William T. Foxtrot

I know, I know… it’s pretty widely understood that good, available domain names are nearly impossible to find these days. I guess I just didn’t realize how bad the situation was until I started looking for one myself. I’m currently spending a lot of my time learning Ruby on Rails, and I finally decided on an application I wanted to build. I’m creating it mostly to learn the entire process of Rails development — from designing models and database tables to actually deploying a production application on a web server. But just because I’m doing it for the learning experience doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t at least think about trying to get people interested in it. I want it to be a real web application, ideally something that a group of people (no matter how small that group may be) would actually use regularly. It would be exciting to see people actually use my application.

The problem is, I’m trying to find a domain name to register and everything has already been taken! I obviously don’t want to have something like agsdaghoiubasdf.com, I take this project seriously enough that I want at least a decent domain name for it — something that will be fairly easy to remember. I don’t want to get into what the application is too much at this point (I’ll talk all about it when I’m ready), but generally it’s going to be a site for debates. I still have a lot of planning to do before I can even get too far along in the project, so I can’t even really say what types of features it will end up having. I did want to get a domain though so I could set up a subversion repository and maybe even start testing different layouts in a few weeks.

Since the site is about debates — at this point it’s centered around two-person debates — I thought it would be cool if the domain name (and thus the application name itself) was something related to dueling. But EVERY good idea I had for a name was already registered. I thought “duelism.com” might be good, but that was taken. I then tried “duellum.com” (the Latin word for “duel”) and that was taken. I even stooped so low as to try “duelr.com” (a rip-off of flickr.com) and that was taken!

Okay, I’ll admit I’ve mainly just been focusing on .com domains, rather than .net or *shudder* one of those other ones, but come on… 99% of people who type in a web address just automatically put a .com at the end. It would be frustrating to have a .net address and have people accidentally type in .com and get to some generic-looking ad search site. Since my app is pretty small and not something that people are going to be lining up to check out, I’m sure less people will be interested just because they’ll type in the .com address, get a different site, get confused and then just give up on it entirely.

I’m going to give it a few more days and hope that I can find a nice .com address that fits my site. If not, I’ll look for a .net address. But I just thought I’d ask, in case anyone else has been in this situation before — what’s the procedure like for buying a domain from one of those domain parking companies (or whatever you call the people that buy up all the domains and then put generic ads on them)? How much do they usually charge for a domain? Does anyone have some experience with this? Leave a comment!

I just found out from their website that Ween (my favorite band — well, my favorite active band that still records and plays live… I can’t forget about The Beatles ) is releasing a new E.P. on June 8th, entitled “The Friends E.P.” According to Ween,

It is is the ultimate party record, filled with good beats and good times. Perfect for your barbecue or doing bong hits or whatever it is that you guys do.

Sounds good to me. I like the cover as well:

Kudos to “The Simpsons,” 400 episodes and 20 years on television.

I was 1 year old when “The Simpsons” began on “The Tracy Ullman Show” in 1987. I, like all of my friends, have been a fan of the show for as long as I can remember. I have vivid memories of sitting around the lunch table in 4th grade just quoting “The Simpsons” with my friends — practically every other sentence uttered began with with the phrase, “Hey! Remember that time on ‘The Simpsons’ when…” 95% of my sense of humor at that age was Simpsons-related. My after-school routine from age 8 through 14 was to come home, get something to eat, and watch the two Simpsons episodes at 5:00 and 5:30. More than half of the time the two episodes were reruns, but that only meant that I got another chance to catch a funny line from the show that I could proudly quote to my friends the next day.

I think at around the time I was 14 or 15, when I started high school, I stopped watching as much TV. I still watched “The Simpsons” of course, but not as religiously as before. I’m not sure if it was just me or if the episodes weren’t as funny, or maybe I had just seen the old ones so many times that I could practically recite each episode line-by-line. You might think that I perhaps grew out of the show, but you would be completely mistaken. About 5 or 6 months ago, my friend Simon got the 4th season of “The Simpsons” on DVD for his birthday. We started watching the DVDs, and thus began a Simpsons marathon that is still going strong 6 months later. We’ve watched the episodes from seasons 2 through 10 multiple times, and will continue watching more as we are able to acquire copies of the next seasons. The show is just as good, probably even better, than I remember it. Some of the jokes are somewhat obscure or even intellectual, and I don’t think I would’ve understood them all at age 10.

