Maëlys McArdle

Blog

  • Rice Tea: Camcorder Purchased & Need Name for Movie!

    Rice Tea: Camcorder Purchased & Need Name for Movie!

    So I’m at the stage now where I’m procuring equipment for the main shoot in mid-late July. Over the last few days, I’ve purchased about $1,500 of hardware. I’m hoping to keep the final costs to under $5,000 – including costumes, travel costs, and a constant stream of food to keep the volunteer-actors happy.

    The biggest expense was on today’s item: an HD camera. The camera I chose is the Panasonic HDC-TM700, which seems to be the spiritual successor to the Canon HV20. Among the qualities I needed was its ability to shoot at 24 frames per second, good low-light handling, and solid state memory.

    When I’m not looking at hardware to get, I spend the rest of my time editing the script. I finished the first draft, and I’m now cutting down and editing superfluous bits that are expensive to shoot in order to cut down on the time required to organize everything. I’m also paying particular attention to the dynamic of the scenes, and making sure that they’re the right amount of time. Some of them were too short, others irrelevant or too drawn out.

    As a side note, I can’t call the movie “Rice Tea.” I need a title that gives a better idea as to what the movie is about; something that’ll make the target crowd (geeks) more interested in seeing it. Do you have any suggestions? I’m all ears.

  • Store Encounter of the Third Kind

    Store Encounter of the Third Kind

    While I was waiting a prescription to be filled out at a pharmacy the other day, I heard the full conversation of a woman berating a worker for what was entirely the woman’s fault. She was insulting the employee, raising her voice, and generally failing at being an adult.

    She walked past me after her tantrum was over. I let her know what I thought of her behaviour. She wasn’t pleased, and continued walking on.

    A minute later I hear her high heels walking through the store. She was looking for me. She was quite angry, and asked if I worked at the store. I told her I didn’t. When she failed to succeed in belittling me in a manner she deemed satisfying, she stormed off.

    I realize this wasn’t any of my business. However, it’s not right for people to insult others like that, and those workers in the interest of self-preservation are prohibited from standing up for themselves. Someone had to.

  • Websense for Web Developers

    Websense for Web Developers

    In this final segment about Websense, I’m going to show you how, as a web developer, you can prevent your site from being blocked. It all comes down to this PHP code which you can insert in the top of your web page:

    <?php
    

      if (ereg("208.80..*..*", getenv('REMOTE_ADDR')))
    

         header("HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden");
    

    ?>

    In the first line, we compare the IP address of the person visiting with the block used by Websense. If it matches, the second line stops the page from loading and issues an error to the client. Websense doesn’t see what’s on your site, and consequently, has no grounds on which to block it.

    As far as user agent strings go, Websense spoofes its bots to appear like regular web traffic. Blocking on a basis of IP is the only way to go.

  • Rice Tea Film Update

    Rice Tea Film Update

    I’ve completed the first draft of the film script for Rice Tea. In this initial process, I concentrated on streamlining the story and shortened the dialog. Next up is revising it to make sure that it maintains audience interest and that its reverence for accurately depicting technology doesn’t get too anal.

    Other Developments:

    • “Rice Tea” won’t be the title of the film. It’ll be called something that sounds more related to the subject matter.
    • Shooting is set for mid-July.
    • The film will be free as in beer and as in speech. One key benefit of going this route is that it enables me to utilize an excellent variety of Copyleft and Creative Commons music.
    • A community will be set up to enable third-party contributions to development. More on this later.
  • More Websense Tricks

    More Websense Tricks

    Last time, I showed how to bypass Websense if you were in an environment which used it. However, this last method required you to be able to install an application onto your computer. What if you have no such rights?

    With that in mind, here are a few more tricks to get around Websense filtering so that you can do the work you’re paid to do.

    Use Translation Services:

    1. Go to http://babelfish.yahoo.com/
    2. In where it says “Translate a web page”, insert the address of the blocked page you want to access.
    3. Choose to translate from Chinese to English.

    The translator will attempt to find Chinese words and translating them to English. Failing to do so, it will leave the original text (in English) intact, providing you with a mirror of the page hosted on the translator’s servers. If the translator isn’t blocked, neither will be the page you want to load.

    Switch up the subdomains:

    Websense filters by subdomains. So if you want to access, say, “http://www.somesite.com/”, try putting in “http://somesite.com/”. It may just work.