Jason Whong: Renaissance Man-in-Training

Applescript is a wonderful thing. You can use it to tell pretty much any program on the Mac to do anything.

Some people say it has a natural language that makes it more approachable by non-programmers. That’s fine if you are editing someone else’s Applescript, but it can still be a challenge if you are starting from scratch, because you still have to learn the syntax. There may even be two or three ways of saying something; I don’t know this.

All I know is that it took me all of two minutes with the Applescript dictionary for Safari and a few google searches to come up with a script that I can use to perform actions in a facebook game, roughly every two minutes.

tell application "Safari"
repeat
set URL of tab 1 of window 1 to "http://example.com/"
delay (110 + (random number from -5 to 5))
end repeat
end tell

And with that, while other people are wasting their time logging in to do this action of little consequence, I can go on with the rest of my life.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Applescript, Safari, development

Erin recently took a quiz that tested how many countries you could name in five minutes. I initially didn’t take it, but I decided to give it a whirl. I had some issues with it not liking a space at the beginning of stuff I typed, so it slowed me down while I went back to delete the space. But oh well. Here’s my (not so) awesome result.

Actually, I have to write a bit more, so the
graphic
will
appear
somewhere
below
the advertisement.

By the way, these ads are pretty lucrative. If I invested a bunch of time into this blog,
who knows how much I’d get from it?

62

Technorati Tags: geography

I don’t always post photographs that I took at work. Today I’m excited about a shot I took at a Revolutionary War reenactment.

Getting there was a hike; I had the fortune of being able to drive to the state park where the reenactment was held. In 1779, most people would have walked there, with a lucky few on horseback.

Anyway, when I got there, I ended up following some people who were walking on the wrong trail, so it’s a good thing that my assignment was for an hour before the battle began. I eventually made my way to the Colonial encampment, where I met reenactors from various parts of the country, and took a picture of local people interacting with them.

After that I headed toward the Indian village, where a number of British forces and Loyalist units were rallying before their certain defeat. I also found a few local people in that crowd.

Then I found some people in green calling themselves the “Queen’s Rangers.” I walked and talked with them for a bit, until we were smack dab in the middle of the woods. In the distance, people were gathered to watch the reenactment. Nobody seemed to know when to stop walking, so the loyalists ended up walking past the colonialists they were supposed to be ambushing. It might have been easier to coordinate with a radio, but no reenactors seemed to carry them.

Anyway, I was standing next to the loyalists taking pictures of them while they discussed the choreography of the battle, and shots started to ring out from the colonial militia.

“I guess the war’s on,” said the leader.

I hadn’t planned on being next to the reenactors during the battle, but the shooting started while I was still on the field, so I just tried to stay as far away from the spectators as possible.

I had several lenses at my disposal: the Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L, the Canon EF 70-200 f/2.8L, and the Canon EF 17-35 f/2.8L. Maybe the bigger glass might be more useful in today’s war, but I think that if photographers were covering this battle in the forest, they’d have wanted to get in close with the wide-angle lens. It helped me get my best shot of the day:

JASON WHONG/Star-Gazette
Reenactors portraying British soldiers load and fire weapons at Colonial reenactors Saturday during the 228th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Newtown at Newtown Battlefield Reservation State Park in Elmira.
Image and caption © 2007, Star-Gazette.

You can see more Battle of Newtown photos at Star-Gazette.com. And like most of the Star-Gazette’s photos, this one is for sale.

Technorati Tags: revolutionary war, reenactor

If you fall for one of those inbox scams, the terrorists win.

That’s right. There’s a story in today’s Washington Post about how someone was fooled into providing financial information that ended up in the hands of terrorists.

I don’t know that there is much we can do about this except for getting back to teaching common sense. Or, if you’re the kind of person who can’t say no, learn to say no on the Internet, at least.

Tell your kids not to fall for these sorts of scams, too. I have a feeling they will be around for a long time.

Devin Pike, an old friend of mine whom I met when we were beta testing Majesty for MacPlay, showed me a press release for his project,Can’t Stop the Serenity.

