phones, video and synthetic programming

A quick Pythonic burst before I depart for IBC later this week.

Video
In my spare time I’ve been tinkering around with Final Cut Pro’s XML capabilities and FCP’s interesting Apple Event support with the goal of automating the production of some channel elements. Python’s great libraries and the community behind their production is one of its strengths. For this work I have employed Appscript from HAS to allow me to send Apple Events to FCP. For the XML processing Fredrik Lundh’s elementtree was the natural choice. I used the Python Imaging Library (PIL) for a similar project several years ago for the automated production of id boards.
Once I’ve cleaned things up I’ll publish my FCP Apple Event class as an example of using Appscript.

Phones
Python for s60 mobile platform went gold last month. I need to dust off my PC to install some Windows only software that’s required to create a developer certificate. The dev cert allows you to get at the tastier capabilities of the phone.

Synthetic Programming
Corepy is a Python package for creating applications targeted at the IBM’s PowerPC and Cell architectures.

“Synthetic programming was developed to provide a new approach to high-performance and multi-core computing using scripting languages. The design of the synthetic programming environment encourages developers to experiment with different approaches for mapping algorithms to processing resources and generating optimized code sequences.

Synthetic programming itself is a methodology for building applications that combines high-level language code with user generated machine code. The synthetic programming environment exposes the underlying processor instructions as first-class functions in the host language and provides components for building and executing instruction sequences built using the instruction interfaces. The instruction sequences, called synthetic programs, can contain any instruction available for the processor, allowing developers to create highly optimized kernels for high-performance tasks. An application can contain many synthetic programs, all of which can be executed an arbitrary number of times synchronously or asynchronously, allowing the application to make full use of data and processing resources.” - Mueller C., Synthetic Programming: User-directed Run-time Code Synthesis for High Performance Computing

So the ease of use and elegance of Python is employed to create high performance machine code, making “assembly fun again”.

This is one of those times when having an older machine has its advantages as copepy will only run on PPC Macintoshes, so time available I’ll be able to load it up on the trusty PowerBook. Probably of more interest to those in scientific programming, such bioinformatics.

“they’re applauding because i’m a pissant”

Freeview

Freeview has been around for a month on my non-Freeview tuner. I don’t get to use the MHEG-5 based EPG but contrary to some press reports I still have an EPG. Given that’s how I select what to record on the Topfield PVR I would not be terribly happy if it disappeared.
I am happy to have TV3 and C4 available to record. The Daily Show now gets selected in my weekly time-shifting trawl through the EPG, where I select the programmes that week that will get recorded and which we will watch…whenever and without commercials. After a hard days work a bit of Jon Stewart with dinner is nice way to start the evening. The quote above is from last night’s show, or rather the episode that I watched last night, but was probably recorded the night before.

Final Cut Pro & MXF

Talking of work I never really concluded the discussion of my investigation into mixing FCP and MXF within a workflow. FCP 6.0 does not provide any MXF capabilities period. Compressor 3, bundled as part of FCP Studio, can use an optional Episode Pro plugin from Telestream that provides the ability to rewrap QuickTime <=> MXF. I believe that Omneon’s ProExchange also provides this functionality.
In the scenario that I was looking into we’ll probably stick with QuickTime from ingest through production and play-out but will rewrap into MXF for archiving.

Python and the Nokia E65

Don’t have much time for happy hacking the Nokia E65. I am a bit disappointed that the 3rd edition S60 security model is so restrictive that I couldn’t get some of the API to produce any results in my initial peeking. location.gsm_location() produces nada without ReadDeviceData, ReadUserData, and Location privileges. It seems that in order to get these privileges on the phone you own you need to acquire a developer certificate. Hmmmmmm.
I’m not a big user/fan of Twitter but I was planning to do a proof of concept script that would update Twitter as one moved between cell locations.

Lastly

Jim Barksdale argues for the need to more effectively archive our bits.
And given Microsoft’s recent patent threats this video of Columbia Law Professor, Eben Moglen, is worth five minutes of your time.

Phones & Music

E65 & Python

Ever since Nokia introduced Python for their Series 60 phones I have been planning on acquiring one. The phones have slowly become smaller, less expensive and with more features. Whilst the N95 represents the future of features, with a decent camera, WiFi and integrated GPS, it’s not there in terms of cost, size and battery life. So I have selected the E65, only slightly heavier than my current phone but with lots of S60 goodness, WiFi and VoIP capabilities.

Naturally the first thing I’ve attempted is to install Python. There are a couple of gotchas, one a bug and the other related to increased security measures within the 3rd edition of Series 60.
1. You need to configure the phone to allow self-signed applications to be installed before installing Python.
2. When installing Python you must install the current version to the phone memory rather than the memory card (BTW: the micro-SD cards are tiny), this is a known bug and will be fixed in future releases.

Nokia provide great access to the phone’s features via Python so I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do with it. Here are some initial ideas: send the phone a SMS to take a photo, time lapse photo sequence with auto-upload to flickr and have the phone record locations of open WiFi spots detected (requires the external GPS).

JB HiFi

After buying the E65 I chanced upon JB Hi-Fi on Queen St. opposite Smith & Caughey. The Ockker retailer looks set to stir things up - they have a massive selection of games, music and DVDs with a smattering of consumer electronics. Nice to see some more competition in Auckland. Its not a pretty retail environment with its fluoro sale now look and if you’re looking for decent staff recommendations I would still head down to Marbecks.