Archive for the 'Geek Alert' Category

• e  15 On Amazon, Apple and dick moves

  When Amazon pulled Macmillan’s titles over the weekend, it was a dick move. With the iPad, Apple is setting itself up for a series of dick moves.

• e  56 How screenwriters will use the iPad

  A few thoughts on Apple’s new tablet, and how we’ll be using it in a few months.

• e  33 Hiring a new person

  I’ll be hiring a new full-time employee, a position I’m calling Director of Digital Things.

• e  23 Reading scripts on a MacBook, book-style

  Turn your laptop on its side, and hold it like a hardcover book. It works much better than you’d think, particularly with one of the unibody MacBooks.

• e  28 Reading scripts on the Kindle

  The 2.3 software update adds pdf support for older Kindles, but it’s not as excellent for screenplays as you’d hope.

• e  13 Kindle, international edition

  Amazon’s Kindle, the e-book reader I adore, is now available in more than 100 countries.

• e  94 Why do the machines need humans?

  In The Matrix, why do the machines need humans? “As batteries” is a pretty lame answer.

• e  9 Finding movies online, legally

  SpeedCine indexes movies available through iTunes, Crackle, Hulu and Amazon VOD, letting you know where you can find any given title

• e  18 Show your stats

  I’m working on a new incarnation of the site, so I checked Google Analytics to see which browsers readers are using.

• e  30 Blogs and baked goods

  Most people shouldn’t run their own blogging software.

• e  5 Scrippets 1.3

  The update fixes a rare compatibility issue with the new WordPress 2.8.

• e  11 Mapping The Variant

  Partially-redacted sales data for The Variant is available for curious data-miners.

• e  28 Kindle formatting for web geeks

  If you feel comfortable hand-coding a site, you can get a book on Kindle in 30 minutes or less.

• e  22 Twitchforks

  I almost invented this word today. But didn’t.

• e  13 Show your work, pt. 2

  Nearly every browser lets you “View Source,” showing how the page was constructed…up to a point.

• e  8 Kindle for iPhone

  Long rumored, and now here. It’s free, and pretty darn good.

  The Whispersync feature suddenly makes a lot more sense. If you’re reading a book on your “real” Kindle at home, but find yourself with ten minutes to kill at the car wash, you can open the book to the exact same place on your iPhone.

• e  21 The Kindle is not good for screenplays

  Kindle 2: great for books, but not ready for screenplays.

• e  18 Answer Finder

  Answer Finder is a new way to navigate through the hundreds of answered questions on this site.

• e  22 The new Kindle is pretty solid

  After playing around with it for an hour, I’m pretty happy with the Kindle 2.

• e  19 Snopes plugin

  Whenever a family member forwards an email with a warning about an urgent peril to my health, I immediately visit Snopes.com to confirm my suspicion that it’s a hoax. I then copy a link to the article and send it back, with a gently-worded request to please check Snopes before sending out similar emails.

  Today’s [...]

• e  10 Scrippets for Blogger

  The Scrippets plug-in for WordPress seems to be working well for self-hosted blogs, but it’s no use to folks who use services like Blogger, Tumblr and the like. For people on these on these platforms, the cost of simplicity is customization — they’re easy to use and hard to modify.

  But in an effort to share [...]

• e  46 Scrippets, PHP and a call to coders

  UPDATED. See below.

  For the past four years, I’ve been including little blocks of formatted screenplay examples in my posts, such as…

  INT. LIVING ROOM – DAY As the phone RINGS, Gary dozily reaches one dirty-socked foot off the couch to sit up — and suddenly finds himself falling. He lands hard, dazed. We REVEAL that the [...]

• e  3 Off-topic tweaks

  I’ve made some tweaks to Off-Topic, including adding comments. For those who never click over there, Off-Topic is largely a list of things I find amusing and/or interesting, including a lot of videos.

  The section is experimental, with the explicit goal of trying new things that are prone to failure. It’s not even hosted [...]

• e  19 James Cameron on 3-D

  A pioneer explains how 3-D changes (or doesn’t) cinema.

