Schinckel.net

Gravatars are now working well on Blogsome: {$comment->comment_author_email|gravatar:"default":"size":"rating":"border"} This needs to be inside the {foreach} inside comments.html in your template. For example, to use no default image, and limit the size to 40x40 pixels, you’d use: {$comment->comment_author_email|gravatar:"":"40":"":""} Notice the double quotes where the argument is missing, and that (in this version) you actually need to include all of the arguments. This may be fixed at some stage.

#1 Song on This Date in History This is cool: you plug in your birthday, or any other day, and it tells you what the #1 songs were on that day, back until about 1940. On the day I was born:

December 1963 (Oh, What a Night) by The Four Seasons

On Jaq’s day of birth:

Disco Lady by Johnnie Taylor

At least I’ve heard of my birth-song!

With no radio in the car at the moment (I broke the automatic aerial again, and it’s too expensive to justify buying a new one just yet), we tend to put 6 CDs in the stacker, and listen away. At the moment, we have:

• Diesel • Short Cool Ones
• Sheryl Crow • Tuesday Night Music Club
• Coldplay • Parachutes
• Diesel • Solid State Rhyme
• Frank Bennett • Five O'Clock Shadow
• Dido • No Angel

I know, I know, it’s a pretty Early 90s set of discs, but, hey… Now, the interesting thing is that we are sick of Frank Bennett already – he did a couple of albums that are covers of modern songs, in a Lounge/Swing style. We must have listened to them too much when we first bought the CDs! The big surprise for me was just how much I love Sheryl Crow.

I remember her being big with Tuesday Night Music Club back when I first started Uni (1993), and I still knew most of the words to most of the songs upon first listen. I tend to over-analyse song lyrics, after listening to too much Paul Kelly and Ben Folds, and people of that ilk, who really pack a lot of meaning into their songs, so this may be a bit over the top, but there’s one aspect of one of Sheryl Crow’s songs that made me look at the whole song a different way.

No One Said It Would Be Easy by Sheryl Crow, from the album Tuesday Night Music Club (1993):

It’s obvious the trouble we’re in,
When your father pulls up in a Mercedes Benz.
He says he just happened to be in the neighbourhood.
But before he leaves he slips the Landlord the rent.
You say, “It’s just a question of eliminating obstacles."
As you throw your dinner out the kitchen door,
You say, "I know how you try,"
"But honey, let’s eat out tonight.”

[Chorus]: No one said it would be easy,
But no one said it’d be this hard.
No one said it would be easy,
No one thought we’d come this far.

You can’t seem to ever fold up a shirt.
I bring it up and you think I’m a jerk.
But I think we’re here to stay,
I can’t imagine it any other way.

[Chorus]

Sometimes I wonder who he’s picturing,
When he looks at me and smiles.

[Chorus]

Oh, and look we’ve come this far.

Without being too anal and looking at the whole song, I’m just going to talk about the chorus. Pretty straightforward:

No one said it would be easy, But no one said it’d be this hard. No one said it would be easy, No one thought we’d come this far.

I originally (probably correctly) thought that the last line had the meaning of:

No one thought we would come this far.

But think about the song, and how the meaning changes if you instead think about it as:

No one thought we had come this far.

Suddenly, the song changes meaning. In some ways, it makes more sense. Instead of it being a statement that “We’ve done better than anyone thought we would,” it becomes “We’ve come too far to quit: no one else thought we were as deep into this relationship as we are. It’s too late to get out now, not without losing too much.” And the final line:

Oh, and look we’ve come this far.

BREITBART.COM – Young Canadians prefer ‘virtual sex’: survey Apparently, around 87% of young Canadians prefer online sex. I just think maybe they aren’t doing it properly offline.

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind recently broadcast a series of four programs entitled “The Emotional Brain.” Unfortunately, I missed the first two episodes, and they’ve since disappeared from the website, or rather, the MP3s have.

• The Emotional Brain, Part 1: Sexual Desire
• The Emotional Brain, Part 2: Anger
• The Emotional Brain, Part 3: Jealousy
• The Emotional Brain, Part 4: Joy

I wouldn’t mind getting hold of the missing two episodes, if anyone has them floating around on their hard disk still… I’ll repeat my mantra that the ABC should keep all of it’s programs available online, for eternity. Storage is cheap.

More of the best of PostSecret.

I had a training afternoon on Friday with Scholaris, and came across a few issues I found hard to work with.

