# up somesubdir
# Find a directory below this that matches the word provided
#   (locate-based) 
function down() {
    dir=""
    if [ -z "$1" ]; then
        dir=.
    fi
    dir=$(locate -n 1 -r $PWD.*/$1$)
    cd "$dir";
}

# cdd someglobaldir
# quickly change to a directory anywhere that matches  the word you typed.
#    best if your locatedb is in good shape
function cdd() {
    dir=""
    if [ -z "$1" ]; then
        dir=.
    fi
    dir=$(locate -n 1 -r $1$)
    cd "$dir";
}

 # Not breadth-first, so less fun sometimes
 function down2()
 {
     dir=""
     if [ -z "$1" ]; then
         dir=.
     fi
     dir=$(find . -type d -iname $1 | head -n 1)
     cd "$dir";
 
 }
 
 # Breadth-first, but really slow
 function down3()
 {
         # create a list of all directories in the current folder
         dirlist=( $(find . -maxdepth 1 -type d) )
         dirlist=( ${dirlist[@]:1} )             # exclude .
 
         # loop through the list
         while [ $dirlist ]
         do
                 # check the head of the list to see if it matches needle
                 val=${dirlist[0]}
                 found=`expr match "$val" ".*$1.*"`
                 if [ $found -gt 0 ]; then
                         # change dirs, we found the first match
                         cd "$val";
                         break    # done
                 else
                         # not found!
                         # scan that new directory for subdirs
                         appendlist=( $(find $val -maxdepth 1 -type d) )
                         appendlist=( ${appendlist[@]:1} )    # exclude .
                         # add those subdirs to the tail of the dirlist
                         dirlist=( ${dirlist[@]:1} ${appendlist[@]} )
 
                         # rinse, repeat
                 fi
         done
 
 }
 

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Here's a silly video I created for a contest at work:
     http://youdeliver.citrix.com/Play/tabid/79/pid/1112/Default.aspx

Feel free to vote for it, because the top submissions get an iPhone. 

Tools used:

• Second Life
  
• Sony Vegas

I must have spent 15-20 hours on that video, primarily on sound effects. While working on this, I discovered that sound effects are very essential, but if they're good no one will really notice them. I.e., making something look and feel natural is a lot harder than it looks and isn't appreciated unless there are no sound effects.

If you notice, Helen's voice is distorted in a way as to make it sound as if she's coming through a digital line. My voice is distorted to reflect the environment I'm in, there are environment sounds like splashes and vehicles, etc. This all required a lot of work, but you can barely 'notice' it while watching the video. You just expect these things to be present.

Second Life is a great tool for creating the stage and environment. Inside its interface, I used existing Second Life places (e.g. the Midgar Final Fantasy Island) and dynamically created iPhone look-alikes (see if you can spot it). I also adapted an in-game laptop to display a fake webpage, and created a weird/fake server rack on the fly. I only scratched the surface, but you really can create just about any environment you imagine. This can be very helpful for fun videos.

I can't harp on Sony Vegas enough-- that tool is wonderful. I happen to have the $50 home version of the tool, but it's possible to get effect and codec plugins from the professional version and they work there, too. (The primary limitation being 3-4 video tracks, and 3-4 audio tracks, which I've always worked around. Professional versions allow unlimited tracks, I believe.) With Vegas, I was able to create overlays, manage sound effects, apply video rendering effects, pan/zoom, etc. If you enjoy video editing, I highly recommend it. I studied video editing in school for a few years (winning best editor awards, even), and I'm in awe of how far digital editing has come. I'm ten times more productive with this software than with a top-of-the-line editing deck from 8-10 years ago.

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In my ongoing quest to mimic Photoshop tutorials in Paint.NET, I decided to take another run at one. This time it was for creating an "out-of-bounds" picture in Photoshop where something seems to step outside of a picture.

Here's what I was able to accomplish with Paint.NET:

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Over on digg recently I also saw a tutorial for creating a fake software box using Photoshop. I don't use Photoshop, but I do use Paint.NET. So I decided to try the same thing using that tool, which is one of my favorite free tools.

There are a few features different from Photoshop, so it wasn't 100% trivial to do, but I did manage to emulate it pretty well. I may write a similar tutorial for Paint.NET users to follow. Take a look:

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It seems there are a lot of things in this world that you ignore for years. Yet, once you discover them, they come full force and you aren't able to ignore it at all anymore.

This happened to me while listening to Soul Coughing one day. (Stop reading if you don't want to potentially affect your enjoyment of their music.) I discovered that nearly every single time Mike Doughty (lead singer) sings a sentence that ends in a consonant, he ends it with a very audible "uhhh" suffix. For example, this turns "Unmarked Helicopters" into "Unmarked HelicoptersUHHH".