• e  16 The Nines, as planned

  Digging through the files this afternoon, I came across this document I’d written for The Nines three years ago, which outlines a lot of my production philosophies at the time. To complete my process-geekery, I thought I’d annotate it to show what we did versus what we planned.

  You can download it here (.pdf). Note: Attentive [...]

• e  18 Gravatars

  For the last week, you may have noticed little pictures in the comments section. They are called avatars, and they’re hosted by a service called Gravatar.

  If you’d like one, you can register and upload an image.1 It’s free and painless. Conveniently, the same picture will show up any blog that uses the Gravatar system, which [...]

• e  29 Mis-pinned

  I’m in New York for the second time in a week. This trip is for a director meeting on the studio’s dime.

  While no one will confuse me for a native, I’ve become a lot more comfortable with the city in the past few years. When people give me cross-streets, I generally have some idea what [...]

• e  21 Easter Eggs for Halloween

  Although we’re still in theaters, we’re busy at work on the DVD for The Nines, which should hit store shelves sometime after the New Year.1 There are going to be quite a few special features on the disc, but it’s the Easter Eggs that have me blogging today.

  My question for the DVD gurus out there: [...]

• e  8 Trailer competition judging in progress

  Wow, that’s a lot of entries. I’ll be announcing the winners tomorrow morning.

  Erik Beeson, who so generously helped with the hosting and torrenting, sent along stats:

  total torrent file downloads for both torrents combined: 808 (includes search engine crawlers) dv torrent: 162 completed downloads mpeg4 torrent: 79 completed downloads mpeg4.zip: 242 (the direct download) total completed (torrents+direct): 483

  Thanks [...]

• e  13 Trailer competition, teaser

  Tomorrow, full details of the long-gestating trailer competition will be announced here (and at the lookforthenines site). You’ll have two versions of footage to choose from: DV and MPEG-4. The DV is big and beautiful. The MPEG-4 is small and nimble — and not as bad as you’d think.

  To get ready, Erik Beeson [...]

• e  12 String theory

  While in Venice, I had dinner with several journalists, buyers, and Gabriele Veneziano, who is the father of our international sales rep.

  Veneziano, a physicist, is one of the pioneers of string theory — which is ironic, considering some of the related issues in The Nines. In fact, there used to be a scene [...]

• e  19 The Nines audio commentary

  If you’re going to see The Nines this long weekend, you’ll be in a movie theater. You’ll have the benefit of a giant screen, good sound, and fellow patrons with which to partake (and debate) the film. There’s nothing like watching a movie with a crowd: it’s participatory and immediate.

  One of my [...]

• e  10 I think I just got Google Mapped

  I was walking my dog this morning when I noticed an orange van with strange equipment on its roof: an array of cameras pointing in all directions. As it passed, I read “TeleAtlas: We’re mapping your world!” on the side.

  The company is partners with Google, so I have a hunch I may be showing [...]

• e  16 Cannon fodder

  I’ve previously written about my little World of Warcraft problem, which cost me a summer. My latest, greatest productivity killer is called Tower Defense.

  It’s not one game really, but rather a genre of videogames in which the objective is to place and upgrade a series of automated kill-bots (towers) in order to obliterate wave after [...]

• e  5 Feeds and subscriptions

  In a bit of misguided tweaking, I completely screwed up the RSS feeds for the site. It was a few weeks before I realized the damage I’d done. (I was redirecting through FeedBurner, but only certain formats, leaving other feeds lying dormant. Bad.)

  I think everything is fixed now. I’m back to the [...]

• e  18 After the digg

  I’ve seen a lot of articles about the Digg Effect and what a site can expect after having a bunch of new visitors arrive to check out an article, as happened with my recent post on Warcraft.

  The general prediction is that readership drops to normal levels pretty quickly, and that’s borne out by the stats.

  Page [...]

• e  96 Seven Things I Learned from World of Warcraft

  Those who’ve seen my movie, The Nines, can infer that I had a bit of a World of Warcraft problem back in the day. “The day” being a period of about four months in which most of my waking hours were spent either playing the game or wanting to. The luxury and danger [...]

• e  1 About the live updates

  If you’re reading this site via the RSS feeds, you may not be aware that the “real” site features a continuously updated list of what I’m doing at Sundance. Call it microblogging. It’s powered by Twitter, and doesn’t show up in the main feed.

