This Author Has Moved

As you can probably guess by the lack of recent activity. I'm no longer posting to this blog. I've always struggled with my attention span for keeping these things up, but for now, I'm writing at adevelopingstory.com.

Thank you for visiting.

How To Blow a Couple of Hours with the iLife Suite

Step 1: Pick a Song

I've always been a huge fan of Paul Simon and The Only Living Boy In New York is a personal favorite.

Step 2: Record The First Pass

The first thing I recorded was the final video clip and a one-take pass at the song to give me some structure to begin layering on top of. To get this first track I set up Garage Band to record using a microphone which was set up (off-screen) about 2 feet from me. At the same time I used Photo Booth to capture the video from the iMacs web cam. In the video I'm wearing headphones so that I can hear the click track.

Step 3: Overdub, Overdub, Overdub

At this point I had the one track to work with and began to lay additional guitar and vocal tracks over it, recording directly into the iMac using an M-Audio USB interface.

Step 4: Export the Final Mix and Sync the Video

After exporting the final mix from Garage Band into a high quality AAC file, I imported both the original video clip from Photo Booth and the audio track into iMovie HD. Once the import was complete, all that was left to do was to extract and remove the clip's original audio track, sync up the new audio and export to an H.264 Quicktime movie. I ended up forgetting to flip the source video so the final clip is still a "mirror image" due to the way Photo Booth captures video.

That's It?

I'm consistantly amazed at the quality of the iLife applications. I'm in no way an expert at Garage Band and this was literally the first time I've ever opened iMovie HD. Still, given a couple of hours and a low end Apple it's almost absurdly easy to complete a project like this. As a teenager I'd spend days recording and bouncing tracks on a 4-track cassette recorder, work that would literally take a fraction of the time on an out of the box iMac.

The "Final" Product

Virtualenv Helper for Windows

If you're a fan of Ian Bicking's virtualenv library, and you should be, you've probably heard of Doug Hellmann's virtualenvwrapper bash script. Unfortunately for me I have to develop on Windows at work so this does me little good without a Bash shell (it may work under Cygwin, I haven't tried). Thankfully, Python runs everywhere and I was able to hack together a simple virtualenv management script for windows that handles most of my needs.

The script assumes you will store your virtual environments in the directory "C:\virtualenvs" (you can edit this in the script by changing DEFAULT_DIR_PATH), and supports listing, creating, removing and switching virtual environments from cmd.exe. To install, simply save the code below as env.py in your Python scripts folder, typically something like "C:\Python25\Scripts". You can then get a summary of the command line options by typeing "env.py -h" at a command prompt.

Here's the script:

import os
import shutil
from optparse import OptionParser

# default path to store virtualenv directories
# can be modified on a case by case basis with the -d option
DEFAULT_DIR_PATH = "C:\\virtualenvs\\"


def main():
    usage = "usage: %prog [options] arg"
    parser = OptionParser(usage)
    parser.add_option("-r", "--remove", action="store_true", dest="remove",
                      help="delete the virualenv")
    parser.add_option("-c", "--create", action="store_true", dest="create",
                      help="create the virtualenv if it does not already exist")
    parser.add_option("-l", "--list", action="store_true", dest="list",
                      help="list all current virtualenvs in directory")
    parser.add_option("-d", "--directory", dest="directory",
                      help="path to the directory containing the virtualenv")
                      
    (options, args) = parser.parse_args()
    
    dir_path = options.directory
    if dir_path is None:
        dir_path = DEFAULT_DIR_PATH
    
    # create the virtualenv directory if it does not exist
    if not os.path.isdir(dir_path):
        os.makedirs(dir_path)
        
    # list virtualenvs and exit
    if options.list:
        for item in os.listdir(dir_path):
            if os.path.isdir(os.path.join(dir_path, item)):
                print item
        return        

    # if we are not listing all envs we need a env name
    if len(args) != 1:
        parser.error("you must supply a virtualenv name")
    
    # store our paths
    env_name = args[0]
    env_path = os.path.join(dir_path, env_name)
    
    # does this env already exist?
    env_exists = os.path.isdir(env_path)
    
    # can't create and remove
    if options.create and options.remove:
        parser.error('iptions -c and -r are mutually exclusive')
    
    # prompt for confirmation and then delete the virtual env
    if options.remove and env_exists:
        resp = raw_input('remove directory "%s"? Y/n: ' % env_path)
        if resp == 'Y':
            print 'removing directory "%s"' % env_path
            shutil.rmtree(env_path)
        return
          
    # if the env does not exists we either create it (-c) or throw an error
    if not env_exists:
        if options.create:
            print os.system('virtualenv.exe %s' % env_path)
        else:
            parser.error('virtualenv does not exists. use the -c option to create it.')
            
    # activate the virtualenv
    script_path = os.path.join(env_path, 'scripts', 'activate.bat')
    os.system('cmd.exe /K "%s"' % script_path)
        

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Here are some usage examples:

# List all environments
> env.py -l

# Switch to a new environment
> env.py myenviron

# Switch to a new environment and
# create it if it doesn't already exist
> env.py -c myenviron

# Remove an environment
> env.py -r myenviron

A couple notes:

1. I've only tested this script on Windows XP with Python 2.5. It works for me. Use it at your own risk and all that.
2. If you're developing with the Django development server DO NOT exit it using CTRL-BREAK as instructed. This will bork your command process and you'll have to close it out and open a new window. Use CTRL-C instead.

Update:

I've posted this script to Bitbucket where you can check out the latest changes and report any issues you find.

Seriously, Get Dropbox.

If you don't already have a free Dropbox account (I wrote about it here) you don't know what you're missing and you should sign up using this link so that we both get extra free space. Dropbox is good. Extra free space is even better (more good).

Quite a Year

Overall, 1999 is still my favorite movie year. I saw more than 50 movies in the theater that year, including EWS [Eyes Wide Shut], Rushmore, Princess Mononoke, Election, Run Lola Run, Being John Malkovich, Iron Giant, The Matrix, Magnolia, American Beauty, Toy Story 2, and Three Kings. Quite a year.

- Jason Kottke

Quite a year indeed.

Setting Up A Django Development Virtual Environment on OS X

This is a simple script I currently use to set up a Python virtualenv for Django development. It just sets up a new virtualenv and checks out the latest revision of Django from their web site. Maybe someone else will find it useful. Improvements are definitely welcome!

#! /bin/bash
virtualenv env
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/django env/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django
cp env/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django/bin/django-admin.py django-admin.py

I save the script in /usr/local/bin as "djangovirtualenv.sh" and whenever I want to setup a new environment I do this:

justin$ cd ~/projects
justin$ mkdir NewProject
justin$ cd NewProject
justin$ djangovirtualenv.sh
justin$ source env/bin/activate
justin$ python djangoadmin.py startproject newproject

You can get virtualenv from PyPi

Why Apple Might Close the iTunes Store

Vice president for iTunes, Eddy Cue:

Apple has repeatedly made clear that it is in this business to make money, and would most likely not continue to operate iTS if it were no longer possible to do so profitably

While the consensus on the web seems to be that this would never happen, I think a strong case could be made for Apple exiting the music sales business - if it did become unprofitable - and turning the iTunes store into a distribution platform for a current rival such as Amazon. Such an arrangement would allow Apple to keep the iTunes/iPod integration and lose the continued hassle of RIAA negotiations and DRM enforcement.

Via BBC News.