This realization has quite tainted my enjoyment. Now it's very difficult for me not to notice it, making me unable to casually listen to their music.

Perhaps no one else runs into quirks like this and I'm just losing my mind; either way I thought I'd share.

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Using the Socratic method, it seems that you can teach third-graders to do binary arithmetic. Very neat.

(Thanks to digg for the link.)

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PureText is a simple little tool that could save me hours of my life. I searched for it today before I began to write such a tool for the third time. Here's a summary by the author (the guy who writes DependencyWalker):

PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY.  The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.

Basically, this describes what I do about 5-30 times a day. I grab something formatted and want to paste it into another document or email, but I rarely want to keep the formatting. Before this tool, I copied the text to the clipboard, then I hit this arcane sequence of keys: WindowsKey-N (my Notepad hotkey), Ctrl-V, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Alt-F, x. Now that I've bound this tool to WindowsKey-Q, I've shortened 6 keystrokes (with slight delays) to 1 immediate keystroke.

It may seem silly, but it's worth it for me.

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I must admit, I think I'm addicted to Sony Vegas.

No, Vegas has nothing to do with gambling. Vegas has everything to do with digital video editing. I had heard great things about Adobe Premiere and the state of digital video editing, but the mid-range software is far better than I expected. This weekend I tried out Sony Vegas (formerly Vegas Video by Sonic Foundry) and have fallen in love.

It shouldn't be surprising, but it still feels weird: if you spent ~$1,500 on video equipment today, you can do ten times more than you could with $25,000 ten years ago. I run into this sort of 'leap' a lot in software development, but it's rare that it hits home just how far we've come in other technology areas.

In high school, I was the lead video editor for our school's television studio. In order to create professional-looking video, it required all sorts of clever tricks and hours upon hours of your life. Now there are no such requirements. So much work is now done in software that near-professional-quality is just a few minutes away.

I can't wait to get home and play with it some more. 

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I'm creating this post from the blog editor provided in the pre-release version of Flock, a new browser that promises to revolutionize everything.

I'm not sure if it will do so, but it looks pretty snazzy so far.

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If you're looking for something to make you say 'Wow' today, take a look at Goowy. The email interface is beautiful, and it's all highly interactive.

Even if AJAX turns out not to work wonderfully for online Office tools, this shows that Flash has a lot of promise.

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I just might have to buy a copy of c-jump some day. I'm not sure how useful it would be in teaching people to program, though.

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• Sidebar and Auxiliary displays
  • Sidebar is back in Vista (probably beta 2)
  • They're hyping the auxiliary displays for laptops/PCs. These are little color LCD and buttons on the outside of your laptop that lets you quickly check appointment data, email, etc, while the machine is off.
  • People can write things for sidebar/aux by visiting [url=http://microsoftgadgets.com/]microsoftgadgets.com[/url]
• They offered ~2000 very cool PDA phones which I was too late to buy. (cry)
• I really want to try Office 12 which they showed-off for the first time today.
  • Really like the new menuing plans, though screen real estate is eaten.
  • They're redoing UI because 9/10 of features requested for Microsoft Office already exist, but users can't find them.
  • Outlook emails now have a very easy way to mark them as things to handle later. I like how it works/looks, though it's a small gain. Still, I want it now.
  • Outlook can replace FeedDemon/NewsGator as it has a lot of new RSS support.
• From the what-in-the-world department, they showed-off somehow using USB Memory sticks as virtual memory expansion in Vista. Very very cool especially combined with their virtual memory optimization additions ("superfetch"), but I have so many questions about this. It doesn't make sense and seems like an easy feature to cut from release.
• I love LINQ/DLINQ/XLINQ/etc. Basically, they showed-off very cool .NET language constructs for doing queries in the language itself, without a need for SQL, etc. These can be off of a database or you can actually query any collection of objects. I can't wait to play with it. At the moment, I rate this as the most interesting announcement.
• We saw some really cool Avalon apps demo'd. One you can try yourself is Max, a photo sharing application. It was designed and managed by one of their Usability leads as a test of Avalon and XAML. I must say the application looks nice, but I can't try it because my laptop runs on Vista and it won't install. (They demo'd it on Vista, though.)

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strComputer = "." Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\CIMV2") Set objEvents = objWMIService.ExecNotificationQuery _ ("SELECT * FROM Win32_ProcessStartTrace WHERE ProcessName = 'notepad.exe'")   Wscript.Echo "Waiting for events ..." Do While(True)    Set objReceivedEvent = objEvents.NextEvent      'report an event    Wscript.Echo "Win32_ProcessStartTrace event has occurred."   Loop

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