  However, you can subscribe to the just the Twitters at this link.

• e  13 On why the site looks a little different

  One of my self-assigned projects for the holiday break was to rebuild the site — not so much how it looked, but the coding underneath. Inspired by the SimpleBits re-do, and armed with my copy of Andy Clarke’s Transcending CSS, I envisioned sparkling new CSS, built on a clear semantic framework. No longer would [...]

• e  32 Retcon

  New (to me) term for a useful device in serial fiction.

• e  7 Introducing jaWiki

  When I redesigned the site in February, the major goal was to allow better access to the archive information. Unlike most blogs, the bulk of the content on johnaugust.com is equally relevant today or four years from today — unlike celebrity marriages, the answers to screenwriting questions pretty much hold solid.

  Although I think it’s [...]

• e  23 Back from Austin

  Two flights, three panels and five beers later, I can say I had a good time at the Austin Film Festival. It was certainly the best time I’ve had in Austin, largely because I got off my ass and went to the parties and screenings. (Although some of the credit for that has to [...]

• e  21 Previewing score with GarageBand

  Alex Wurman is busy writing the music for The Movie, which in this digital age means a lot of files shuttling back and forth. Rather than tapes, we have QuickTimes for each reel, with timecode burned in for reference. When Alex wants us to listen to a cue, he sends an mp3 with [...]

• e  24 It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

  A shout out to a good show and their low budget ways.

• e  34 ControllerMate and automatic fingers

  I recently upgraded to a Mac Pro, which I justified to myself thusly:

  I’m doing effects for The Movie, and Motion runs much faster on it. (In truth, I only did one effect in the final cut.) My G5 was actually slower than my laptop. As a writer, I needed a quieter computer. I deserve to [...]

• e  4 Update on the promiscuous player problem

  My plea for a DVD player with loose morals and low standards was answered by many thoughtful readers. I ended up picking the Philips DVP-642 ($49 at Amazon), which not only zips through questionably-recorded dailies, but even Peixe Grande e Suas Histórias Maravilhosas, the Portuguese version of Big Fish.

  Thanks again.

• e  17 Making the geek movie

  There is definitely room in the film universe for a uber-geek movie, be it a thriller, a drama, a comedy or whatever.

• e  90 Why the Matrix trilogy ultimately blows

  Following a link from digg, I just finished reading a lengthy explanation of the Matrix trilogy, written by an engineer, who attempts to deconstruct the films on a purely logical level. That is, he looks at what The Architect and The Oracle are trying to do, and how Neo fits into the plan, without [...]

• e  24 Geek Help Wanted: The missing sidebar

  Being a Mac user, I’m spoiled with Safari and Firefox, and happily assume that the rest of the world has it so good.

  A kind reader wrote in to let me know that the sidebar isn’t showing up on Internet Explorer 6 or 7 for Windows. This means readers stuck with IE (at work, for [...]

• e  23 Redesign, part one

  Readers who visit the web site, as opposed to getting it through the feeds, will notice a few changes, both cosmetic and architectural.

  We’ll start with the obvious stuff. The blue header is a little bluer, the footer is fatter, and there are fewer entries per page.

  There’s now an archive listing on every page of [...]

• e  4 Something weird with the RSS feed

  If you’re reading this site through the feeds, an FYI: the plain-old RSS feed (the 0.92 version) isn’t working right for some reason. You’d be better off with the 2.0 version or the Atom feed, both of which seem to work fine.

• e  26 Shake for less

  I recently learned Final Cut Pro, Apple’s editing system, which is complicated but incredibly intuitive. That got me anxious to experiment with the other pro film tools. The full Final Cut Pro Studio package is fairly inexpensive, especially with an educational discount.

  Unfortunately, Apple’s Shake 4 compositing software costs $2700 or more, which would [...]

• e  28 What happened

  On Sunday morning, I woke up, fed my daughter, and read the Los Angeles Times. There was a good article about Joss Whedon’s Serenity, which managed to shoot in Los Angeles at a reasonable budget, largely because of smart planning.

