Linux Movies Group Meeting #5

Thanks to everyone who came and helped make the meeting a success! We met at America Pizza Man in Berkeley. Headcount was 5: Robin, Drew, Jim, Jason, Ramona. As usual these notes are just highlights of my hazy recollection of conversations -- not complete or necessarily accurate.

Drew is implementing new functionality into dvcont, Jason's program to control MiniDV camcorders. Drew has discovered that DV supports a feature of absolute position location on a blank unrecorded tape. This is not timecode, which may restart many times throughout a tape, but some measure of physical tape position returned as an integer. Drew theorized that this position is derived from the difference in hub speeds as a tape moves in the transport. Everyone, including Jason, was surprised by this capability.

The current issue of Linux Journal has an interview with Drew (written by Robin) as part of a story about the compositor RAYZ. (The story is only available to print or paid online subscribers.) Rumors are rife that Silicon Grail, the creator of RAYZ, is being acquired. Apple acquired RAYZ competitor Nothing Real Shake recently.

Jim is working on replacing MySQL with PostgreSGL in the calendar program Kalendus (which is not Kalendar). Wild Brain wants to use that to help schedule Avid edit suites and picked it because it was simple yet had the features they need. PostgreSQL is considered superior for its robustness and transactional capabilities. Incidentally, the new building for Wild Brain is progressing, and the concrete floors have been poured. Jim finds the Handspring sync to Evolution indispensible, and went through some hassle lately undoing an installation when he discovered the bleeding edge developer snapshot v1.1.0 of Evolution lacks palmsync support. The Evolution calendaring is quite nice. Drew asked what protocol is used for calendars, and Robin said he thought it was ical.

Drew found an XML template for doing resumes on SourceForge. He's been looking for a convenient way to make resumes HTML and PDF formatted from the same document. Tex and Troff didn't meet his needs.

Jim says that the Galeon browser rocks because of its smart bookmarks feature. You can make a bookmark with a %s format in it, attach that to an icon on the Galeon frame, and thereby create a handy search widget for SourceForge, Google, or whatever. Drew mentioned that there is supposed to be a Python toolbar feature like that for Mozilla, but that he has never succeeded in running that without it immediately crashing. The Mozilla release party is next week, June 12th, at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco. Sometime when you have lots of time, you may want to look through Mozilla creator Jamie Zawinski's "Cries for Help" on his Web site at www.jwz.org. His bookmarks and Java Sucks pages are interesting, too.

Jim and Robin discovered they are both experienced welders and both grew up on farms. Ah, the joys of the classic Lincoln arc welder! In the ensuing discussion of power load Robin mentioned the Green Destiny Transmeta supercomputer that operates uncooled at 80 degrees in a warehouse at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Here's a paper about that Beowolf cluster. Jim mentioned that cooling was an issue for their new machine room.

We all lamented the lack of plot of many animation and special effects movies, except Drew who asserted he never follows the plot anyway. Jim says that the Disney movie Atlantis is worth seeing because the scene in the interior of the submarine is an awesome example of an inkline 2D renderer (called Inka) drawing from a 3D geometry. Star Wars E2 is worth seeing for the digital actor light saber effects of Yoda. If you are going to see Star Wars be sure to do so in a digital theater. Jim mentioned that Grinch had maybe 600 layers in the opening scene and probably used every renderer known to man there. Jim said he can't use the beautiful Lightwave renderer until it becomes available on Mac OS X (instead of OS 9 only).

Jason says he is releasing a SMPTE timecode GNU library. He found Robin's drop-frame algorithm worked (in response to his query for same on the list) but says he has reworked the math somewhat so that it doesn't iterate to calculate the correction factor.

On his way to the meeting, Robin had ran into Greg Dow, the leader of the Mac Programmers Group, who was on his way to their meeting at nearby Mel's Diner. That group has no Web page, and we didn't know about it. We ended our meeting early at 8:30, walked over to Mel's as a group, and caught the tail end of the Mac Programmers meeting. That was interesting, and we're discussing with them making the Open Source Programmers Group meeting a joint meeting with them at Mel's in two weeks.

Editor's note: As a long time Windows PageMill fan, I've been stuck for something near as good since that was discontinued. All the WYSIWYG editors seemed either too simple-minded to let me easily get into the HTML code, or so feature-laden and counter-intuitive that I couldn't afford the time to learn them. Newer editors also tend to create a lot of extra sludge in their HTML code. For the first time I am using IBM Websphere Homepage Builder as my Web editor, which has a look-and-feel similar to PageMill. This page was created using the 60-day eval Windows version, but I will be trying the Linux version next.