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Upcoming: Portfolio Show 2011

It’s been a quiet time for me on jole.ca the past couple months, but I wanted to let everyone know about an upcoming event at the University featuring work by some of my cohorts as well as a special project I’ve been working on as part of the University of Alberta Portfolio Show & Silent Auction.

Promo Postcard for Portfolio Show

Portfolio Show is mostly geared towards the BFA Design students that us Techs and SM’s work with throughout our 4 year program, but we will have a few things to showcase as well, and my experiments with the Kinect platform will be incorporate as part of my official title as “Projection Designer” for the show. I’ll be posting about that project soon after the show goes up.

So when and where?

Where:
Second Playing Space
Inside the Timms Centre for the Arts
University of Alberta,
87 Ave & 112 Street

When:
Wine & Cheese Reception
April 6th 7pm-10:30pm

Gallery Open
April 7th 2pm-8pm
April 8th 2pm-8pm
April 9th 2pm-7pm

Silent Auction
April 9th 7pm-10pm

What:
A showcase of Theatre Design work from BFA/MFA designers, with work from BFA Tech and BFA Stage Management from the University of Alberta.

I hope to be around during the opening on April 6th if anyone wants to come by to say hi and talk tech! Hope to see you there! (I’ll post any FB events as they are available)

EDIT: Facebook event here!

CSN Website Launched

Reading week is just wrapping up in my world, but there’s been a flurry of activity to get a new website out the door for the Canadian Society of Nephrology (CSN). It’s been an interesting journey for them, as they’ve been working with Blackbaud, a huge SaaS provider targeted at non-profits and fundraising outfits. 

The product they’re using is called Kintera Sphere, which provides CMS and member/donor management in one. They’ve had the member management working quite well for a while now, but the website kept getting delayed because there wasn’t a lot of time or know-how to get all the information into the CMS for them.

My task was just that, and overall it turned out quite well. Much of Kintera’s management is a bit antiquated, with some interesting interface quirks, and many traces of legacy code that isn’t quite in line with modern standards. The separation of theme and content also wasn’t quite well developed, which meant it was hard to output content in a logical way.

I did however manage to figure out a few of the many tools the CMS offered, and use them to my advantage. The launch was relatively smooth, and now the job of optimizing, tweaking, and keeping the site fresh over the months begins. Congratulations CSN on your new website!

Visit CSNSCN.ca

Duck Podcast 15 & 16 Uploaded

Duck Podcast 15 & 16 have been uploaded to the Duck Podcast website this afternoon.

Duck 15 was recorded back in October 2010, and consisted mostly of an impromptu teleconference that has a few twists. Simon Kully makes an appearance in this one. Finally uploaded here, I really can’t remember what was discussed, other than that part of it was recorded while I was driving home.

Duck 16 was recorded yesterday morning (Feb 25), probably the first time we’ve recorded an episode early in the morning (and after having slept). We cover the latest MacBook Pros, telecom, and many other topics. Check out that episode here, and set aside some time, as its definitely a new record length, consisting of almost 3 hours of straight tech talk!

 

McLuhan TV wall installation

If you’ve been following along on my YouTube channel you may have picked up on a few clips of a recent project of mine involving a gigantic pile of old TVs.

The purpose of the installation was to explore Marshall McLuhan‘s theory, “the medium is the message.” A group at the University of Alberta is developing a larger interactive installation entitled “WAVE” to be setup at the Faculty of Extension in celebration of the 100th anniversary of McLuhan’s birth. Our TV Wall was setup, with guidance from the WAVE Group, at a reception to raise awareness about the project.

So what is it exactly? The setup consists of 11 Television from 1960s onward that are tuned to play different channels. In one corner of the room we had an antenna connected to a high-end RF Modulator capable of outputting 3 different video sources on any channel. These three sources were from DVD players all at a different point on a media disc. In short, we setup a trio of our own TV Stations in the lobby of the Art Gallery of Alberta, and the results were pretty spectacular! Most of the TVs were from Kevin‘s personal collection, along with the VHS Reporter Video Camera that was feeding a few of the screens, and a few of them were acquired from a few Facebook call-outs and dumpster diving.

Embedded is a video of the final setup, and clips from its development are available here and here.

Road Trip 2010

How we’re going to pull this one off in 13 days I have no clue, but stay tuned for updates!