  Yet another reason to admire Joss Whedon.

  I headed out the office to blog about this [...]

• e  26 Metablogging

  Now that there are several screenwriter-oriented blogs, I thought I’d take a moment to examine the six-degrees of separation quality among them.

  Or perhaps I just want to revel in the fact that I’m the Kevin Bacon of screenbloggers.

  ★ I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing

  This is how I met Josh Friedman: When I bought [...]

• e  4 New server on the way

  Good news for those readers frustrated by the all-too-frequent outages at this site: we’re moving to a new server, which will hopefully not flake out as often. If it does, I’ll change service providers. Again. Sigh.

  There may be a little turbulence this week as the new server settles in. Caveat browser.

• e  24 New videocamera

  In preparation for both the Charlie press junket and my impending fatherhood, I bought a new videocamera. I already had a Sony DV camera, but small as it is, I never end up bringing it along with me. It’s overkill for what I want, which is mostly posting little clips on the web [...]

• e  11 Weekend numbers

  It’s not quite the Slashdot effect, but Sunday’s article in the NY Times did result in a spike in readership, as the chart shows:

  Average traffic for a Sunday is about 2,800 sessions; yesterday, the total was 5,500. (A “session” is a way of measuring individual visitors to a site, while “hits” simply refers to [...]

• e  12 Tracking a comment thread by RSS

  Unlike some sites, where the number of comments on a given article can reach triple-digits, most of the threads at johnaugust.com stay pretty short. Still, sometimes you want to keep on top of an interesting discussion without re-visiting the site every hour. That’s where RSS can be your friend.

  On every article, down by [...]

• e  15 Movable Type vs. WordPress

  Not a screen-writing question, I’m afraid — more a “Geek Alert” one.

  I’ve got a blog on blogger.com at the moment, and am thinking of moving to a different blogging tool. I’m a techie by background (computer science degree) now working in film visual effects (currently on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), and would love to have much more flexibility [...]

• e  2 Picking a printer

  You don’t need a great printer, just one that can kick out 120 pages.

• e  16 Removing duplicate iCal entries

  This is hugely off-topic, so feel free to skip to the next article, which will likely have something to do with screenwriting and/or filmmaking.

  My assistant Chad and I use Apple’s iCal to keep track of appointments. It’s nowhere near as sophisticated as Exchange or a real professional calendar system, but for the most part, [...]

• e  1 Archives section working, sort of

  The Archives link, which has been broken ever since switching hosts, is now un-broken — which is not to say fixed.

  In its previous incarnation, the Archives section could be sorted by category and date, in a variation on the familar Sortable Nicer Archives kludge for WP. (Click here for an example.) However, the database [...]

• e  2 Random slowdowns and non-existence

  A heads up for readers who occasionally get gibberish or worse when visiting johnaugust.com: it’s not just you. The front page occasionally takes forever to load, or fails completely. I’d be tearing my hair out, but I keep it very short (a “1″ on the clippers, thank you very much).

  For once, I’m glad [...]

• e  9 To Do: Destroy the world

  It’s surprisingly difficult for any villain — even a powerful alien race — to actually destroy the planet.

• e  20 Celtx screenwriting application shows promise

  An early look at an early version of the alternative screenwriting platform.

• e  12 Update on Firefox numbers

  After my recent post wondering why so many readers still use Internet Explorer, I’m happy to report the numbers have shifted in favor of Firefox.

  Before January 25, 2004:

  26% Internet Explorer 22% Firefox 5% Safari 3% Opera

  For the week ending February 20, 2004:

  23% Firefox 19% Internet Explorer 4% Safari 3% Opera

  (Numbers don’t total 100% because bots [...]

• e  11 How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Courier

  As a former designer, I now spend most of my working life in the world’s most boring typeface.

• e  1 Finding the RSS feeds

  Stephen wrote in to say that the RSS feeds were acting up. I think I’ve addressed the problem, particularly with Firefox’s “live bookmarks” pointing in the wrong directions. (If you’re having an issue where “Live Bookmark failed to load,” delete the bookmark and make a new one.)

  You can always find the right links [...]

• e  40 Why does anyone still use Internet Explorer?

