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Found: 25-year-old COSI visitor guide

I’m in the middle of cleaning and packing to move house, and I came across a time capsule I made as part of a workshop at COSI (Columbus, Ohio’s science museum), 25 years ago today (1988.07.14). I was 5 years old at the time.

Included in the time capsule were two pieces of yarn identifying my height and circumference, and a personal-facts sheet, mentioning such things as my favorite musician (Herbie Hancock, of whom I’d recently become aware via his appearance on Sesame Street) and my favorite toy (the Yamaha PSS-470 synthesizer with its wonderful FM modulation control panel).

And this Souvenir Program, submitted for your approval —

Getting HTML5 video to work with iOS Mobile Safari

I’ve been researching issues regarding serving HTML5 video content to iOS devices this past week. Here’s an outline the issues and some concise answers as to how iOS Mobile Safari 6 will handle HTML5 video. This post won’t touch on video encoding.

Mobile Safari’s QuickTime component does not handle HTTP requests the same as it does normally, say for a web page. Instead

From celebrating women in computing to changing the system

You’re in a roomful of computer scientists. Most of them are women. All of them are there to promote women in computing.

What do you talk about?

What don’t you talk about?

What are you accomplishing?

What aren’t you accomplishing?

These are the questions I’ve been asking about the recent Ohio Celebration of Women in Computing (OCWiC).

Git-ing Drupal contrib patches done

In not-so-recent news, Drupal migrated the drupal.org project repository from CVS to Git in late February, 2011. My experience with Git previous to this has been as a user fetching source code of x.org, mesa, dri, and other various Linux and Unix projects.

As a user, not a developer, I found the Git work flow confusing. I did not need to make local commits and it was hard to wrap my head around bringing in changes from multiple remote repositories.

As a PHP developer, I first grasped the work flow at Columbus GiveCamp 2010 when I needed to make a github account for the branch of the Audio module we hacked on. As well, some Ruby guy had a nice Git work flow diagram, which I promptly forgot all about until the not-so-recent event above.

Drupalcon tidbits

Cool things I learned about at Drupalcon DC include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • There is a Drupal 6 theme starter app whose maintainer is constantly improving it.
  • Usability studies have proven that I am not the only one who couldn’t figure out WTF to do with the welcome screen on my first Drupal install.
  • A lot of the modules that seem like they should be in core but probably won’t be in Drupal 7, are left out because Token is unlikely to be included and many of them rely on Token.

As usual, more coming…

DrupalCon 2009: First Impressions

I can positively affirm that the free tee-shirts given out with DrupalCon 09 registration are quality. The medium size fits me perfectly and the cotton is nice and soft and thick. Overall very wearable. Caveat: they’re not pre-shrunk so they will shrink.

I have a lot of actually relevant info to post but that will have to wait. Topics will include:

  • Theming tips and best practices
  • Awesome stuff (eg. fields!) that will be built-in to Drupal 7
  • Awesome stuff that won’t be in core in Drupal 7, and why it won’t (Hint: if it depends on something that won’t make core, it can’t go in core either)
  • Some other stuff.

Overall it’s been enjoyable and packed with information so far. I only wish I could go to more sessions.

90% Easy, 10% Impossible

90% Easy, 10% Impossible Pie ChartFrom time to time, I get these insatiable urges to read what other Cocoa developers blog about. Sometimes they’re informative, sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they read like college textbooks, and sometimes they’re just downright terrible, but I read them anyway. It comes and goes in waves, every 2 or 3 months. A couple weeks ago, one such binge happened, and I started reading Aaron Hillegass’ critique of NSController (since I was hating it at the time, and wanted to feel justified in hating it). In the critique, the following statement was made:

NSSound and Enumerating CoreAudio Output Devices

Cocoa’s NSSound provides a blindingly simple way to play back audio asynchronously, and even provides some metadata and control over how the audio is played back.

It uses the default sound device, by default. It gives you the ability to change the output device.

According to the documentation:

- (void)setPlaybackDeviceIdentifier:(NSString *)playbackDeviceIdentifier
 
Specifies the receiver's output device.
 
playbackDeviceIdentifier
    Unique identifier of a sound output device.

That’s it. What is the “Unique identifier of a sound output device”? What format is this “Unique identifier”? How do I get a list of the “Unique identifiers” of the available output devices on my system?

Silicon Dioxide (SiO₂)

QuartzCrystal LogoIn the wee small hours of this morning, Kineme Interactive Media released its first commercial product, QuartzCrystal.

QuartzCrystal is an offline renderer that turns Quartz Compositions into portable QuickTime movies. It supports 3rd party plugins, as well as patches that do not work in safe-mode-only environments (such as QuickTime Pro). It also supports software scene antialiasing, so if you have a Mac with plenty of RAM and a hard-core video card, you can make spectacularly beautiful renderings of your plugins, effects, and compositions.

Beside QuartzCrystal, the only other product that renders and encodes compositions to movies is Apple’s own QuickTime Pro, which doesn’t support plugins, unsafe patches, or antialiasing.

QuartzCrystal Main Window Screenshot

The Black Apple Strikes!

Matt Radcliffe and his BlackbookIt took a few minutes for cwright and smokris to realize what was different yesterday. Yes, the days had finally come. I had begun to shave my proverbial neckbeard. More than year after and much like similar happenings, 7/15/08 is a day that shall live in infamy.

I have an Apple product once again. 黒林檎(くろりんご、kuroringo)is born!