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We all know that just about everything that comes out of Hollywood is faked in some fashion or anther. Certainly the film blockbusters with the computer generated images by the thousands. Even bio pics and movies which ought to be true use 'creative license' to spruce up what is otherwise another boring existence. Add to that the reality show phenomenon and of course, commercials.
I remember a few years ago they shot a car commercial in Simi Valley and they wanted to use the Venture Liquors store front but I guess they objected to the title, so they stuck a fake sign on the store and shot the commercial. I only know about this because we saw the hubbub around the place when bowling next door at Harley's one evening and I later went by to ask what was happening.
Interesting, but not the point. I can see why an automotive manufacturer might have a problem with a liquor store name and ask the owner to change it.
Sometimes though, I see something and I just have to ask why.
This particular question revolves around a Jetta commercial that's been running since at least September. I just saw another one this evening, leading to this silly post. I'd captured the commercial as part of something else on September 21 and turned it into a movie on October 3 of last year. I've looked for information on this a few times before. Nothing.
The original ad (and perhaps the latest ones too) are centered around special deals for remaining 2004 models. It was a typical closeout ad with one tiny exception. The ad begins with a car apparently getting onto Interstate 95, a major east coast transportation artery, which runs from Florida to Maine. I've been up and down nearly the entire length a few times, done the Florida to New Jersey run in both directions countless times and I once did it hitchhiking. The rest of the commercial takes place on both sides of the 118 freeway (aka the Ronald Reagan Freeway) in the eastern half (or so) of Simi Valley. No one, unless blind (and unable to see the sign) is going to think those mountains (the Santa Susana Pass) are anywhere close to I-95. Further, they left in the real street names: Stearns Street and Tapo Canyon Road. Stearns flys, but umm, Tapo Canyon? I don't think so.
I just can't understand it; why bother with the subterfuge? There had to be a meeting somewhere (either at the ad agency or at Volkwagon) where someone brought up the idea that they'd use a faked (stolen?) I-95 sign in the early part.
What the hell were these people thinking?
Taking a picture of a window in MacOS X:
To take a picture of a window, the menu bar, the Dock, or other area, press Command-Shift-4, then press the Space bar. Move the pointer over the area you want so that it's highlighted, then click. (If you decide you want to drag to select the area, press the Space bar again.)
This is mostly a note to myself because I can never seem to remember the sequence correctly (I keep thinking it's the CAPS LOCK key, which it may have been for some version in Classic). And every time I ask someone they respond with "You can do that?" The spacebar... I'd have never thought of that one.
Doc has a good aerial picture taken while flying into the Santa Barbara airport. It does a very good job of showing the 'larger geological context' as he put it.
I meant to post this on Saturday, got busy and just found it again now. Argg.
I've finally gotten around to using the static content system I created a while back to create a link to Ventura County News Sources.
The primary impetus was a desire to move my links online, but I was further spurred in that direction because of a blurb on L.A. Observed about La Conchita which pointed to an article in the Ventura County Reporter, which I'd never heard of (despite it's long term presence).
Unfortunately, the Ventura County Reporter doesn't use long lived links. I'm sure they've had many great articles, but what caught my eye was One soldier’s story. Patrick Campbell is a young man from Camarillo, a Cal grad who dropped out of law school (and gave up a position on the staff of Senator Patrick Leahy) to join the Army as a medic. His (mis)adventures are chronicled on his site: Campbell Watch and (and his mailing list) and were summarized in the Reporter article.
If you have additions or corrections to the list, please let me know.
The Ventura County Star just made a color change on their site, which completely screwed me up.
It's been a seaweed greenish for so long, I thought Firefox had some sort of palette problem until I checked it elsewhere.
Does this statement by a PR flak from Motorola rub anyone else the wrong way?
"Nobody in the industry has ever said that Bluetooth would always be cost-free," Motorola spokesman Alan Buddendeck said on Thursday. "It will vary from operator to operator."
That's this most preposterous thing I've read this week (and there's been a lot of weird stuff written, with the Macintosh version of a yearly pilgrimage happening up in San Francisco).
