Quirkblog

Two weeks in, and WordPress is impressing me.

I’ve had minimal comment spam (although this could be attributable to the fact that I’ve been less than frequent with my updates lately) and the posting process is lightning-quick.

For a long time, I’ve been used to a several-minute pause after writing a post and hitting the “Publish” button. Movable Type would bring up a progress screen and let me know that it was saving my post and then rebuilding all of my archive pages before finally displaying a finished entry.

WordPress is just done. You hit “Publish” and that’s it. I’m pretty sure that’s because the whole thing is database driven, and only generates a page when a viewer requests one. In a way, it passes the rebuild time off to the viewer.

I suppose, if this were a much higher-trafficed site, that could be a problem…

Smithee Mega Meta III show is done! And yes, I know that’s a duplicate of something I’ve already said, but this time I mean it’s REALLY done. Done, Debugged and Duplicated.

The debugging part was no tougher than it should have been. There’s always going to be the standard stuff that crops up when watching the full show for the first time. Little things like half-frame blips at the end or beginning of a clip, or screwy sound levels. Even the bigger things, like having the wrong selection menu show up at the end of a category, are fairly easy to correct.

The problem I ran into was at the duplication stage.

We’ve got this sweet DVD duplicator / printer at the office – it’s the sort of thing you can queue up with a stack of fifty discs and let run overnight. It feeds discs into a high-speed burner along a conveyor belt, which then reverses course and runs the finished disc through a nice inkjet printer. It comes with some customized software to drive the whole thing, and unfortunately that’s the weak spot.

Charismac Discribe just flat-out won’t burn a video DVD correctly. Every one I’ve tried has worked fine in a computer, but has failed in a set-top DVD player. I’ve come up with a work-around though: burn a master disc using the DVD creating software, and then have Discribe duplicate the correctly burnt disc. This is slow, but it works.

In addition to being slow, another downside to this is that if you’ve got multiple discs that you want to make multiple copies of (say, for example, a Smithee show that spans two discs), you have to do them as two separate queues.

Anyway, this was all complicated by a second flaw I found, this time in Toast. If you include any of the invisible files (like .DSstore) on your final DVD, it can cause serious playback problems. If you’re using Toast, just delete them from the burn list. You’ll save yourself tons of headaches.

“Hi, I’m calling on behalf of Frank*… He’s walking down Dixboro road with a gas can. Would you be able to come by and help him out?”

If you got a call like that last night, that was me. We were on our way home from work when we saw Frank hitching his way down a very dark road in very cold weather. We’ve got a tiny car, and a back seat full of junk, so we couldn’t help much there, but we do have cell phones now.

* not his real name

Wow. The Mega Meta III Smithee show is done. And with a week and a half to spare.

For those not in the know, the Mega Metas are where we take the winners of the previous five years (2002 – 2006 inclusive) and put them up in a head-to-head competition to determine the Worst of the Worst. We’ll be presenting them on December 16th, 1800 Chemistry Building, starting at 7 pm.

So tonight I’m going to be reviewing the master discs for the show and finding any fiddley little flaws that need patching. If there are none, then the discs will be dupe’d and sent off to the other Smithkateers by this weekend.

Oh, and just for fun, here’s a test of how WordPress handles image uploads:

Rule: The more idiot-proof you try to make something, the less useful it becomes.

Corollary: Any idiot can be useless.

So, I’m working on a price calculator. Something that takes the form data that the client has filled out, and tells them how much they can expect to pay to have it printed before they even send us their files. I’m doing this in PHP, a quick little form that sends itself variables and calculates results.

I found a whole bunch of handy scripts designed to find the the difference between two times. I set it up to automatically feed in the time the form is submitted, compare that to the due date selected, and calculate if the job is a “rush” or not. And then I hit two snags.

Holidays and weekends.

I can’t figure a good way of convincing the script that we’re closed on Saturday and Sunday, let alone handling all of the exceptions for University holidays. All of my attempts to idiot-proof the form quickly became complex, buggy and useless. So out they went. What I’ve finally come up with is a much more streamlined system. It takes the incoming data on paper size and type and prints out a schedule, with normal and rush fees listed.

This leaves the choice entirely up to the client. They can decide if it’s worth it to absolutely, positively have it right now, or if it can wait until tomorrow.