IDEA: Bleeping Media Player

"Cutting out the Naughty Bits Ruled Illegal" on slashdot today refers to a case where people were creating DVDs of special edits of films with the sex scenes, bad language, etc. cut and swapping them for original dvds.

Personally I feel there is a market for a device (or initially media player) that can gain access to bleep tracks for movies, cd's etc and use them to (at runtime) modify the output of the player.

So imagine... you buy your daughter a new music cd. You have previously configured her player to her age group. When the player gets to track 6 (which unknown to you contains the f word) it blanks the word (or play some substitute mp3 to patch it) . In a DVD with explicit content it could blur the screen, or cut the scene or whatever.

The community could create the patch-tracks and make them downloadable for each media... by default the player could dissallow anything not on the list.

This would only work for youngsters that are not able to buy their own player, but those are the ones you would want this for anyway.

It doesn't infringe copywright or anything, so all legal. :) It solves the same problem.

OSX keyboard shortcuts

Here's a list of keyboard shortcuts for OSx.

I was looking for 'Cycle to next windows of same application' which turned out to be Control + `

New MacBook

I recently got a new MacBook (duel core OSX).. so far I am loving it!. It's so much faster than my old PC laptop (which wasn't that quick anyway, so thats not saying much). In other words, all the Rails stuff generators etc run in seconds (or fractions there of) not minutes. I am getting used the different window paradigm. Learning the new key mapping seems the hurdle. I used to use linux back at uni (in 1994) so terminal is like an old friend. I love the software installation process (drag things from mounted drives to the applications directory). it is so light! I can hardly feel I am carrying it around. My old laptop powersupply probably weighed the same as my macbook. Things I would change are:

The mouse sometimes seems to freeze for a second after switching application. The screen is wide, but small, so the text is tiny. I think i would have appreciated getting the Pro with the larger screen. The macbook doesn't have enough space for my hands to rest while I type so my palms get a bit sore resting in the sharp corner the edge of the machine presents when open.

Another big win is knowing that if I shut the mac, no matter what is running it will hibernate. With windows if I had a browser open or webrick running it somtimes failed to hibernate. This meant I had to sit there attempting to hibernate it and killing processes till it worked. Not ideal.

Oh and battery life! My laptop was down to about 1hr before it died. The macbook lasts abount 3 to 4 hours, so thats a big improvement.

All in all, I am very happy with it.

Rails Hint: Database changes from script/console

You can make database changes from script/console like this...

ActiveRecord::Schema.define do 
  drop_table :follies 
end

More Getting Real

37 Signals keep banging on about 'getting real' or making small things that work well with small teams. Paul Graham has a great post on his blog called The Power of the Marginal. His writing style is great. There were more than a couple of places that made me giggle.