I expect that sort of answer from Verizon, which decided that the phones Bluetooth features could only be used the way they wanted them to be and now they're being sued. Motorola is supposed to at least understand what they make and why.
To Mr. Buddendeck:
The full Bluetooth functionality in the phone has already been paid for in the eyes of the customer. There is no 'cost-free' thing happening here.
One of these days, a standards based approach to modern wireless communications is going to happen and this crap will disappear move to some other industry. I really can't wait. Until then, we're all screwed.
The rescue efforts in La Conchita were stopped today because of the elapsed time and instability in the mud. Will they rebuild? If not, what happens to the rest of the small town? Many questions remain and will echo through the rest of the year and beyond.
Somehow, Highway 101 between Ventura and Santa Barbara is due to open by noon tomorrow. I guess that's a rush job because of all the people who need it on a daily basis (and it's certain that the well heeled folks who need it on the weekend made some calls too).
The huge boulder on Topanga Canyon Road is now a pile of rubble and being removed although I haven't heard when they plan on reopening Topanga Canyon to traffic. And I'm just guessing, but it seems pretty likely that Pollywog Park (shown in the second photo) is drained by now.
KCLU is finally back on the air today although there's a bit of static I don't recall from last week. I'm not sure if the transformer has been replaced but today's update mentions some additional damaged equipment from the lightning strike. From the statement on Saturday:
National Public radio station KCLU in Thousand Oaks remained off the air. It was knocked off Friday morning during a heavy lightning storm. The station's transmitter is at the end of a muddied trail atop a mountain between Camarillo and Thousand Oaks, said general manager Mary Olson. Station technician Mike Tosch and his daughter rode horses to the transmitter Saturday only to find the problem was a blown transformer that Southern California Edison needs to replace.
and this from the KCLU website today:
KCLU is currently operating at reduced power while repairs are completed following last week's lightning storm. We expect KCLU to resume normal operation soon. Thank you for your patience.
For the most part, it's back to business as usual until the next major storm, earthquake, fire or whatever comes along. C'est la Vie!
My stumbling path through Python continues... often two steps backwards and three steps forward. I've just about stopped building personal tools in other languages (do shell scripts count?) at this point which leads to interesting problems and discoveries, not always linked one to another.
It all started with wanting to use the feed validator by Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby because it's got a reasonable looking model for generic feeds. With the tools history, it seems likely that it'll be extended for future purposes (Atom and others).
After playing with the bountiful included examples, I was able to make it work on a small sample of what I want to do. Cool, let's install this thing. After a bit of fishing around and eventually pulling the sources from CVS just to make sure, I realized that there wasn't a setup.py file. Some sort of licensing thing? A desire not to see it be easily installable? Hell, I didn't know and neither did google or yahoo.
But I did stumble upon a previously unknown packaging mechanism which filled me with hope (for a little while anyway). Danny O'Brien does something interesting in his Life Hacks setup log using a .zip archive. After having a .jar file flashback episode, I went searching and found PEP 273 and PEP 302, which are included in Python 2.3. and ran off to play.
First, I tried it Danny's way and it worked like a charm. Put the feedvalidator package together as an archive in the current path, push it into the path at runtime and all is good. But it has an ugly side; manually loading libraries (especially by path) is prone to failure if you want to share. It has a further drawback, you still have to load it manually to look at the documentation so it's not going to show up if you launch pydoc in server mode which I've been doing.
I hatched a new scheme. If I'd read the docs right, I should be able to put the feedvalidator.zip file in the site-python directory and it should just work. Despite a bunch of fiddling, it doesn't appear that putting an archive in the site-python directory works without some extra mojo. My best guess is that it needs to be registered somehow. Giving up on the simple dream, it seemed best to just create a setup.py file and be done with it. I did (and I'll get to that in a bit) but first I had to take a big detour elsewhere...
I looked at a couple setup.py files for pure Python code and decided that it couldn't possibly be that simple (it really is, more on that later). I looked at the distutils documentation (and found this information about modifying paths) but wasn't yet convinced it was easy. So I went looking for Mark's 'universal' feed parser (and some examples that used it). Where I wound up was reading Python development using the Eclipse IDE and Apache Ant build tool. I guess I missed it entirely the first time around, but having python code in Eclipse and being able to run (and debug it) is awfully neat. Slow, but neat none the less. If they can do some sort of dynamic pydoc thing I'll use it, a lot.