I watched the 400th episode last night, of course. I personally thought it was great. Especially all the jokes bashing Fox. I can’t think of any television show that could get away with what “The Simpsons” was able to get away with in this episode. They completely attack the blatant hypocrisy of Fox — trashy, morally degrading filth on one channel, holier-than-thou right-wing liberal bashing on another channel. It’s pretty great that they saved this material for the 400th episode, when they knew the most people would be watching. Good for them. A lot of people in the media have criticized Fox, but how many television shows on Fox have criticized it?

If you haven’t already, go rent or buy any season of “The Simpsons” between 4 and 10.  This was probably their Golden Age, when they were just cranking out classic episode after classic episode.  If you like goofy humor, political and social commentary humor, sitcom-style humor, cartoon humor, and so on — “The Simpsons” is probably your cup of tea.  I can’t really imagine someone not being able to find any humor they like in the show — it’s pretty much universally loved.

Today I wanted to download the source code for Beast, a lightweight forum built with Ruby on Rails.  I forgot what the URL to their website was, so I did a search for “beast forum” in Google.  Imagine my surprise when the first hit from the results was BeastForum.com, “The World’s Largest Bestiality Board.”  It seems that the users and developers of Beast know this, but are fond of the name and are reluctant to change it.  I guess I can understand that.  They now have a challenge though — they must become popular enough to beat BeastForum.com in Google’s ranking system so they will be the top result for the search “beast forum.”

Good luck to them.

Last night I got a call from my friend Martina, who told me that she had a school video project due the next day and she needed help. She edited this cool stop-motion video in Windows Movie Maker on her home computer, but since her computer was so old and slow, Movie Maker was constantly crashing and she was barely able to work on it at all. Somehow she managed to edit the movie and export it as two WMV9 clips (Movie Maker allows export to either WMV9 or DV, and the computer didn’t have enough space to export as DV or WMV was the default option and Martina didn’t know how to switch it — I’m not sure), but she still needed to join the two clips together and add a song as the audio track. She burned the two files and the song to a CD and brought them over to my friend Simon’s house, to put the finishing touches on the project in iMovie on Simon’s fancy new MacBook Pro.

Unfortunately, when she got there, she realized iMovie is unable to import WMV files. She and Simon found Flip4Mac, the Microsoft-recommended plugin which supposedly allows you to play WMV files through QuickTime. After installing this, they tried dragging Martina’s WMV files into iMovie, and it appeared that it was going to work. A progress bar popped up and it started to import the files into iMovie. Unfortunately, when it was finished, a giant message telling them to upgrade to Flip4Mac Pro appeared watermarked across the entire video. That’s when they called me. I cringed a little when I heard what they were trying to do, since I have tried to convert WMV files before on both Mac and Linux and knew that it is a pain. However, I like being known as the computer nerd that all my friends call when they need assistance, so I selflessly and heroically agreed to drive over and figure it out for them.

When I got there, I thought of a few things that could maybe work. I downloaded ffmpegX, a Mac OS X front-end to both the ffmpeg and mencoder conversion tools. I figured this might be able to convert WMV to MOV or some other format compatible with iMovie. While I still think ffmpeg and mencoder are great tools (ffmpegX not so much, it’s shareware that derives practically all its functionality from two free software programs — so basically they want you to pay for a snazzy interface… this is a typical problem I’ve run into on Macs), their ability to handle WMV files is flaky at best. This isn’t their fault though, WMV is a closed-source format that Microsoft controls. In other words, I couldn’t get ffmpegX to convert the files into a format that would work with iMovie.

