Spam, Spam, Spam, Eggs and Spam

It looks like Blogger's new spam detection basically doesn't work. Therefore, I'm instead turning on comment moderation to deal with the increase in comment spam that I'm getting.

The Shrek Marketing Machine has Started

The Shrek Marketing Machine has Started, originally uploaded by smithco.

Remove Played Podcasts

Quite unfortunately, Apple removed a very useful feature in iTunes 9.1. Previously, it was possible to go to the Podcasts pane and bulk-select the entire podcast list, and in the context-menu, select “Allow Auto Delete”.

This was an important feature, as otherwise, podcasts with set to “Do Not Auto Delete” would stick around after refreshing my podcast feeds. Of course, I had already set in the iTunes preferences that I only wanted to keep unplayed podcasts, but iTunes had this extra un-Apple-like complication of overriding that setting on a per-file basis.

Anyways, as a stop-gap measure, I wrote an Automator service to delete played podcasts.

The service is stored at http://sites.google.com/site/smithco/Home/remove-played-podcasts/RemovePlayedPodcasts.zip?attredirects=0&d=1 and can be installed by unzipping it and copying it to your Services folder (<user>/Library/Services).

The service is built for Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6).

This service contains AppleScript code from Rob Ryan (http://discussions.info.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=11316250#11316250).

Colour Fun

I had fun playing withe colours in this set of family vacation photos. I did figure out two good lessons by experimentation.

Firstly, it can be useful to compress the colour range to create an apparent depth. I really managed to make the colours in the kite pop out by slicing off the top and bottom of the colour range.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithco/4464331426/

Secondly, black & white can be made more interesting by pushing the hues slightly to one colour. Here, I pushed the colour slightly towards blue.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithco/4464341186/

Thirdly, the “rule of thirds” was something I read somewhere, though I don’t recall exactly where. A bit of tinkering gave me some nice composition results. What was a cute, but bland photo of Harrison was made much better by cropping
it such that he was centred on the intersection of the lower and right third dividers.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithco/4463551035

The full set of photos is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithco/sets/72157623581272873/

Dragons in 20 Days!

Only 20 more days until How To Train Your Dragon is out.  As it will be my first theatrical credit, I’m getting excited.

While waiting, let's watch the trailer over and over again.



Of technical interest, the dragons were creating using the new character rigging technology DreamWorks has been developing for the last few years. The dragons were largely completed by the time I started at DreamWorks, but I did get to help fix a few bugs on them.