(We start off in Edmonton)

Production: ASLC 2010

Every year a high school in Alberta hosts the Alberta Student Leadership Conference (ASLC) that brings together students in leadership from across the province together to network and learn. I’ve been hearing about it for the past year before I even graduated, but this month the whole thing came together in what ended up being a technical bonanza.
There were three major events that required servicing: the Opening Ceremonies, the Dance later the same day, and the Closing Ceremonies. The first two were serviced by Stardust Events along with volunteers from the Harry Ainlay Tech Team, and of course me, jole.ca Technical Services. The Closing Ceremonies were held at the Myer Horowitz theatre, and was run mostly by the tech team and I, with some help from the house tech there. In all it was a pretty fun time with lots of new experiences with new people, albeit somewhat tiring and certainly stressful.
Opening

It’s the GrandMA! Bill from Stardust cues up lighting during rehearsal for the opening ceremonies. They had about four lighting stands along with a large lighting bar lighting the show, entirely composed of intelligent fixtures, both LED and traditional. Controlling the whole rig was the GrandMA Lite.

More

Whiteboard of the Week – 17

Hurray! I remembered to publish one this week!

 

In this Whiteboard…
  • “Tag” (Rebecca)
  • The TI-34 (Rebecca)
  • “The Game (Rebecca)
  • A monster truck (Misha)
  • A Turtle (R)
  • A battle involving underwater canoes (Misha)
  • A TurkeyGoose™
  • Wild Kevin fighting Wild Misha, with Joel appearing to throw Pokeballs at them. (Misha…who else?)
  • An’s Pencil (An)
  • A cliff (\/)

 

 

Fixing your CS3 Installation in 10.6.3

If you’ve been having issues with your installation of Adobe CS3 on the latest 10.6.3 OS X update, I have found a solution (for my case anyway).

Adobe has acknowledged the issue, albeit without a real fix for the problem. It offers three “solutions” to the problem, which is due to a System Serial number that exceeds 12 characters. If you’ve ever had your motherboard replaced on your Mac and the tech forgot to transfer your serial number into the NVRAM, you likely see “SystemSerialNum” when you open System Profiler. Apparently this crashes CS3. (Geez!)

For me this issue has been a long time coming: I’ve had the top-case on my MacBook replaced at least 3 times, and amongst those trips to AppleCare the techs forgot to re-place the system identifier sticker back on my computer. By the time it was time for a new motherboard, they had no clue what my serial number was so they couldn’t enter it. I have it on my original invoice though.

There’s a guy on InsanelyMac though that seems to have picked up the image to a Serial Number Utility (for Technicians obviously).

You can check out the discussion here: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t28529.html where you’ll also find the download links.

I did it and it solved the issue! I’m set to go!

AffectiveDesign.com Launches Today!

Today marks the launch of AffectiveDesign.com, a project I’ve been working on for Design and UX Expert, Trevor van Gorp. The design and flow of the site was created by Trevor; the HTMLification and integration into WordPress being my task. WordPress has come a long way from its early days as a simple blogging platform. Previously it required a lot of hacking to get it to behave like a Content Management System (CMS) but thanks to Pages and a bit of theme code, it actually works quite well for light-duty websites. 

The theme I created for AD implements some interesting WordPress-as-a-CMS functionality. While plug-ins play an important role, I tried to implement the bulk of it using WordPress theme templates. WordPress supports distinction between “Posts” and “Pages” (and sub-pages) which I used extensively to organize page data. Top-level pages are the source for the tab navigation, with any sub-pages living within those tabs. Blog “posts” live within the Blog page, which is specified within Settings > Reading of WP.

Home Page

The homepage uses a special template (homepage.php) which houses various elements. The left-box houses the “Home” page contents, and is coupled with the Flashfader plugin, configurable inside WP. The purple-headed items are Sub-Pages of the Home Page, and the items below them are WP Widgets, all managed within WordPress.

Top-Level Pages

Diving into a Top-Level Page, some of the CMS features come to life. Starting with the left sidebar, subpages of Services are listed automatically. Below these items is a customizable sidebar of widgets (just a Twitter widget is being used here). Theme code in functions.php automatically creates dedicated Left and Right sidebars for every page for maximum flexibility. I haven’t evaluated the actual load this imposes on the server, but load times do not seem to be severely affected, and WP-Cache takes care of the rest.

In the center we have the contents of the Services pages. If desired, a listing of subpages can be inserted in-line by adding the
tag within the page contents. This listing is generated based on variables set in each subpage (for the image) and text processing (to display the snippet). This configuration is not as elegant as I would like, as it requires the use of “custom fields” (which isn’t terribly user-friendly) but allows for thumbnails to appear beside the subpage listing. WordPress has the ability to “attach” a particular image to the post, but I found it to be unreliable and difficult to manage.