Determined to figure this problem out, I did a little research online. I found avidemux, a free software program I had used on Linux. I hadn’t realized that ports existed for both Mac and Windows. Unfortunately (of course), avidemux for Mac requires X11.app, which Simon didn’t have installed. It took me forever to find it — maybe it’s just me, but it really seemed like Apple went out of its way to hide the download site for this program. I finally found it (somehow) and installed it, but didn’t have any luck with avidemux either. It was able to open the WMV files and append the second clip to the first, but I couldn’t get it to export to a usable format.

At this point, I had spent probably 2 hours (with a couple 10 minute breaks to play Super Mario All-Stars on Simon’s SNES) trying these techniques. I was so frustrated that I decided to try something so evil and diabolical I thought for sure it would work. I tried to download a cracked version of Flip4Mac Pro. I know, I know… this is illegal and I don’t AT ALL condone this sort of activity, but we were so desperate to finish Martina’s movie in time for her class the next day that we were willing to try anything. None of us had any money either, so we couldn’t have just bought it (although I don’t think I would have let Martina or Simon buy it even if they had the money — it’s such a rip-off). I searched a couple BitTorrent sites and found the Universal Binary version that we needed to be able to import WMV directly into iMovie. I started to download them, and waited. And waited. And waited. It wasn’t working. No one was seeding either of these torrent files, so they weren’t downloading. In retrospect, I’m glad it didn’t work. Now that I’ve switched over to Linux, the idea of using pirated software really bothers me. Why do something illegal when there are tons of free alternatives?

After this failed, I hopelessly looked at Martina and shook my head. I don’t think it’s going to work. She said, “Oh. Okay, that’s alright.” I could see the disappointment in her eyes. Completely discouraged and feeling that I had lost my reputation as the dork who could fix any computer problem among my friends, I started putting my shoes on, getting ready to leave. Then it dawned on me — aren’t there websites out there that allow you to edit your videos online??! I threw my shoes off and shouted, “Wait! I think I know how to do it!” I raced over to the computer and opened up a Firefox window. I quickly remembered three video-sharing sites off the top of my head that allowed you to edit your clips — Motionbox, Jumpcut, and Eyespot. I paused for a second, thinking, “Wait… you can edit your clips online, but would they let you download them?” I froze, thinking we might be out of luck. What are the chances that one of these sites is going to not only allow you to edit your videos, but download them too? I did a quick search of all three, and there it was — right on an Eyespot video page was a “Download” bar that had buttons to download the video in your choice of FIVE different formats (Mac, PC, iPod, PSP, and DivX)!

If only I had thought of this simple solution two hours before. The actually editing was incredibly easy — I uploaded the two WMV files and the song, went to the “Mixer” section, dragged the two clips onto the timeline and muted them, dragged the song onto the “Audio” bar, named my final edit, clicked “Mix and Play”, and tada! It started mixing the clips. It took only about 40 seconds. I then went to the video’s page and clicked the “Mac” download in the download section. A message popped up saying an email with the download link would be sent to me shortly. I check about a minute or two later and sure enough, there it was in my Inbox. I downloaded the MOV file, imported it into iDVD (in the end we didn’t even NEED to use iMovie!) and burned it onto a DVD. After it finished we all gathered around the TV, put the DVD and watched Martina’s cool short stop-motion film!

Needless to say, I felt that I owed it to Eyespot to tell this story. They really saved the day. As for the quality of the finished product, Martina was happy with it, and that was all that mattered. I’m not really sure if Eyespot adds any compression to the downloaded video file — it would’ve been hard to tell, since it had already been heavily compressed when it was converted from DV to WMV. I only watched the final product once on the TV, and I was mostly watching it for the film itself, not to check out the quality, but I don’t remember it being really pixelated or anything like that.

You know, after having the pleasure of editing a short film on Eyespot, it kind of inspired me to want to make my own videos. I know that Linux is a bit lacking in the simple video editing department (there’s Kino, but last time I tried using it, it crashed a few times and so I didn’t experiment with it much more), so something like Eyespot might be the perfect solution. There is a 100MB limit per video file, but that’s the same limit as YouTube so you can’t really complain (although YouTube also puts a 10 minute limit on the video files, and it doesn’t seem that Eyespot does that.  So if you have a long video that you’re able to compress to under 100MB, Eyespot might be the better choice!).  I didn’t even get a chance to experiment with the effects and transitions on Eyespot, because Martina’s video didn’t require them.