I have to admit I don’t have any idea who Joss Whedon is (or whether Joss is male or female), and I have never seen the film “Serenity” or the television show that preceded it, “Firefly,” but I do know that the screenings of Serenity are being held to benefit Equality Now, a women’s rights advocacy group that was founded by Joss Whedon’s mother. Not to put it in competition with other causes, but as far as charitable events go, this is one of the less physically strenuous ones you can do. You pay to be entertained rather than to walk or run.

The closest one to me is NYC, which is about 4 hours away by car (which you’d have to park somehow) or five hours away by bus. Ah, Elmira.

It’s funny, I could actually move to Maryland and be closer to NYC (and have Interstate highways, trains, and express buses to get me there. Not that this would be a reason for such a move.

Today I found Psstpassiton, a site that is a bit like the old chldren’s game telephone applied to short filmmaking.

This idea uses the Internet both for collaboration as well as for distribution. I don’t know what settings they are using for their codecs, but all of the video I’ve seen there is crystal clear - a welcome change from the yukky codec they use at Youtube. Just watch one of those movies (which probably requires QuickTime 7) and you’ll understand what I mean.

I have not watched everything there, but the films are short enough that you can watch one or two as a diversion. If you’re not into weird artsy stuff, you probably won’t like it. But at least watch it so you can see how good web video produced by independents can be. (Since most content producers these days are independent.)

Technorati Tags: video, art, QuickTime

Stay in school and be committed to getting the story, and you, too, can be paid to go sledding.

I am sorry for not posting a lot lately. I need to post more frequently.

I’ve been having fun shooting still images of sports. I have been shooting a lot of basketball and hockey for the paper where I work. Since my work belongs to the paper, I am not going to repost it here, but I will link the photos.

Fighting for the ball. Two girls fighting for a basketball. The one on the right loosed the ball from the hands of the one on the left. Someone was so moved by this photo that he wrote to me, saying it was the photo of the year for showing true competitive spirit. Then he put a stamp on it, but he was so excited that he ended up hand-delivering the letter so I would see the feedback immediately. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I really like this one.

Bench crash. I like this one because of the expressions on the faces of the crowd.
Rebound. I like this one because this girl (who is easily her team’s MVP) has three girls around her, but she still gets the rebound. I probably could have spent more time fixing the eyes on the girl in the back.
Save! I forget who won this game. I just know that this is an awesome save by the goalie.
A-ha! This photo tells the story of how local fans taunted the opposing team’s goalie. They weren’t totally rude, but the home team won.
Foul! It’s nice and tight. Also, it doesn’t look like a foul, but the whistle was blown and the shooter went to the line shortly after this shot was taken.
Flying. The four closest guys in this shot are local, so I figured I’d get them all in at the start (when they were closest together). The person who got the best start won the race.

Since Apple began offering video downloads at its iTunes store, I have been reading a lot of comparisons between the video available there versus the video available on DVD. This article is about why it’s not smart to generalize when comparing the videos. (more…)

This one’s from the “why didn’t I think of that?” department.

New Scientist Tech has an article about a human launcher! It launches people from ground level onto the roofs of multistory buildings. DARPA is working on it.

Think about it. From your physics class, you know that objects accelerate downward at 9.8 meters per second, so if they first accelerate upward, there’s a brief amount of time when they are moving neither up nor down. This launching device could easily and quickly get people onto the roofs of buildings, landing them safely at a downward speed comparable to that of a natural jump. (As long as the launched person doesn’t lean backwards on the landing…)

Whether they’re more or less practical than ladders remains to be seen. But, if they don’t turn it into something for the army, I’d hope it becomes an amusement park attraction. It would be better than a roller coaster.

When I was younger, I used to jump out of moving swings in order to experience a brief moment of upward, then downward flight. Getting a good distance depended mostly on angle of release, which was hard to control. An early release would make for a short trip. A later release could cause serious injury. A computer-controlled human launcher would take a lot of the guesswork out of short-distance human flight.

Some people hope to travel in space. I’ll settle for a ride on a human launcher.