Wyszdom

This is my first post using WordPress 2.5. I’ve never posted about a version upgrade before, but I have a few comments this time. I didn’t even read the blog entry about it before upgrading, so I didn’t know what to expect. I’m a pretty reckless early adopter.

The upgrade went smoothly until the end, when I couldn’t access the upgrade page because the Maintenance Mode plugin blocked me. I don’t know if I did something wrong, but I just temporarily renamed the plugin’s folder to deactivate it, and everything was fine.

The next thing that I noticed was that WordPress was again inserting the WordPress version number in my HTML, which I like to remove for security reasons. I had previously removed it from my theme in the header.php file, but they’ve started generating it a different way now. Fortunately, there’s a quick one-line fix that I discovered on Safirul Alredha’s blog. Just add this line to the functions.php file of your current theme:
remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wp_generator’);

You can put it right at the beginning, after the <?php line.

Finally, when I opened the Write tab to compose this entry, I saw how different the new layout is. I’m a little disappointed that so much has been moved from the right sidebar and put all vertically on the left. Unless I write a really short post, I have to scroll down just to choose the post category. I wish I could just drag these modules around and arrange it how I want. The good news is that when I clicked Preview, it looked like that annoying Safari line break issue has been fixed, so I won’t have to wait for Firefox to open every time I create an entry.

Today I found two pieces of idiot marketing in my mailbox, both from my credit card company. One is a check that when cashed would enroll me in some fraud protection thing, which is stupid since I shouldn’t be liable for fraudulent charges anyway.

The other is an offer for an “upgrade” (and yes, even they used quotes) to a different card. Actually, it isn’t a physically different card… I would be sent a sticker, that I, a grown adult, could proudly place on my existing card to “transform” it. Two things really bothered me about this offer:

1. The offer came in an important-looking piece of paper that is its own envelope, like the kind you get from your bank, where you have to tear off the perforated edges. This meant that I had to invest time into investigating its junkiness.
2. If the “upgrade” were free, maybe I’d take it. But it isn’t — a $79 annual fee is mentioned on the back of the offer, about 1/3 of the way through the fine print terms that I’m not really expected to read. On the front, this is the only indication that there may be some sort of fee listed on the back that I should look for: “Just sign below and return this form (postage-paid reply envelope enclosed) to accept your [service] status, as described in the details on the other side of this form.”
   
   Here’s the other side of the form. Can you spot the price? It’s in bold so this shouldn’t be hard:
   

In an effort to reduce my incoming junk mail, I called the card company. It was funny because I didn’t know of a better term to use, so I asked the representative to take me off the “junk mail” list. Fortunately, she knew what I meant, and said that my request was processed. She then told me that I may continue to receive junk mail for up to 90 days. That’s three months. You’d think modern technology would be able to stop the spam before the end of June.

I didn’t want this new blog to turn into a complaint-fest like my previous blogging attempts have, but I don’t know how many more cross-country flights I can handle. I’ve written about having to listen to in-flight commercials before, but it bothered me so much on a recent flight, when all I wanted to do was relax, that I would have asked the flight attendant to turn it off if I thought that would accomplish anything. Maybe I was just irritated that they had just announced the in-flight movie was Something’s Gotta Give, a movie that in additon to being for people completely outside my demographic, was released four years ago. Plus I had already seen it.

My mother was recently invited to a “miscellaneous” bridal shower. I had never heard of such a thing, but then again I don’t get invited to a lot of bridal showers. Apparently at a miscellaneous shower your gift isn’t expected to fit any particular theme. If I were ever invited to a shower that was explicitly labeled as “miscellaneous,” I would try to bring the most random item possible. Maybe a handful of receipts that I found in my car for miscellaneous items. This is probably why I haven’t been invited to many bridal showers.

There was also no time listed on the invitation. I guess you’re supposed to show up at any miscellanous time. 3:41 is always good.

Ever since my Wyszonut post, I haven’t had to worry about getting in early on Fridays. Donuts just magically appear on my desk. Here’s what I found yesterday:

Thanks, Sophia Steve.

I want to do what I assume is a relatively simple task, but I don’t know how to do it, because I am not smart enough. Here’s the deal:

I have copied the files from my old site, homepage.mac.com/wysz/, to my new domain, thewysz.com, in the /hotw/ subdirectory. HotW is Home of the Wysz, by the way, not Hot W.

I don’t update the files on the .Mac site, so I want anyone who visits one of those pages to know about TheWysz.com. I took care of this a while ago by just adding a link to my new homepage at the bottom of every page. It took about 30 seconds with TextWrangler. This isn’t the greatest user experience, because if the visitor wants to view the newer version of the page he or she landed on, he or she would have to know to replace homepage.mac.com/wysz/[path/filename] with thewysz.com/hotw/[path/filename].

