Every few weeks it seems LiveJournal revises their RSS generation, and half the LiveJournals I subscribe to become "unread" in NetNewsWire. Most of the time the changes are unnoticeable, but this time it was definitely for the worse (yet slightly more humorous).
A Wired article mentions the increased visibility of Philip K. Dick’s work as Hollywood picks off short stories to make into movies.
Quite coincidentally, I just finished a book of Dick’s short stories which Steve loaned me, including four of those which had been turned into movies (Total Recall, Screamers, Minority Report and Paycheck). Being a not-too-fanatic watcher of movies, I’ve only seen Total Recall and Minority Report.
I read “Second Variety” last night, was somewhat drawn into its world, but it ultimately left me thinking how hollow its premise was. I spent more than half the story anticipating how it would end, just wondering what was taking so long. Tonight I finished with “War Veteran”, which was for me among the best stories in the book. Dick seems to do a lot better writing about people than technology, though part of that may be my inability to ignore the technical implausibility of many situations.
One of Apple’s computer systems had issues on Sunday when I called for repair service, and it apparently caused the request for a box for my PowerBook to be lost. I spoke with a very helpful, realistic (and funny) woman at Apple today, and I should be able to call back in the morning to get a same-day box shipped to me.
I put off my ECE 441 project preparation today, and to thank me for it, my PowerBook’s video hardware died a few minutes after I started work. At least I can still back it up.
This in addition to the 512 MB DIMM in my desktop Power Mac which died last week. I guess November is Hardware Failure Month or something.
I finally switched from Palm Desktop to iCal a few weeks ago, the superior force of iSync winning me over. iCal and Apple’s Address Book are usable in Panther, but still very slow and inefficient to use compared with Palm Desktop. Compare the information density of the images below:
Sorry about all the modifications, I can’t seem to stop PyDS from upstreaming… (Answer: Preferences: Basic Data: show on/offline switch.)
There doesn’t seem to be an “actual size” option, so for the moment I’m constructing the above images with \$pictures.imageTag(2, (400, 400), bigpage='1024x768').
George Bauer (who’s been really helpful, thanks!) explained briefly how to use PyDS’s PictureTool in a comment:
Of course PyDS has a PictureTool. You need to enter a path on your disc in the Pictures preferences and then can upload pictures from there. To upload a picture go to the pictures upload area and enter title and description for those pictures you want to upload. After uploading, you can refer to them with \$pictures.imageTag(picid, (sizex, sizey)). Set picid to the numerical id of your picture and sizex,sizey to the boundingbox the resized picture should fit in (resizing honours aspect ratio, so you picture might actually be smaller than your boundinbox).
It seems that the PictureTool is optimized for posting pictures, not screen images; PyDS provides a nice album-style overview page. This is good, and something Radio didn’t even attempt to do, but all I really want is a single image uploaded. The interface looks like this:
I have no idea what the various text fields represent, and I get a Python exception when I try to submit a fully populated form. If I remove entries 2 and 5, nothing seems to happen. Time to dig into the source code.
Turns out QuickTime 6.4 (and earlier?) incorrectly output PNG tEXt chunks including a trailing null, and PIL chokes on them. PyDS discards the error, and behaves strangely.
That fixed, my next problem: still not getting any thumbnails. pyds-start -f will run PyDS in the foreground.
error: Server Error: exceptions.IOError,
encoder jpeg not available:
file: /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/
Versions/2.3/lib/python2.3/site-packages/
PIL/Image.py line: 325
After rebuilding PIL, I ran into another problem with PyDS: once it attempted to create a thumbnail and failed, it’d write a zero-length file and give up. Fixing that, I finally had thumbnails.
12:26 AM
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