When you’re traveling it can be difficult to keep track of all those receipts. Whether it’s cabs, parking or meals you’re bound to loose a receipt or two. That’s one reason I like to reconcile my expense reports on a nightly basis. I’ve made a little spreadsheet to do it for me, but sometimes I get back to the hotel room and realize I’ve lost that receipt. This is where being able to log into Amex comes into play. I scribble down what I missed in the spreadsheet and then it appears on Amex shortly thereafter. I print the copy out of the web portal, attach it to my expense report, and…
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Final Cut Server: Working with Annotations
Annotations allow you to comment on various parts of the time-line for a clip. To setup an annotation, open a clip and then click on the button to the far right below: Now the proxy clip will cache to your system. Once it’s complete, use the i key to set an in/out marker for in and then the o key to set out (and you guessed it, space bar works here too). But don’t click Add Annotation yet, first type notes into the notes field. Once you have entered an annotation you can delete one by clicking on the x beside it in the annotations list. In order to…
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Mac OS X: Piping Data to TextEdit
So the traditional way to dump a directory listing to text is to use a command such as the following: ls > test.txt But there’s another way, which actually opens the dump into TextEdit, which is to run: ls | open -tf This extends to the output of any terminal command, so you could also do scutil –get HostName | open -tf, etc.
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Final Cut Server: Reanalyze an Asset
If you attempt to Analyze an asset and it fails, or an asset fails to analyze on import then you will not see proxy clips and possibly poster frames for the clip. This could be due to a lot of reasons, but you can retry the analyze process to see if it’s something with the clip. To do so, do a get info on the clip in Final Cut Server, then click on the cog wheel menu for the item and select Analyze from the drop-down menu.
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On the Road: Milwaukee
Traveling for work can suck. Like really suck. It just gets old. But then you get sent to a city like Milwaukee, WI (aka Beer City), where all they can talk about on the radio is Brett Favre. If you get the chance, stay at the Ambassador Inn some time, head down to Mader’s (which is over 100 years old) and grab some good old school German food and then try to go do work the next day… It’s tough, but well worth it!
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WAN Optimization
Latency is the bane of my existence. Latency is the kind of thing you just can’t typically fix when you’re talking site-to-site communications. But you can mitigate it. These days I’m experimenting around with a variety of WAN optimization tool kits, from Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances to F5 to various open source offerings. For SMB/CIFS the various offerings can be pretty cool. Most products require an appliance at both ends to do proper optimization, but I like that Riverbed has a client app that can run on the Mac. Having said that, nothing seems to really optimize AFP the same way that SMB can be optimized. Maybe there isn’t a market…
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iTunes: Make Ringtone for iPhone
Doesn’t work with DRM material, but to create a ringtone, do a Get-Info on the song and click on the Options tab. Then add a start/stop time and convert it to AAC (Advanced Menu -> Create AAC Version). Next, save the file to your desktop, remove it from iTunes and change the extension from .m4a to .m4r. Now drag it into your Library, click on the Ringtone list and you can use it right away.
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Presentation Zack, Schoun and I did at MacWorld 2008
There are a lot of folks looking to upgrade Tiger OD to Leopard OD. Here’s a presentation that Zack Smith, Schoun and I did at MacWorld where we cover the details of doing this type of migration. Hope it helps! Presentation from MacWorld
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The Final Cut Server Command Line
Final Cut Server has a fairly robust, albeit fairly unsupported command line. The following is a list of some useful commands, along with their paths and functions: The following are in /Library/Application Support/Final Cut Server/Final Cut Server.bundle/Contents/Resources/sbin: fcsvr_run allows you to interact with the database, amongst other things. To interact with the database use psql as the first positional parameter and then pxdb as the second, to identify which database you will interact with. You can then run a select statement in quotations to do a variety of tasks, such as tallying up the number of assets in a database, etc. Once you have certain information you can then use grep…
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Mac OS X Server: Reset Last URL with Open Directory
So I recently pushed out an image after trying to connect to an AFP server that couldn’t be accessed. The account that was used was being used by an entire lab of 100 machines so I really needed to get that URL out of there. What to do? Well, first open Workgroup Manager and click on the group in question. Then click on Preferences and then the Details tab. Next, click on the + sign and browse to /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app. Next click on com.apple.finder and click on the pencil. Here drop down the Often disclosure triangle and click on the FXConnectToLastURL button. From here, change the value of the key to the server you…