What I’d really like is to get the file path of the page somehow written to the file itself. That way I could add a link directly to the new URL or even do a meta refresh. Unfortunately, due to technical limitations of .Mac, I’m pretty sure server-side redirection is not possible. I think what I’d want the action to be is a find/replace of <head> for the refresh, or </body> if I wanted to just add a link at the bottom.

So how can I do it? I have over 2,000 files to process, so it would have to be completely automated and not require me to open the files individually. I’m on a Mac, and not afraid to type into a Unix terminal window.

Thank you, smart people. And if you, my dear readers, cannot offer a solution, I will be very disappointed in you.

I often feel like I know nothing about life, as simple tasks such as laundry can leave me hopelessly confused. But then once in a while I hear a story from one of my friends that reminds me I’m not alone in my troubles with daily life. For example, I now know I’m not alone in avoiding situations where tipping is involved. Many of us can’t stand the awkwardness and lack of standards.

I just read Koklynn’s first blog entry about building a cabinet, and I can’t wait for part 2. Stuff like this makes a guy who cooks soup in a frying pan feel a little more normal:

It said, “Apply some glue and lightly tapping the dowel until 5/16″ visible.” Never mind the bad grammar…what I read was “Apply some glue and lightly tapping the dowel until 5/16 visible.” If you missed the difference, I didn’t see that it was supposed to be 5/16th of an inch. Instead, I spent 5 minutes pulling my hair out trying to figure out why someone would use that kind of fraction for this tiny piece of wood…

Read on…

I don’t intend to use Twitter right now (though I agree it is arguably useful/cool), but I like to claim the username “Wysz” on any service that I might want to use at some point in the future. So I figured I’d go ahead and register it on this microblogging thingamajig. It looked like it would only take a few seconds to register (as it should), but at one screen I was about 10 seconds away from giving up and not registering. Here’s what I saw, an option to check if any of my email contacts were already using Twitter:

I didn’t want to give a third party my email account information, and I didn’t want to spam my friends either. So I clicked ‘continue.’

Twitter then told me that I missed something:

Ugh. I had noticed in the upper-right a ‘skip’ option, but honestly I clicked ‘continue’ because it was closer to my cursor. And, in my personal opinion, that should have worked. But it didn’t, so I was forced to find my way to the tiny link to get me past this step:

After that, all I had to do was write my first status update, and that was it. I have enough trouble populating a blog and podcast, but who knows, maybe someday you’ll see constant updates on twitter/wysz.

A new episode of my cooking show is out. You can now download it in HD or for your Apple TV. The Apple TV version isn’t HD, since for that I’d need to reduce the frame rate to 24 fps, but it’s still higher quality than SD. The podcast version remains iPhone-compatible.

Of course if you’re into instant gratification, YouTube is serving up some carrots as well:

Part 1


Part 2

The most recent episode of my podcast was edited on my new Mac Pro, which is powered by two quad-core Intel Xeon processors. It should be released late tonight or early tomorrow. Since I had the extra computing power, I edited the episode in HDV, instead of DV like the previous episodes. While editing I noticed a huge performance increase: I could work with many more layers in real time, and this was with much higher quality video.

Beyond the lack of performance frustrations during editing, the other big advantage I was looking for in the Mac Pro was a decrease in compression time when I export my final product for the web. The Mac Pro certainly is many times faster than my PowerMac G4 during compression, but, being the status/progress bar addict that I am, I noticed something strange when I opened up the Activity Monitor. The 8 cores weren’t being used to their fullest potential:

So I did 30 seconds of research, and found an article from Bare Feats suggesting that I create virtual cluster on my machine to decrease compression time. Compressor has the ability to split tasks and spread them across a cluster of Compressor instances, which traditionally is made up of multiple computers on a network. But you can also create a cluster of multiple instances on one machine. This is called a “virtual cluster.”

Unfortunately, using this technique I can’t send my Final Cut Pro sequence directly to Compressor. I must first export a movie file, and then send that to Compressor. So, is it worth the extra step for some more efficient use of processor cycles? Let’s find out, with an unscientific test. It’s super-unscientific since I used different clips that weren’t even the same duration, and I don’t know if my sequence was fully rendered before I exported directly from FCP.

But here are the stats, for HDV to 1920×1080 H.264 video:

• Without virtual clustering, sequence with a duration of 8:32 direct from FCP: 50 minutes
• With a virtual cluster of 8 instances, movie file with duration of 7:52: 14 minutes (plus about 2 minutes to export the movie file)

Even with all of the variables I introduced, I believe the advantage of setting up a virtual cluster on a multi-core machine is pretty obvious. Check out the CPU monitor during the clustered processing:

As fascinating as this may be, all of this investigation is time-consuming and often frustrating. And I’m still trying to get this video exported in an HD format that will play on an Apple TV, which is one of the reasons why as of this writing, the episode has not yet been published. So that’s why I’m glad I decided not to become a full-time video editor.