jamesmallen

I’ve been doing a significant amount of video work lately. This led to my recent purchase of Final Cut Express (It is so wonderful having a brother-in-law who’s an Apple Store employee), and with it many changes to my typical workflow. I’m used to using Sony’s Vegas Studio product for any editing that iMovie couldn’t handle, and while FCE shares many concepts, it also looks at them from a pretty different perspective.

My most recent project involves editing a slew footage of which I was not involved in shooting. One out of five cameras that were recording during the event (a musical) was shot using 12-bit audio. This is my first experience trying to use footage with 12-bit audio in FCE, and frankly, I’m not impressed.

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I use Subversion with my own, personal projects, and about a year ago I started using it to track changes on clients’ existing sites (No, I didn’t want THAT!). On my Windows dev machine, I used TortoiseSVN over an svn+ssh connection. While I don’t dislike the command line/terminal, I liked the filesystem integration of TortoiseSVN and the ability to see at a glance the status of various files.

For the Mac, there’s SCPlugin, which seems to offer similar functionality and Finder integration. Of course, there are a couple additional (and, in my opinion, poorly-documented) steps required to use SCPlugin with an svn+ssh connection. (Note: these steps worked for me on OS X 10.5, Leopard. YMMV)

1. Get SCPlugin from http://scplugin.tigris.org/ and install it. There is no need for a separate installation for SVN - SVN 1.4.4 appears to come pre-installed on Leopard.
2. Restart the Finder. I just opened up Force Quit (Command-Option-Escape) and chose to Relaunch Finder.app, but you can also just log out and log back in if Force Quit scares you.
3. Here’s the tricky part - you need to set up ssh to use key pair authentication as opposed to password authentication when you connect to your SSH server. Detailed instructions can be found here.
4. Now check something out using SCPlugin. In Leopard, this is done by right-clicking in the target directory in a Finder window, choosing “More,” “Subversion,” “Checkout,” and entering the repository URL and other information as necessary.

A little while ago, there was some hype on the interwebs about a “newer version” of Gmail coming. Well, it looks like that “newer version” might be here…

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As sort of a continuation to my post On Migrations, I thought I’d post about the first piece of replacement software that I’ve found.

It’s called Actiontastic, and it’s geared toward using the Getting Things Done approach to productivity/time management. I myself have not read David Allen’s book on the subject, but simply the description of using the software (supplemented by a Wikipedia article) has given me the basic gist of the approach.

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A variety of factors combined to cause my wife and I to decide to purchase a new computer about a month ago. After much deliberation, we decided to get a Mac. After about two seconds in our local Apple Store, I was convinced of getting a 24-inch iMac.As a web developer/freelance programmer/dabbler, the iMac seems amazingly ideal. We decided to wait until Leopard’s release date was announced, and ordered it earlier this week, so we should be receiving the new computer around Friday or so.
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The Semisecure Login plugin for WordPress increases the security of the login process by using client-side MD5 encryption on the password when a user logs in. JavaScript is required to enable encryption. When JavaScript is not available, the password is transmitted in plaintext (as normal), but authentication still completes in this case.

It is most useful for situations where SSL is not available, but the administrator wishes to have some additional security measures in place without sacrificing convenience.

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And then Sony just had to go and make a hypocrite out of me.

I am a frequent reader of Digg (among other news sites). However, for the past few days the above Sony ad has been showing. It’s a Flash ad, meant to wow me the user with Sony’s brilliance. After the initial play-through, the ad pretty much stays at the above static image, with little flowery things following your mouse around if you mouseover it. Okay, that doesn’t really sound like such a bad ad. Only the thing was programmed to consume 100% of my CPU in the “finished” state!
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Subtitle: Adventures in Transitioning.

After a number of big changes in life last year (getting married being the biggest of all), it was of course time to take another big plunge. This time it came in the form of Jess and I moving to Cleveland, OH, so she could teach choir.

Coincidentally, this was the same time I happened to be finishing up a new client’s website, and I decided that I would try recommending an alternative web host to them. Of course, before recommending a company, I wanted to check them out for myself, hence my investigation into DreamHost.
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