Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist

Random on Windows

15May2007 [directLink] [webprog]

Have been trying to get this site running on my Windows box at work, which has been an interesting experience… Some of the things I’d done to set it up properly were particularly helpful - using SVN and using separate settings modules both make it really easy to tweak things without breaking the site in its other instances.

Most things just worked - going from *nix to Windows is pretty easy, it’s going the other way that usually hurts… So far only ran into one weird bit, with my randoms app. The random image loading just wasn’t working. I loaded up the python shell and tried there; still no good, using the bare minimum of python code. But after trying open(photo_path).read() on a few different files, I noticed that it was returning very similar strings, and that they were a lot shorter than they should have been… Loaded up the python help (love being able to write p = open(photo_path) and help(p) to find out everything I can do!) and discovered a buffer setting. Sure enough, had to explicitly tell it not to buffer the file, but just read it all in one hit. No idea what the environmental difference is, but that’s solved my problems, and I’ve just tested on my Linux box at home and it works properly here too.

One little change then (which I’ve made to the original post also):

open(photo_path).read()

becomes:

open(photo_path,'rb',0).read()

Weeping for a Film

06May2007 [directLink] [movies]

Friday afternoon was spent celebrating with the team behind tenders.gov.au, launched two weekends ago and still standing.

Friday evening I went home and slept from nine till two.

In the ridiculously early hours of Saturday morning I rose, stumbled through a morning routine, then went out shooting. Phi, my final uni project, is an episodic video-for-web thing. It’s made up of half rambling environmental shots (mostly things I’ve been collecting over the last couple of years) and half locked-off direct-to-camera narration. Saturday morning I shot all the narration - the only stuff that has any acting in it, and something I was terrified of trying to pull off. The monologue is very wordy, the character’s journey is a little strange. The dull roar of the city permeates the whole thing; getting up this early was our only hope for keeping the background noise that low, and as it was we were regularly interrupted. But it all came out really well - I’ve spent this afternoon clipping and digitising it and I’m really happy with how it’s looking.

The project consists of five releases; we shot Releases 3, 4 and 5 in the dark, 1 in the dawn, then 1 again and 2 after the sun was up. Eventually got home by 8am, exhausted but completely buzzed on adrenaline.

With the chemical imbalance preventing me from sleeping, or from focussing on anything else, I crashed on the bed and watched Clean. And wow. It’s been a long time since any film has had an emotional affect on me, but this thing had me weeping throughout. Maggie Cheung’s musician boyfriend overdoses on drugs she bought; she gets six months and loses custody of their son to his parents. The rest of it is her trying to get her life back on track; it’s full of beautiful moments - Nick Nolte is amazing as the withdrawn grandfather who’s just looking out for the kid.

(And at one point I found myself getting emotional just ‘cause it was showing Paris, and I so wanted to be there; I think that was the sleep deprivation, but still, I didn’t realise the normally-buried emotions were that strong)