Status-Q

Here's my artistic creation for today, inspired by the work of George Eliot:

Actually, I created this rather by accident. I have been experimenting with the FXscript capabilities of Final Cut Pro. For those not familiar with these, FCP is a professional video-editing package which is widely used in the industry. It has a whole variety of effects filters to do things like changing the colour balance of your movie, adding lens flare effects and so forth. FXscript is a programming language in which you can write your own effects.

As part of my experiments I had created a filter which averages several past frames and then subtracts the result from the current frame. I then fed it some footage from the BBC's production of Middlemarch. Casaubon is walking morosely into the distance:

and there's a cut to Dr Lydgate, who is watching him depart:

And the result is what you see above.

I've always tried to maintain a rough balance of reading one book written before my lifetime for every book I read written during my lifetime. And so it is that, having recently finished Mrs Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, I'm moving on to Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters.

Wives and Daughters is wonderful, and is also the basis of a fabulous BBC dramatisation which is every bit as good, I think, as their rather better-known Pride and Prejudice. Having now read the book, I'm very impressed with how well they adapted it for the screen. Highly recommended; if you like P&P, you'll also like W&D!

Paul Graham's book is also splendid. I'm currently reading the chapter where he talks about why web-based software is so much nicer to develop than desktop-based software. One point he makes is that traditional desktop software requires the user to be the sysadmin. Web-based software requires the programmer to be the sysadmin. This is better for both of them!

You can hear some conversations with Paul over at IT Conversations.

Want to find books at the cheapest prices? ISBN.nu is an interesting way to do comparisons.

Apple have released a new mouse. Unusually for Apple, it doesn't just have a single button. But if you were worried that Apple might have started to conform a bit too much, try working out just how many buttons it does have...

A bit more of a review on Russel Beattie's site.