The right sidebar stores more customizable widgets. The first is a custom-built widget based on “better-text-widget” and allows for the rounded corner styling along with an image (something that is difficult to do with a default text widget.) The “Testimonials” widget is also custom-built, and randomly selects a quotation from a list given in the backend. The remaining items are simply basic WP text widgets.

Sub-Pages

Strategic Insight is a subpage of “Services”. The breadcrumb behaves accordingly, and the active subpage is highlighted in the navigation. The image browser is SimpleViewer Pro, which allowed us to customize the look and feel of the actual Flash player to match the look of the sight. The sidebars and other functionality is analogous. 

Blog

The blog page behaves just like any other WordPress blog, with appropriate theming for the template.

Other

The only other thing to note would be the Twitter widget, which is based on Twitter Widget Pro, and customized to add a “Follow” button below it and to improve stylability. 

Be sure to check out AffectiveDesign.com to see how they might be able to help you out, or just to checkout how all these WordPress tricks come together to build a very flexible and powerful CMS! 

Production: GFS 2010

I recently came to the decision and announced that I would be applying to the BFA Technical Theatre – Technical Production program at the University of Alberta this Fall, transferring from Computing Science. I haven’t really looked back since the realization came upon me, and last night’s Grad Fashion Show was a great reminder of how much I enjoy the production process.

The Show

To summarize, the Grad Fashion Show is a yearly fundraiser for the graduating class at Harry Ainlay. To most, it’s an opportunity to dress up in donated fashions from our local mall, and enjoy some food and do some silent auction stuff. To us, GFS is the technical extravaganza of the year. It started in 2008 when we were approached days before the actual event requesting live video. At first it seemed like it would be all but impossible, but we threw all our best efforts into it and made it happen. We had a single camera, feeding a quasi-analog video card with PowerPoint overlay.

Since then, it’s been an excuse for me to mess with digital video mixing and FireWire cameras. Last year we used VDMX for the video mixing and GrabberRaster in conjunction with Apple Remote Desktop to have a very high-latency secondary camera over ethernet. This year, despite having moved on and graduated, Kevin invited me to return and help out. Before we knew it, we were hatching plans to deliver my Hackintosh and other materials the next morning.

(A shot of Camera A, a Canon GL2 tethered to jQuad running QLab at the 2010 Grad Fashion Show, Harry Ainlay.)

The Rush

After much preparation, it came down to setting up the video mixing software with the two cameras. Luckily the school now has three Canon GL2s (old, but better than nothing). We used one tethered directly via FireWire right beside jQuad (A), and a second on the other side of the gym (B). Camera B was sending an analog signal (FireWire doesn’t work well/at all over long runs) and then fed into the third GL2 which was acting as an analog to digital converter and supplying the second FireWire signal to jQuad.

The software I planned on using, VDMX, did not support the use of two FireWire cameras simultaneously though, despite having two separate FireWire buses on jQuad. After some quick diagnosis, I realized that Plan B, CamCamX suffered from the exact same problem. Both GL2s showed up in “Camera A” and 0 cameras showed up in “Camera B”. Things were beginning to look bleak, not to mention the fact that our lighting personnel had bailed, and time was running short.

(A shot of our video monitoring rig. We initially brought the mini-TVs along for fun, but we ended up needing them to monitor feeds, which aren’t visible in QLab.)

QLab 2 to the Rescue!

So just like those many years ago when QLab came to rescue me from the complexities of In on It, QLab 2 pulled the whole thing off. It had no problem recognizing two FireWire cameras, even identical GL2 models. The Camera cues worked well, albeit there were a few issues with crashing along the way. I suspect it had something to do with the whole Hackintosh/8GB RAM/Crappy Graphics card/Failfest that was going on, but QLab would choke occasionally and I would need a total restart of the program. We rented a $3 license (which was essentially the only thing we bought to run the whole show) so I could easily reload the camera cues after a crash, but overall the cross fades and everything worked very well. In fact, QLab was definitely pushing out the lowest latency and best frame rates out of anything I had tested over the years.

Monitoring the two video feeds was tricky with QLab because that is not entirely what it’s designed for (but perhaps that would be a feature request?). With the help of the extra mini-TVs Kevin brought along, we were able to preview both cameras successfully though.

It was by no means a completely flawless system, but for $3, it was another great experiment in live video, and in particular, digital live video mixing. Learning how to chose the best shot at any given moment takes loads of practice, and this was without a doubt a great opportunity to do it! Most of my friends at Ainlay will be gone next year, so I doubt there will be another GFS, but I look forward to the many opportunities that lie ahead in my technical theatre career, and hope to share them here on jole.ca along the way!

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