Turn on the bright lights

 Posted In: Technology, Everyday life — January 15, 2006 @ 8:53 pm — Peter

This weekend zoomed by with me spending quite a bit of time catching up on work coding and project documentation. Not my ideal weekend fare, but it had to get done. The application development department I work in has recently adopted an Agile approach to projects, using the Scrum implementation to be specific. I’m enjoying the culture shift so far, despite resulting in having to take some work home with me. I’m certain as I participate in more projects organized this way that I’ll become better at estimating time required for coding efforts.

I fit some coding for our website in too. Hoping to spruce up our image gallery, I put together a stylish tree view of our album structure. The only problem with it, I’m not sure where to put it. I’ll have to revisit our template and try to squeeze it into the album page. Ideas anyone? It was a fun little piece of code to write and reminded me why I did so poorly on recursion assignments in undergrad.

While I’m on a geek bend, I should share a page I put together that uses MRTG to chart the usage of our DSL connection. Why is this important and why should you care, I have no idea… Regardless, it is pretty cool and made possible by the hacked firmware our WRT54G router now runs. To clear up the pretty pictures, green is us downloading from the Internet and blue is us uploading to the Internet. This MRTG-based page will someday be rolled up into a collection of pages that describe our home computing environment.

We’ve been quickly accumulating movie shorts of Amelia doing random cute and adorable things. Not sure what to do with these clips, I’ve downloaded Ulead VideoStudio and have been merging the videos together with effects hoping to end up with something to burn to DVD and send to family. I was hoping to download Pinnacle Studio too, but they don’t offer a trial version. Anyone have opinions on either of these video editing suites, or perhaps a different one that I haven’t considered yet?

3 Responses to “Turn on the bright lights”

  1. Chris Says:
    January 16th, 2006 at 7:33 am

    Nifty tree view!

    Can’t offer any help on video editing. Have you tried that free thing that comes with XP? ;-)

  2. Elizabeth :) Says:
    January 30th, 2006 at 9:50 pm

    Hey Peter! I have Pinnacle Studio 9 and 10. I think 10 is CRAP right now. There are too many bugs, but if you can get Studio 9, you will can have some fun. I am ready to put Studio 10 back in the box until they have fixed all the glitches. The nice thing about Pinnacle is the support. They respond usually within 48 hours or less and they have user forums, so if you want to know how to do things or have questions, the forums are AWESOME! She’s BEAUTIFUL!!!

    Of course, I can always put the videos together for you from my other business, but I know you guys, and you would rather do it yourself. :) That’s GREAT! Now all I need to learn is how to secure a wireless router and I’ll be good. Well, then I can fix my desktop since I finally purchased the laptop! YAY!

    Keep in touch guys. I can’t BELIEVE how big she is!! And smiling already?!?! WOW! LOVE the video and it’s nice to hear Stephanie! :)

  3. Peter Says:
    February 1st, 2006 at 5:25 am

    I just finished the trial period of Ulead VideoStudio 9 and it was a decent piece of software. One major flaw was that it seemingly cannot handle Quicktime (MOV) clips. While they import just fine, you end up losing frames or large segments of the imported clip. I had to transcode my Quicktime clips to AVI and then import them to get the whole clip. That issue alone has motivated me to look at other products.

    Regarding your wireless network, make sure to at least enable WEP encryption. WPA is ideal and much more secure, but could be tricky to setup and maintain. What kind of laptop did you buy?

Leave a Reply