That got me thinking about XCode (2.x). If they bother to add all this stuff (and they're doing a lot of this sort of thing) then they need to be able to learn which source code is where rather than force developers to add things to projects. It's the size 10 purple thumb of XCode projects in groups which use a lot of tools. At a minimum, it needs to be easy to update projects with the twenty new files of the appropriate type that have been added in the last few weeks.
Anyway, I mentioned that creating an install file seemed pretty darned simple (too simple). You need to create a file named setup.py, import setup from distutils.core and add a wee bit of meta data.
This worked for me under Python 2.3 (and should until some major change happens).
#!/usr/bin/env python
#
from distutils.core import setup
setup(
name = 'feedvalidator',
version = '1.4.x',
description = 'Feed validator for RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom',
long_description = """\
Feed validator
--------------
RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom
Required: Python 2.1 or later
Recommended: Python 2.3 or later
Recommended: libxml2
""",
author='Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby',
url = 'http://feedvalidator.org/',
download_url = 'http://sourceforge.net/projects/feedvalidator/',
license = "Python",
platforms = ['POSIX', 'Windows'],
packages = ['feedvalidator','feedvalidator/formatter','feedvalidator/i18n']
)
Assuming you check out the code from sf.net using CVS or otherwise download it, the contents above go into a file at 'feedvalidator/src/setup.py'. Change directory down into src/ and do the usual:
python setup.py install
That should cover it.
The loss of property and life is terribly sad, reminding me of last years events in the
San Bernardino mountains. The Ventura Country Star has a whole bunch of coverage including videos and photos from La Conchita and elsewhere around the county while the LAT covers the growing blame game which is going to cost the county. The search in La Conchita will likely resume as soon as the sun is up.
The Star also has a very good editorial today: Brutal storm brings havoc. While recounting the basic events they advised people to stay out of the way and let the professionals deal with mess without adding to it. I'd missed the story about the city of Ventura moving a bunch of homeless out of the river bottom in November, but it's almost an annual event now. The homeless setup camps in the wild vegetation on the banks of the river during the dry parts of the year and then need to be shooed out before they drown in the winter.
It seems the worst of this storm is over according to the National Weather Service although there is another big storm coming this way (see the West CONUS image at the Geostationary Satellite Server; here's the current loop).
The winter is shaping up to be a lot like the 1994-1995 storm series which just kept coming for several months. We shall see.
Between the game, the constant emergency services bulletins (flash flood alerts, it seems that Ventura County is washing away) and of course, the incessant rain... I'm thoroughly blued out.
Oh well... there's always next year!
Someone needs to explain this to me... When did Emerson, Lake and Palmer (and again...) become such a cultural icon that ABC used them as part of the Ram's intro? When they played a part of Karn Evil 9 (there are several parts) I almost fell out of my seat. They'd have killed for that kind of notoriety in the 70's!
I have one regret with regard to ELP. I was supposed to go to a Works concert (the tour with a full orchestra, oh my) in Tampa in '77 which was cancelled because of a riot a couple weeks earlier (just looked around and there is almost nothing about the riot; I'll have to work on that).
Anyway, we're supposed to be talking about football.
The Packers are playing the Vikings for the third time this season. Nothin' is guaranteed, but it should be a good game.
Way back when, I said we'd be 9 - 7, but I had no idea how hard that trip might be. My crack about Washington was funny then and now... unfortunately the rest of the conference was so bad that the purple folks lost in DC and still qualified.
It's worth noting that this will be the last year we'll see this offense in action.
Win or lose, Favre may decide that it's time to hang 'em up. If they win the NFC, it's an 80% chance and if they win the Super Bowl, well... I can't see any scenario that doesn't involve doubling of city ownership that would keep him around. Even with a loss, Brett might have his decisions made by others or may simply have more important things to deal with.
The fortuitous logjam in the backfield is history after this year; there is no way the Pack can keep all these guys paid, active and happy (Ahman Green, Najeh Davenport, Nick Luchey, William Henderson and on occasion, Tony Fisher). Something is going to have to give.