If you’ve got a video you’d like to edit, you might want to give Eyespot a try.  Even if all you’d like to do is combine to clips like I did, it was a pretty easy solution, especially if you’ve got two files in a proprietary format that you’re unable to do anything with.

I just came across this article by Jeremy Allison, one of the head developers of Samba, “an Open Source/Free Software suite that has, since 1992, provided file and print services to all manner of SMB/CIFS clients, including the numerous versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems.”

Read the article, it’s a funny and well-written story about Allison’s attempt to give a presentation about Samba at an Apple conference, only to be told he couldn’t present unless he used an Apple computer to give the presentation.

But then take a look at the comments. I knew that a lot of Apple users are passionate about their hardware and software, but I had no idea how willing they were to embarrass themselves by writing downright nasty comments in response to any criticisms of their favorite corporation. The last time I checked, Allison — besides being called arrogant and self-righteous (pretty standard things to call someone when you want to insult them without actually making a valid criticism) — had been called “a little whiny baby” and “a dick”.

I just don’t understand this passion that they feel. I used to be a proud Mac user myself, until I realized that there were much better alternatives out there, but I couldn’t possibly imagine even back then being passionate enough to personally attack someone who criticized Apple. It’s absurd! Especially when you realize they’re fanatical about a corporation that is making money off them.

I’m sorry to rant, and I don’t mean to criticize you if you’re an Apple user who is content with your computer. If it works for you, then don’t let anyone stop you from using it. But if you’re an Apple user (or Windows user, for that matter) who is publicly harassing a prominent free software developer who created something that you probably use and don’t even realize it, then you should realize that you suck and you’re a dumbass.

Note: Before you get all offended and leave a nasty comment, the title of this post was meant as a joke.

For awhile now, I’ve noticed that my posts to this blog come in two forms — a video, photo, or link with little or no description, or a longer “article” about some topic. I’ve often felt that these two things don’t belong together, that putting them together on one blog makes this blog somewhat unreadable.

I’ve just discovered tumblelogs,

a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.

This style of blogging really appeals to me. I really don’t like the idea of Twitter, it seems so egotistical and uninteresting — why would anyone care what I’m doing right now and why would I care what they’re doing? I know that some people use it for more than just announcing what they’re doing at a given moment, but generally it seems to be pretty self-centered.

Tumblelogs, on the other hand, seem to be more about giving to others. You find a funny YouTube video, you post it to your tumblelog so others can enjoy it. You come across an interesting quote, you share it with your tumblelog readers. Neither of these examples require much, if any, explanation — you can just post them and they will speak for themselves. I look at it this way — whenever I’m browsing the web, I come across a lot of stuff that I would love to share with others, but I often think it’s not worth writing a whole blog post just to share a photo, video, or quote. So I’ll maybe bookmark it with del.icio.us or something but I never get around to using it anywhere or showing it to anyone. Someone might find it by browsing my del.icio.us bookmarks, but who browses other people’s del.icio.us bookmarks these days? A tumblelog solves this problem by giving you an easy place to put all of this stuff, where other people can find it and enjoy it.

So now that I’ve justified having one, I am hereby announcing The Tumblelog of William T. Foxtrot, this weblog’s new little brother. I created it using Tumblr, an excellent place to make a simple tumblelog. If you’re looking to start a weblog, Tumblr probably isn’t what you’re looking for — so far you’re unable to search through pages or leave comments — but it’s a great place to post stuff that doesn’t quite make it to your weblog. That’s what I’ll be using it for, at least. I hope to use it all the time, and I’ll try to make it entertaining for you, my dear readers. What can I say… I’m an incredibly selfless guy.

UPDATE 5-15-07: I’ve put the RSS feed of my tumblelog on the sidebar of this weblog, which seems to be the ultimate solution to all of my life’s problems!