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Dear Apple,

I rue the day that I wasted trying to use your stupid iDVD software. I also rue when I tried to use iMovie to work around the defects. I would have rued using Quicktime Pro, except by that point I had wised up, and I wasn’t about to give you fuckers any more of my money. Even deleting the whole project was a hassle, although I don’t know that I rued it per se.

I hate you guys,

Phil

Do not buy this product

My use case is very simple:

1. Import an AVI into iDVD
2. Add chapter breaks where the commercials used to be
3. Repeat until the DVD is full

This should be Use Case #1 at the Apple iDVD team design meetings, right? Vlad and Beltzner pointed out that no, in fact, Use Cases #1 through 14 all had to do with importing home videos of your baby, wedding, family vacation, or photo album. And it turns out that iDVD can’t do this simplest and most obvious of tasks. The only option for adding chapter breaks is an option to “Create Chapter Markers Every n Minutes”.

I posit that this is never what you want. Even if your movie is Little Franklin Goes to the Bathroom, what are the odds that he does something interesting every 8 minutes? Even I can’t operate my colon with that kind of precision.

Not content to have wasted only fifteen minutes, I browsed the help files, convinced that there must be a way. I mean, what kind of idiot company ships DVD software that can’t add chapters? Come on!

iMovie seems promising, but since the input file is xvid-encoded, iMovie needs to fold proteins for half an hour before you’re allowed to do anything. That’s fine, I can amuse myself exploring alternatives for that long. I wasn’t wild about waiting 35 minutes per file anyways.

While that went on, Google helped me find Metadata Hootenanny; I am physically incapable of passing on software with such an awesome name, and even better, its job is to manipulate Quicktime metadata including chapter markers! A solution is right around the corner.

Alas, there is no Intel build of the Hootenanny. Rosetta gets me going easily enough, except that it can’t load the xvid Quicktime plugin (I have both Intel and PPC xvid plugins installed, but I guess I don’t know where to put the PPC plugins, because they never work). [Editor's note: The innerweb implies that this is indeed possible, so if you know how, I'd appreciate a pointer.]

But that’s OK, Hootenanny will let me plug the chapter markers in, even if it doesn’t entirely understand the encoded content. When I write the file out, however, the video survives and the audio does not. This is a particularly interesting failure mode, because it doesn’t even need a plugin for the audio — it’s just mp3. In any case, that’s out.

Next, it occurred to me that iDVD project files are just plists, which are simple binary XML. The chapter offsets are right there, easily modified — admittedly annoying, but now success is within view.

No. It turns out that those offsets are exclusively for the menu items — so when you click the chapter you want, it starts at the right part in the stream. But chapter navigation with the forward/back buttons are governed by the “iDVD Generated Chapter Duration” key, or the chapter data in the imported video clip, but not the project XML. Fuck.

iMovie finished its Mersenne search a litle while ago, so I’ll go ahead and add chapters with this. All signs indicate that, time consuming thought it may be, iMovie can really add chapter markers. The interface is not totally intuitive, but as soon as I figure it out, it only takes a minute to add the four chapter markers. Now, to get it into iDVD.

Exporting is a non-starter. I’m not waiting another 35 minutes for it to re-compress. Seriously, who designs this crap?

There is a “Share -> iDVD” menu option that holds considerable promise, and it does exactly what it says. It takes just a few seconds for iDVD to receive the file, with the proper chapter markers, and forward/back working properly. Success!

There’s just one catch: sharing between applications in this way causes iDVD to open a new Project, and it can only have one Project open at a time. So you can’t have more than one of these multi-chapter streams in your DVD, which makes it almost completely worthless.

Do not buy this product either

Fortunately, Apple bundles iDVD and iMovie together, so you can conveniently avoid buying just a single package.

It does appear that Quicktime Pro can do what I want — take an xvid AVI, add a chapter track, and write it as a MOV in just a few minutes. They definitely don’t want you to forget that it’s Apple software, which despite all of the hype, has some of the worst user interface Chernobyls ever to punish mankind. Adding chapters with Quicktime Pro is — I swear to god I am not making this up — a thirteen step process that begins with opening a text editor. But I’ll be god damned if I’m paying for it until I see that tortured process yield a proper DVD with my very own eyes.

