Making Movies

I quite like programming. You can take an idea and just make it happen. And every now and then you end up making something much more wonderful than you thought it would be when you started.

Making videos seems quite different to this. You start off with all the ideas OK, but when you try to film them you end up with something quite different you then have to hammer into some kind of shape, and you don’t end up anywhere near where you started.

However, both do have one thing in common, in that they seem to take twice as long as you thought, even if you you allow for this.

My original plan was to make a video in one 10 minute take. The batteries in the camera were up for this, but they turned out to be the only thing that was. And I have always regarded myself as a natural video performer, but this is unfortunately not how the camera sees me.

Anyhoo, Ian came round with Andy as cameraman and we managed to get a good chunk of video “in the can” as the professionals call it. The only problem was that for the group shot of “Team Building” as we call ourselves (well, I thought it was funny) the camera exposure seemed to have gone a bit awry, in that all you could see of me and Ian was eyes and teeth. And they are not necessarily our best features.

So I’ve made a rough cut of a few bits and pieces and we have having a reshoot of some scenes tomorrow. I know how Steven Spielberg feels now.

Deadly Deadlines

The last chapter for the new XNA book needs to be completed and sent off to the printers by this Friday. Our video for the “Dare to Dream Different” .NET Micro Framework needs to be filmed and submitted by, yes, you’ve guessed it, this Friday.

Oh well.

.NET Micro Framework Dare to Dream Different UI

The .NET Micro Framework Dare to Dream Different competition round closes on Friday. We have to have a working prototype and a video of it working, all ready by 11:59 PST. So this seemed like a good time to build the product.

Actually, we’ve been working on it for some time, getting the sensor class design sorted and the physical sample sensors built up, but the User Interface needed to be built, and so I started that today.

The first menu display. The touch buttons work too!

The device will be entirely touch screen controlled, with no need for buttons at all. I’m building the display components on the fly rather than having pre-rendered graphics. The device seems plenty fast enough to do this, and I’m caching the components once I’ve drawn them. (If I run out of memory I might need to rethink this, but I only solve problems when they are problems, and not before).

I’m using a combination of events from the touchscreen and background timer to get a responsive display that is easy to use. So far it seems to be going OK. Once I get the components working I’ll post the code.

Great Service from Griffin

For some time I’ve been looking for a gadget that l can use to play my music in the car. The previous vehicle had a cassette player, and so I got one of those “fake cassettes” that let me connect my MP3 player of the day into the sound system.

Then, thanks to some rather off-putting clunking noises when I went over bumps, I swapped my old car for a newer, shinier one. What with progress and the like, the new car of course had a CD player. I tried putting the fake cassette into the slot and it wouldn’t fit. So that was that.  I burnt a few disks of my favourites and just played them.

A few weeks ago the urge to play MP3s in the car returned though, mainly because I fancy being able to listen to podcasts and the like. Eventually I settled on a Griffin RoadTrip, because it doesn’t have any trailing wires. It just plugs into your cigarette lighter (I wonder if anyone still uses those things to light cigarettes) and you attach your MP3 player to the other end. It finds the quietest parts of the FM spectrum and then uses them broadcasts your tracks, including the RDS data, into your car radio. And it works a treat with the iPhone. I had to pad out the fitting with a bit of insulating tape to get a nice snug fit with the connector and stop the whole thing from slowly rotating out of the socket, but apart from that it worked fine.

Then I tried to use it with my five month old iPod. Which, of course, is an old model. The RoadTrip comes with a bunch of adapters  which doesn’t include my apparently ancient and unsupported one. This reflects a kind of lack of foresight on my part I guess, but we’ll gloss over that.  I sent Griffin an email bemoaning this and they instantly came back and said they’d post me a missing adapter. It arrived today, all the way from the USA. Great stuff. In these days of the internet and telephone helplines it is nice to see that some companies keep the idea of good service alive.

Another Twitter Test

This is another quick test of the Twitter Notify plugin for Windows Live Writer. And no, I don’t know why it used to put Permalink after my blog address…