Wood and Wire

I’ve just removed the password from the beta version of the australianscreen site - a massive new site my company has been working on for the Australian Film Commission. It’s fantastic content - a team of curators have been trawling through the archives of the NFSA, ABC, SBS and AIATSIS to build an online database of Australian film and TV productions. On top of that, teachers’ notes have been developed by The Le@rning Federation for selected clips. The end result is like a cross between an Australian IMDB and YouTube - a directory of Australian screen history, complete with video clips.

The content is really diverse, ranging from footage of the Melbourne Cup shot in 1896, classics like The Sentimental Bloke, Breaker Morant, Newsfront, Crocodile Dundee, and Picnic at Hanging Rock, through to recent releases like Ten Canoes. There are even old TV and cinema ads, and even historically significant home movies (including some shot by former prime minister Robert Menzies). There are currently over 500 titles on the site, and there are hundreds more in the pipeline. If what you’re looking for isn’t on the site already, it will be soon!

The site is built entirely in Django, which has allowed us to slice and dice the content in lots of interesting ways. We’ve got tags, location maps (using the ubiquitous Google maps technology) and a Flash timeline (developed by my colleague Greg Turner). We’ll be adding plenty more Web 2.0 goodness in the coming months.

Check it out at → http://australianscreen.com.au.

This took me by surprise today, when trying to open a Word file over the network.

Actually, it’s not the scariest warning I’ve ever received. I remember trying to change screen resolution in an old beta version of BeOS, and being told that selecting the refresh rate I had chosen may cause my monitor to catch fire. Did I want to proceed?

We just produced this campaign video for Amnesty International Australia.

It was a bit of a rush job - we wrote the script on Wednesday, filmed on Thursday, and uploaded to YouTube on Friday - but I think it’s come up OK. It was a great job to do. The folks at Amnesty are really cool to work with, and it’s great to be doing something this worthwhile and immediate. As I read this I’m listening to the news that State and territory attorneys-general have signed a declaration demanding the Commonwealth take action to ensure that David Hicks is immediately brought to trial.

Oh, and don’t forget to go to the Amnesty website where you can send a message about David Hicks to John Howard.

Who would have thought that an almost complete lack of features could make an application so useful?

WriteRoom is a new Mac application that does word processing

For Mac users who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world. WriteRoom is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, WriteRoom is just about you and your text.

I’m doing a whole lot of writing for The Pure Drop at present, and the lack of features is helping me focus on the main game — stringing words together. The only downside is that the green-on-black interface shows up all the dirt, so I’ve had to clean my monitor

Oh, and there’s a port for Windoze too.

I just realised it’s been quite a long while since I last wrote about The Pure Drop, despite the fact that it’s been the project keeping me busy for most of the last few months.

We’ve been busy filming interviews and performances around Australia by The John Butler Trio, Zulya Kamalova, Silvia Entcheva, Linsey Pollak and Trouble In The Kitchen. Later this month we’re off to Toronto to film Tanya Tagaq, then Stockholm to film a piece about Garmarna, Yorkshire to meet up with Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, and finally Byron Bay to interview Mandawuy Yunupingu.

In the meantime, the thepuredrop.com.au page has a sneak preview of Reg Mombassa’s fabulous site design.

UPDATE: The site is now live - check it out!.

Something mysterious and bad just happened on my PowerBook.

Basically, it looks like a lot of my application preferences have gone missing. Most applications are acting like I have never opened them before. Daily workhorse applications like BBedit and Transmit are welcoming me as a newbie. My dock looks way too clean, and iTunes and iPhoto don’t seem to know anything about my 30GB of MP3s and photos. Worst of all, Mail can’t find any of the 900 or so emails that were languishing in my InBox.

It’s almost (but not quite) as if the contents of ~/Library/Preferences were deleted.

Has anyone else experienced something like this? I’m trying to think what might have been the culprit, and the only 3 things that spring to mind are:

1. My PowerBook got a nasty bump a few hours earlier
2. I had just finished downloading approx. 9,000 spam emails from an unused email account belonging to one of my clients (don’t ask!)
3. I have the ‘flu, and somehow this made me stupid enough to delete lots of emails and plist files.

Oh well, most of what I lost was backed up, but there is a chance that some recent emails got lost. So, if you’ve emailed me recently and I haven’t replied yet, please try again. It may be that I lost the email you sent me.

Update: I was wrong about iTunes and iPhoto not being able to find media files. The media files were actually gone! So far as I can tell, nothing is missing from my documents folder and all my applications are OK. What could cause such a specific pattern of data loss? It almost feels like a virus. Thankfully I had used a demo copy of Super Duper a few weeks ago to do a complete backup. I’ll be upgrading to a registered version now!

It’s been a hectic week, but we have now moved Ether into new premises.

When we first started the company back in 1993 we had offices in the wonderfully bohemian and sadly demised Blackwattle Studios. During the late 1990s Ingrid and I tended to work on-site with clients, so there wasn’t a great need for anything grander than a desk or two at home. From 2000 onwards we set up an office in the largish basement of our townhouse, and that was working well – at least the commute to work was quick, and it’s made it easy to work while bringing up 2 kids, although finding separation between work and home life has always been rather difficult.

But the last few years have seen the business growing like crazy.

Late last year we realised we needed to get more staff but we had nowhere to put them, so we looked around for commercial space and were pretty uninspired by what we saw, and certainly nothing lived up to the glory days of Blackwattle Studios. Then a couple of the townhouses in our row came up for rent, and it occurred to us that renting one of those might give us just enough separation without losing the convenience of having an office within shouting distance (almost) of home.

So far we couldn’t be happier. Our house now feels spacious again now that Ether has moved out, and in the new place Ingrid and I are both loving having a room each! We’ve also now got a separate video editing suite which is a big improvement on our old situation which was completely open-plan.

My New Office.

Finally, the complex’s pool is just outside the back door of our office. (You can see it on the GoogleEarth snapshot above.) If only they’d finish repairing it so it had some water in it

Earth Shines,
originally uploaded by pietroizzo.

This one is for Jayda Tham and Pete Talbot. I just found this on Flickr. It’s what you guys missed when you fell asleep in the back of the car on the way back to Reykjavik and wouldn’t wake up to come and look at the crater!

Google Earth has just been released as a beta application for MacOS (Tiger only). Oops, there goes the weekend!

I just started a Nick Drake group on Flickr, since I noticed I had a few photos in my collection that would fit in such a group, and I wondered if anyone else might. Having set it up I was surprised how many images on Flickr had connections with Nick. Anyway the group is starting to grow…