I think I just rued again.

I need some help from people with experience battling pet allergies.

I’d like to move in with a friend who has a moderate cat allergy, forcing me to decide between her and Simon. Allow me to take a moment to remind you just how cute Simon is:

Simon likes to help me watch MC Hammer

He also likes to sleep on the Tivo

Here he’s getting in-depth news and analysis with an international perspective from a team of worldwide correspondents

So he’s pretty cute, and I’d rather not be forced by circumstances to make him into a casserole or something. On the other hand, my friend has allergies that are severe enough to put this plan on ice, nor is a Benadryl drip a lifestyle choice that she is willing to embrace. Erecting a complex series of gates, tunnels, alarms, and air-exchange devices to keep him and his dander in an enclosed part of the house is also a non-starter.

I am willing to purchase and experiment with all manner of filters, ionizers, vacuums, pastes, creams, lotions, or salves, and there is still a few-months window during which a solution can be demonstrated. Do you or someone you know suffer from a moderate to severe pet allergy? Have you actually experienced symptomatic relief as a result of some revolutionary new product, to the point that you can pleasantly cohabitate with that animal?

I’m not saying it gets to sleep in your bed, or that you have to pet it all the time. But if we take reasonable care to avoid overwhelming contact, and keep the place clean, we don’t have to lock Simon in a bathroom and brick the door shut. That’s the kind of success condition I’m looking for. Any advice?

I was not just being coy. She is marrying someone else, someone else also living with us.

I have nothing more to say on this topic.

My Macbook arrived a couple weeks ago, but a whole bunch of stuff was happening, and then I got sick, and so on. The Wangersons’ recent gushing reminded me that I have some sort of duty to disgorge the truth to my loyal reader.

I was not particularly eager to be Apple’s guinea pig for an entirely new platform, but I bought it because using my only-16-month-old Powerbook felt like using a machine from my innocent, dewy-eyed youth. I spent most of my days staring at a spinning beachball, the more hypnotic Mac equivalent of an infinite hourglass. It didn’t matter how much ram I crammed into it, that clearly wasn’t the issue, it wasn’t going anywhere near swap. The G4 is a fucking slow processor.

FedEx was racing against Air Canada that morning, in that sense that it wasn’t a United flight, so I couldn’t count on them to hold the plane until I was ready to leave. As usual, FedEx performed a feat of incomparable logistical magic the morning after a long holiday weekend, for which I assume they will win some kind of Businessweek innovation award:

3:18 AM Int’l shipment release MEMPHIS, TN
4:41 AM Departed FedEx location MEMPHIS, TN
6:04 AM At dest sort facility EAST BOSTON, MA
8:21 AM At local FedEx facility MEDFORD, MA
8:27 AM On FedEx vehicle for delivery MEDFORD, MA
10:19 AM Delivered MEDFORD, MA

That’s right — it was still clearing customs in Tennessee at 3 AM, and seven hours later it was in my unwashed hands. Delivered 24 hours ahead of schedule, no less, just in time for my flight.

So the first time that I got to actually use the machine was on the plane, and I was very unimpressed. My legs were being cooked through three layers of clothing (I don’t care what kind of screwy winter we’re having, if the month has an “R” in it, I’m packing longjohns). The flight attendant was more than happy to spoon cold water over my legs to avoid any discomfort, but the battery meter said that I only had ninety minutes remaining, no doubt because of the built-in Apple space heater. This is unacceptable. My buyer’s remorse was in full bloom.

Just before I gave up and closed the laptop in disgust, I fired up the Activity Monitor and found that Word had failed to shut down cleanly, and was thus consuming 100% of both cores. I guess Microsoft multi-threaded shutdown? And then screwed it up? I don’t know. Once I killed that, the spot welder turned off and my battery life shot up to three and a half hours and I regained feeling in my thighs.

