Trilogy in Many Parts

I’ve just completed the final part of my trilogy on InDesign 2.0, Spot Colours and output.

Part 1: InDesign 2.0: Generating Composite, Trapped PDFs

Part 2: InDesign 2.0: Spot Colors, Transparency

Part 3: InDesign 2.0: Photoshop with Spots, InDesign and Composite PDF
If you look at , you will see google searches that have arrived here. Every now and then someone searching for “Moonshine Distilling” hits my site. Sadly for them, it has absolutely nothing to do with illegal alcohol production in stills.

CSS and mungenetengine

30 days to a More Accessible Weblog: Interesting Sunday reading, even if you are not a weblog-person. It details how to create more accessible sites in HTML. Spent some time adding title attributes to the a href's that the mungenetengine generates.

Got my first servlet working with Apache Tomcat. Also downloaded and using Eclipse 2.0 as the IDE. Fun and frolic with web.xml configuration files, jar files and the like.

Travel

Now in Sydney, watching the sun rise over the CBD. Thanks to Qantas, got a late-stage upgrade to business class. Watched A Beautiful Mind, and slept for about 10 hours on the flight. In Sydney for all of three hours, then off to Auckland, New Zealand.

Now in cool, wintery Auckland, New Zealand. Some 30 hours after leaving San Jose, California

As my hosting provider is adding some level of Java support soon, and its a language that is becoming increasingly “hip” at Adobe, I’ve installed Tomcat 4.0 ready to rock and roll. The last time I seriously touched Java was back in my Apple days with WebObjects 4.0. It feels like getting back into a pair of comfortable shoes.

Travel Overload

Another day, another flight. The plan: 2 hours at San Jose “international” airport. 1 hour flight San Jose to LAX. 5 hours layover. 14 hours LAX to Sydney. 3 hours layover. 3 hours Sydney to Auckland. Total = 29 hours “on the road”. Yes, sports fans, jetsetting is a glamorous lifestyle of the rich and famous. And what makes it worse: I have about 467,000 Qantas Freaky Flyer points – and its impossible to do anything with them.

For those in New Zealand, I’ll see you at Printtech 2002. You will find me at the Fuji-Xerox stand doing mini-training courses on InDesign 2.0.

I love visiting New Zealand. It has to be the most beautiful place in the world. Thankfully, I get to visit as a part of my job. When I told my friends at Adobe US I “was off to NZ” after this visit to the US, they were all amazed… Kia Kaha!

Ok, this is coolness. Sitting in the terminal @ San Jose International Airport – wirelessly online and able to send emails. Alan Rosenfeld and I are now so sick of the musak we’ve got our headphones on and are doing work. Alan is listening to African music wishing he was still on holiday. I am listening to Neil Finn – to get into a NZ mood. Saturday in San Jose, Monday in Auckland.

The New mungenetbar


The New mungnetbar

Using Visual Basic and Simon Fell’s pocketSOAP, I created a small interface that communicates between my desktop and the server. There is a special SOAP interface to the database that permits remote updating of the mungenetengine without using the traditional web-based interface.

[1196] 01_mungenetbar.jpg

This is the mungenetbar. It sits at the bottom of my laptop’s screen and tells me:

  • the number of page views on the site
  • the number of unique users to have visited the site
  • the current ADBE share price

[1197] 02_mungenetbar.jpg

If I double-click on the mungenetbar, I can see either select the content or images within a particular section of the site.

[1198] 03_mungenetbar.jpg

The edit window for a content or image allows me to update the “metadata” etc for a piece of content. If I “persist” the data, this downloads the HTML, images, CSS into a folder that permits editing in GoLive 6.0

[1199] 04_mungenetbar.jpg

When looking at images in a section, I can download the image to the desktop, and automatically open Photoshop 7.

[1200] 05_mungenetbar.jpg

The +blog button is a quick weblog addition/edit button. Weblogs on the front page of the site are updated more often – so this input permits quick editing. The Check Site button asks Internet Explorer to go to my home page URL and display a recent addition to the ‘blog.

There is another way of adding elements to the site. By dragging a HTML, JPEG, GIF or PDF to the mungenetbar, it will display the content dialog box permitting quick insertion of content. If the image or HTML fragment contains metadata, the mungenetbar recognises this and changes the data on the site.

On the server-side, I am using nusoap PHP Libraries as my server connector. After working though WSDL — which is a little of a mind-bender, the VB client the PHP server works well. Even with complex types! I can highly recommend both pocketSOAP and NuSOAP.

The next step is to recreate the legacy VB code in C-sharp. This will be primarily a learning process.

Reversing Footage in Premiere 6.0


Reversing Footage in Premiere 6.0

A question from a customer in an email: how do you reverse a piece of footage in Premiere 6.0? I know how to do this in AfterEffects, but never looked at the problem in Premiere.

A few quick experiments later (what, read the manual?) – its even easier than I first thought.

Here we have a piece of footage loaded in a bin. It is going to be our target we are going to reverse time over:

[1193] 1193.jpg

Right-click (Mac users: control-click) on this piece of footage and select "Speed"

[1194] 1194.jpg

Now all we need to do is change the rate at which this plays. Typing in a negative number doesn’t change time and entropy in the universe, but it will reverse the playback of this clip. -100% means run it at the same speed, but in reverse. Viola!

[1195] 1195.jpg

Thanks Gil-Ad.