  One benefit of switching my new webhost, TextDrive, is that they have a much cooler statistics program called Urchin. With it, I can see a lot of information about who’s visiting the site, and what articles they’re reading. Plus, I can learn what browsers they’re using. Here are the current percentages:

  26% [...]

• e  5 A new year, new technical difficulties

  I’m back from two weeks in Australia, a country that’s just as great as everyone makes it out to be. While I was gone, there was all kinds of behind-the-digital-scenes drama at johnaugust.com, most of which hopefully wasn’t visible to Loyal Readers.

  Basically, the webhosting company moved the site to a “non-production server” because we [...]

• e  Comments Off Comments temporarily off

  Due to some mysteriously high server loads, I’ve had to turn off comments until I get back from vacation. Hope everyone is having a great holiday.

• e  6 New comment spam blocker

  Over the weekend, the site got hit by more than 130 comment spams. These are junk messages added to the comment sections of individual articles, usually consisting of links to off-shore gambling, viagra and vioxx. Spammers use automated scripts to leave the same message on article after article, site after site. It’s [...]

• e  35 New CSS template for screenplay formatting

  An early draft of what would later become Scrippets.

• e  Comments Off Atom feed fixed

  The Atom feed was choking on quotation marks and other special characters. That should be fixed now.

• e  2 All the Feeds you can eat

  The Feeds section is now up and running, offering RSS and Atom feeds for all the content on the site. If you’re subscribing to one of the old feeds, update it now, because the old ones won’t be functional after this week.

• e  4 More about the RSS feeds

  A few readers wrote in asking about the RSS feeds for the site. Some wondered why clicking on the links just brought up a page of gibberish, or asked for recommendations about which applications worked best with them.

• e  3 Fatter RSS feed now available

  If you’re subscribing to this site via RSS, there’s now an RSS 2.0 feed that includes the full text of articles, along with any comments posted. You can find this fatter feed here.

• e  8 Digital cinema gets a little closer

  An article on CNET today does a nice job explaining how the studios are working to pick a standard for digital video distribution, with the hopes of saving themselves $800 million a year.

• e  6 Ingenious comment spam booster

  For readers unfamiliar with content management systems like Movable Type (which this site uses), one annoying trend is comment spam, where an automated system will place comments on various articles, linking back to a target site — often one that sells cigarettes, for whatever reason.

• e  5 My new keyboard setup

  Screenwriter Dana Fox, who happens to be my former assistant, has had more troubles with repetitive stress injuries than I have. She was the one that turned me on to what is quite possibly the Holy Grail of insane keyboards, manufactured by SafeType

• e  Comments Off New Wiki for discussing better screenwriting software

  While I intend to continue the discussion on this site about how to make better screenwriting software, interested readers might want to check out a new wiki on the topic, which an interested reader forwarded to me yesterday.

  For those who’d never used a wiki (and I hadn’t), it’s essentially a series of interlinked web pages [...]

• e  1 Met the guy who runs Final Draft

  I met the Final Draft guy.

• e  49 New Final Draft version 7.0 is…marginally better

  Review of the Final Draft update.

• e  Comments Off RSS feeds fixed

  For those who are subscribing to the RSS feeds for this site, entries now link to the individual articles, rather than the main page.

• e  2 When Final Draft won’t open under OS X

  I’m posting this in hopes of saving other screenwriters a few hours of potential frustration with Final Draft. After installing the OS X version, or upgrading your system software, or sometimes for no discernible reason at all, Final Draft will occasionally refuse to open. It bounces one or twice in the dock, then [...]

• e  2 Archives and individual entry pages rebuilt

  Given Dreamweaver and a couple of free days, pretty much anyone can put up a website. The more difficult thing, I’ve realized, is keeping it updated. To that end, I’ve been using Movable Type, the remarkable blogging software sent down from Heaven. With Movable Type, it’s easy for me to add short articles [...]

• e  Comments Off New RSS Feed

  This site now has an RSS feed, located here. If you click on the link, you’ll see that it comes up as badly formatted text. That’s because it’s designed to be used by something other than a standard web browser. Depending on your level of jadedness, RSS is either a brilliant new solution for content [...]