The fact of the matter is that this machine is fast, there is no getting around that. I only now realize that I was actually CPU-bound just browing the web, that’s how obvious the difference is. And when I’m not folding proteins with Firefox, it’s relatively cool and battery-friendly.

So that part’s good. Very happy about the CPU and battery life.

Video chat is still fun, but I have no illusion that that particular novelty won’t wear off shortly. The novelty may well last longer if Joe would stop taking his laptop into the bathroom.

However, it’s not all fun and games and video chats that would be illegal in some states. There are some annoying corner cases to the Rosetta story. For the most part it does a fantastic job, and the improved horsepower seems to more than make up for the emulation overhead. On the other hand, anything with a plugin immediately gets complicated. As I alluded to a few days ago, I’m really not sure what to do about Quicktime codecs. One or two have Intel builds already, and those work great. But even when I copied a PPC version of Quicktime from my Powerbook, and run it through Rosetta, I still can’t seem to load any PPC plugins. And I don’t have a clue how to debug that shit; Quicktime doesn’t even seem to acknowledge the existence of plugins, let alone tell you what may or may not have been loaded or why.

Finally, the Magsafe power connector appears to the naked eye to have been molded from some pure, extruded form of Awesome, carefully refined from the hand-extracted ore of the dangerous Awesome mines of northern California. I spent the first half hour of ownership just trying to pull the laptop off the desk by its cable, marveling at how it broke away like a pair of stripper pants. Joe will tell you that it comes off a little too easily, but I haven’t had that experience yet. Fortunately, it’s easy to put back in. Alas, they need to ship a new airplane cable, and I think I threw my back out the first time I tried to lift the new power brick. Lift with your knees, not your back. That’s a tip, kids, you’ll want to write that one down.

On the whole, I am very pleased. I didn’t have the very latest edition of the Powerbook, so I don’t really notice any of the regressions — I never had a dual-layer DVD burner, and the MBP has more pixels than my class of Powerbook. It’s noticeably thinner, and it’s easier to remove the battery.

I think you have to be a very jaded, bitter, cynical, inherently unhappy person not to enjoy this laptop. When vmware or a new Virtual PC ships, so we can finally play games on our Macs, we shall truly experience perfection.

I was just going to write about hop-ons, but that hardly seems worth it, so I might as well tell you about the show.

I had the fortune to see Metric last night for the second time in a month (after shaver surprised me with last-minute tickets a few weeks ago!). In Toronto they played at Kool Haus, where we once saw Matt Good the communist — it is a very large venue. Boston’s Roxy, by comparison, is about 20% of that size, so it was a much more intimate show. It also sounded better, although I don’t know whether to attribute that to the relative quality of my earplugs, the relative quality of the mixing, or the unique quality of having 600 fewer people in the room.

Last night Emily brought a crazy person up on stage, who had shaved one eyebrow to proclaim his love, and gently and endearingly ridiculed him. I think she remembered last time, which ended with the stage absolutely packed with audience members, while they somehow managed to finish their last song. It didn’t look like that was going to happen last night, but the stars aligned and towards the end of the encore the floodgates opened.

I think we got an extra song in Toronto, because they still had room to perform on stage. You’ve got to watch out for hop-ons.

I don’t know what Married to the Sea is, exactly, but Deb found a comic that spoke directly to me and my love of all train-related program activities.

Now I really want to play the train game.

I’m disappointed to see that the uprising about the ports appears to be getting resolved.

Part of my disappointment is because I think people are making a big fuss over nothing. Ownership stopped being relevant decades ago. The same way that it didn’t matter whether CNOOC bought Unocal (there would be no less oil on the world market), I don’t think it matters one bit who owns our ports. Congress are just looking for an excuse to jump on a President with a 34% approval rating, and people wonder why Americans are cynical about politics.

But most of my disappointment is because I was really hoping to see the House attach the rider to the Iraq/Louisiana appropriations bill, and then have Bush veto it. It’s the only chance I can see that anything even approximating fiscal restraint, however reluctant, will be exercised.