• The first thing I noticed was that in lots of cases there were 2 buttons with the same name (usually Add) in the one window – when you said “click on Add”, I (and others) invariably clicked on the wrong one some of the time. Whilst most of the time this can be fixed, there was at least one instance where all settings could not be changed once this had been done. (Virtual Classrooms, cannot change theme once Add has been clicked). I think that more specific buttons names (“Add User”, “Create Virtual Classroom”) would create less confusion than relying on positional context alone.
• Another issue I came across was that in the Assignment Manager, it’s possible to drag one Target Group ‘into’ another. This results in some weird behaviour, that is difficult to describe. Basically, the top-level target group is then given a name that is a number, and contents are not accessible. You can delete this top level group, and then everything seems to be a bit more back to normal.
• The biggest issues for me were in the Content Editor, specifically to do with Images. When you insert an image, and then resize it, pressing Control-Z deletes the image, rather than un-resizing it. Secondly, I feel that the “Lock Ratio” button images should be reversed – it would make more sense that the image reflected the state of the function (ie, a locked image indicates that the aspect ratio is locked, not that clicking on the button will lock it). Another alternative would be a checkbox with “Lock Aspect Ratio” as the label. (I have written down that this function didn’t work anyway, but I can’t remember for sure).
• I also think that all windows should be resizable – in a couple of cases I had editing windows that only allowed me about 4 lines of text entry – which is generally not enough. Having to scroll all of the time, especially when I have a large monitor and this window takes up a small fraction of the available space, seems silly.
• Finally, I think that all “Preview” windows should have a “Close Preview” button. At times I wasn’t sure whether to click the close box or not: sometimes a new window is created, sometimes one isn’t (in the general context of Scholaris), and it would be much easier to see when in a Preview window if a specific “Close Preview” button/link was in these windows.

I’m trying to create reference movies (as Quicktime .MOV documents) for all of the movies on my Media server, and the most obvious method is to use AppleScript and Quicktime Player. Why am I doing this? Because iTunes requires Quicktime Movies, I’ve mainly got AVIs, and I don’t want to (a) convert all of them, and (b) have iTunes manage them. I’d rather have the files in the right spot, and allow iTunes to manage the reference movies. Quicktime will often open files of varying types, even though iTunes will not. It’s then possible to save the file, and choose not to create a stand-alone movie. This will create a reference movie, which is much smaller than the original, but requires that the original remains in the same place in order to work. However, using AppleScript, the following will not work if AVIs are set to play in another player, like VLC:

1     tell application "Finder"
2       set theMovies to selection
3     end tell
4     
5     repeat with theMovie in theMovies
6       tell application "QuickTime Player"
7           open theMovie
8       end tell
9     end repeat

That is, the movie opens in it’s default application. To get it to work requires simply the following:

1     tell application "Finder"
2       set theMovies to selection
3     end tell
4     
5     repeat with theMovie in theMovies
6       tell application "QuickTime Player"
7           open theMovie as alias
8       end tell
9     end repeat

That little as alias causes Quicktime to open it, instead of VLC. How bizarre! The next problem is that by default, it puts the document(s) into a list. I often make the mistake of operating on a list, rather than each item individually. Especially when there’s only one item in the list. It’s like my eyes don’t see the curly brackets. So, we can save the movie, and by default it will save it as a reference movie. Next problem, how do we tell it where to save the movie? It will default to the root directory of the boot disk. Not really where I want to save this file, as I want to do multiple copies. But, what I can do is save the file, import it into iTunes, (ensuring that iTunes creates a copy of this file in it’s library) and then delete the file, or create the next one over the top. What I’m up to so far (and this doesn’t deal with names or anything yet):

 1     tell application "Finder"
 2      set theMovies to selection
 3     end tell
 4     
 5     repeat with theMovie in theMovies
 6     
 7      tell application "QuickTime Player"
 8          set mov to first item of (open theMovie as alias)
 9          save mov in (file "movie.mov")
10          close mov
11      end tell
12         
13      tell application "iTunes"
14          add alias "Macintosh HD:movie.mov"
15      end tell
16         
17     end repeat

More later. Sleep time now.

I like that iTunes displays half-star ratings, but I want my tracks rated 51-59 to display this way too. That doesn’t work, but if you use the following script, it will round the ratings of selected tracks to the nearest half-star:

1     tell application "iTunes"
2       repeat with trk in selection
3           set rating of trk to ((rating of trk) / 10 as integer) * 10
4       end repeat
5     end tell

I hope Apple don’t include the functionality of odd-rated tracks to play different amounts, otherwise I’ll need to re-rate all of my music. Again.

BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Monkey magic casts spell in Asia Hot on the heels of the news of the Dark Crystal remake, comes this, an announcement that a Japanese company is redoing Monkey!, the tale of a priest and his companions, Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy as they travel across China to India in search of the Buddha’s Scrolls. It’s one of my all-time favourite shows (I now have the complete set, including the dozen or so that were never shown on Australian TV). I’ve read the original book, or rather a translation, written by Wu-chèn Eng, and can sagely say (that was supposed to be safely, but I like the typo) that the original TV series was true to the story. I hope the new one is.