Programming: yahoo pipes, Quartz Composer, noise film (+ askville)

I've been doing a lot of things over the past week so I haven't been posting here as much as usual.



One thing I was doing was playing with Yahoo pipes (pipes.yahoo.com). It's a mashup/web2 visual programming language that allows you to make widgets that you can (eventually) post on your site or blog. So I could make a widget that allowed me to dynamically find the names of available apartments in Pasadena and post the locations on a map and see if they formed any conspiratorial shapes like pentagrams.

I've also been playing with Quartz Composer which is on the Tiger install disk (part of Developer Tools). I used to play with Pixel Shox awhile ago and was really surprised to find that in turned into Composer. Quartz Composer allows you to visually link up OpenGL and Core Animation/Video effects. You can try out effects or make screen savers, etc. MIDI and other input options makes it an appropriate tool for VJs. And if you have Tiger, you already own it! You can see some Quartz Composer work at www.zugakousaku.com.

I've also spent some time on askville.com, Amazon's online question/answer community. You type in questions and other members answer them gaining credits for Questville in the process. However, no one knows what Questville is yet. At any rate, I posted some questions about where to find some movies I was looking for (I posted those here about a month ago). I discovered that Askville isn't good at that kind of thing. The people/knowledge base there seems suited to more generalized topics. Yet, posting there is a suprisingly fun activity and you can get into some engaging discussions with members.

In noise film news, I think we're getting closer to making the bird scene work. Writing this script is a lot like programming: you try a bug fix, but then the fix itself causes new problems. In this case, changing the research scene to a car scene solves a lot of problems, but now there are new problems--namely that it's hard to shoot a moving car! The DV Rebel's Guide (if I love it so much why don't I marry it?) suggests breaking down action sequences into specific shots and then solving problems shot by shot, sometimes using totally different solutions. Stu Mashwitz' examples for doing a breakdown are really helpful. So I'm taking that approach with the bird scene. I have a couple of the shots figured out, I think, and just need to figure out one or two more.