The offensive line is going to change. Incredibly, this group has been through this year after year because of matriculation or injury and they continue somehow. Perhaps I worry too much. Maybe the answer is 4 + 3. Keep four of the regulars and some of the occasional folks and things will work out.
Anyway...
The cold, outdoor conditions should work to our advantage, but that hasn't been the case this year. What the heck, the Packers need to win this if only to go to Atlanta next week so they can exercise some other demons (Vick has a career day last time around and there's always Ed Donatell).
I'd love to see the Pack we've seen a few times this season, scoring and causing turnovers early; controlling the game from there. And if not, be patient. Just don't become Air Green Bay... that almost never works.
I think we've got at least another week:
| Purple Folks: | 21 |
| Cheese Heads: | 37 |
Welcome to the show... or Hasta la vista; there is no in between.
I had a need to find a MacOS (actually HFS) friendly alternative to shutil.move.
I have some some code in a utility which shovels '.webloc' files around based on modification dates and works well even on files with resource forks but will fail silently (eating the resource fork) if the move crosses partitions (or worse, moves to a file system like UFS or NFS). It's had this disclaimer in there for a few days and I wanted to make it go away:
# this will break across file systems so I need a better way... shutil.move( aFile, newDir + fileName )
Ideally, it would be something I could dynamically import and if it fails, fall back to using shutil.move. So I had a few things to learn.
The macostools module doesn't have a move, but it does have a copy, which'll have to do (for now). The big question... is it always installed? I've no idea, but I'm going to have to find a generic install of Panther to find out.
Here's my interim solution, such as it is:
def moveFile( srcPath, dstPath ) :
try :
import macostools
macostools.copy( srcPath, dstPath )
os.remove( srcPath )
except ImportError :
import shutil
shutil.move( srcPath, dstPath )
In a perfect world, I would be able to hand this off to a module which would do all the consideration about the partition and pick the best mechanism (like various bits of Jim Luther's MoreFiles collection), but this will do for now.
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a relatively new space shortage on my laptop system.
Since then, I've found one major contributor in GarageBand.
Some time ago I posted to MacInTouch asking whether anyone knew of a way to store the contents of the /Library/Application Support/GarageBand folder - all 1.8 GB of it - on a different volume to save space on the startup volume.
No-one responded at the time, and I did various experiments with aliases, all to no avail - GarageBand simply wouldn't have it. However, in today's Notes and Tips you provided a link to the University of Utah's Crappy Apps page, where I found the solution I was after: a symbolic link. On that page it's given as a workaround for a security issue in a lab full of students, but a simpler version works just as well for me just to save space.
All I did was copy the entire GarageBand folder from Application Support to an external volume (which I happen to call 'Podule'), then put the symlink in the Application Support folder using Terminal:
cd "/Library/Application Support"
ln -s /Volumes/Podule/GarageBand GarageBand
Not quite the same thing as an alias, and GB seems perfectly happy with it, and I've reclaimed the best part of 2 GB on my startup volume. I hope this is some help to someone else.
This is Apple at it's best (and worst). Nearly 2 Gigs of user data (good stuff!), tossed onto the startup device. Once upon a time, applications could live anywhere and the data could live elsewhere. While still possible under OsX, many vendors assume root disk installation, Apple foremost among them.
While we're at it, iDVD could use a serious diet (or at least let me put it in my user directory). It has a 1.8 G Resources directory in the application bundle. Good grief.
Anyway, after some twiddling around, I once again have 4 Gigs of space available on my boot volume after a restart and am no longer up against a wall.
It's off to the office again in the morning and we remain quite damp. The prognosis for clearing isn't too good either.
While looking around for local weather resources, I checked my link collection and was reminded of KABC, the LA area ABC affiliate. They're not great, but they do have a reasonable forecast and Doppler 7000 page, which rolls up links to other radar and satellite images. KABC also has a bunch of regional cams.
If you're looking for additional cam's along the coast, check out the LA County Coastal Monitoring Network, which includes Zuma Beach (not very useful right now, but as the weather warms... it will be).