The Backstory

Around mid-2011, when I decided to make a film, I went around searching for a simple, free, multiplatform screenwriting software. Note the three adjectives.

As an Ubuntu user, I needed something multiplatform. I did not want to switch my OS just to write a screenplay.

I needed a program that would be fast and easy to use. Hey, I like bells and whistles as much as the next person, but a screenwriter also needs to get out of your way and let you write.

And I’m an free software enthusiast. I like the freedom of being able to tinker with my software, of not having to wait for the BIGCORP, INC overlords to deign my feature request worthy of attention.

The Past

So, I went around on a google hunt. And the software that came the closest? Celtx.

Celtx is pretty good. It is multiplatform. It’s free, and it has a lot of bells and whistles.

It’s good enough that I wrote my first film with it.

But celtx was never simple. It had quirks. It did not look right. It provided limited configurablily of the interface. It called itself open source, but the build-sauce was difficult, and you needed to jump through hoops to work on it. It was tied to the company’s services. PDF functionality wasn’t built into the software! It was on a remote server, so you had to have an internet connection to generate a PDF.. I never understood that! And I could not disable the distracting bottom bar, that always showed the latest news update and things.

And it grew slooowww. Longer screenplays would start crawling. The editor would update in jerks, like you were magically typing words, and not letters. Granted I use a netbook, but a screenwriter is just a text editor! It should not require a supercomputer to run properly.

Being a little disappointed with this option, I searched for others.

There were none. Final Draft seemed to be the “standard” but  it cost  a lot. (And I mean a LOT).

The search did lead me to many tiny little gems. The most memorable one was called Pago. A vim script, that modified vim into a screenwriter. I now had fast and multiplatform. But not simple. Pago only had the (limited) intelligence to format the text to screenplay style, but that was it. However, it had one thing over Celtx – simple offline PDF generation. And I had settled on Pago for my then screenwriting needs.

So I forked a project on Github, and created a Pago repository. And while I was on github.. why not search for “screenwriting”. With the thousands of project on there, perhaps there would be some other Pago like tiny solutions.

And so I discovered Blyte. “Chanced” might be a better word. Talk about hitting gold.

Years ago Osku Salerma had entered the fray of  screenwriting software, creating a very well written piece of free, simple, multiplatform software. But it’s revenue stream did not justify the time spent on it, and it was killed. Thankfully, it was made open. Osku created the github repository, and pushed the code in. This code has since been in hibernation.

Blyte had not show up on my extensive google searches. I suspect it hadn’t in Kent Tessman’s searches either, who grew tired of the incumbent playing field as well, and set out to create Fade In Pro, which is multiplatform and simple, but not free!

The Present

In October, I started working on Blyte. It was written in python! I installed the wxpython libraries, and ran the program, wondering how a five year old codebase would’ve aged.

(beat)

It worked! the colors looked odd, the interface seemed a little clunky, and the ancient widget library did not look great on Ubuntu.

But it ran without issues. And it was good. It had full PDF support (including font embedding). It was lightning fast. It was configurable. It had a tiny little fancy features too.

And the big three-adjective hole in free software was filled. I got in touch with Osku, who had not looked at Blyte in years, but enthusiastically agreed to take up maintaining Blyte’s modern fork: Trelby. (it took a while to settle on a name!)

The Future

Trelby is polished Blyte, with many (many!) additional features, a clean uncluttered interface, ported to the current generation libraries.

In my initial discussions with Osku, here’s what he wrote about Blyte’s dormancy:

The main problem, I suppose, is that the intersection of “people who care about screenwriting programs” and “people who can code” is quite small, so the potential pool of developers is tiny.

I can attest to that statement. With all my frantic searching for a good alternative I ran across very few developers. By and large, screenwriters are Joe Consumers.

But to the people in that tiny intersection: Find a feature lacking in Trelby? Why not join the Trelby team, and help improve it?

I’ll write at more length about the whole process another day. Today I want to unload my thoughts about a couple of festivals that just finished: Bangalore International Film Festival, and Stepping Stone Film Festival.

First of all.. wow! What a treat for local film buffs.

Stepping Stone Film Festival

This was held at Jaaga, a local hackerspace and culture hub. On the weekdays that I attedned, there were anywhere between 2-4 people at the screening. I was the only non-organizer then. I’m not sure about the reason behind this.. Jaaga is quite well recognised cultural hub, and the festival selection was pretty good.

For one, the screening schedule was being updated after the screenings. This perhaps put  people off. I just went in blind, taking everything in as a surprise. And attending on four days was well worth it just for a single short film: Proposals.

Proposals is a short comedy-drama about a couple that starts to fake engagements. As it builds, we delve deeper into the relationship, reach the core character conflict, leading to the beautifully crafted end. The actors have played their parts beautifully – I’d be on the lookout for future works by writer-director David Ehrlich, and the actor Sarah Kohl.

I just wished more people had seen this little gem. This film is not yet available on any of the alternative media download sites, or online video sites. I hope the filmmakers release it widely somewhere online.

Bangalore International Film Festival

A complete opposite to the former in terms of scale. Over 3000 delegates showed up. 4 films a day, 7 days, across 10 multiplexes/theatres. And the selection was fantastic. Jumping in quickly to my favourites:

When We Leave is a film about an muslim woman in Turkey who splits with her son from her abusive husband, and heads home to her family in Germany. Only to find herself constantly pressured by religious and societal types to head back to her master the husband. As her father says, “The hand that slaps, is the hand that sooths”. We cry with her, feel her pain, and question her loyalty to her family. All of this builds to an ending that left not many eyes dry. I distinctly remember the people who broke down a couple rows behind. And the confused looks on the faces of the audience of the next film as we exited the hall. This was my bet to win the Best Film. It ended up grabbing the best direction.

Lucky was the first film I saw at the festival. I walked in a tad bit late, but was immediately hooked. It’s a story based in South Africa about an old Indian woman who starts taking care of an African teen. It explores the themes of racism, poverty in Africa. A bitter sweet ending. This ended up winning the best film. I loved the chance to talk with it’s director Avie Luthra.

A Separation is a Iranian film that follows the course of the divorce of a couple, and their adolescent daughter. The daughter wants to stay with her father, but her mother wants to migrate to a different country and provide better opportunities to her child. Meanwhile, the father is accused of a crime, and as someone who works to set an example of honesty to his daughter, is put into a few dilemmas. This film showed me that the vision of Iran I have in my head was quite a bit off what I saw in the film.

Lebanon is something I loved as a concept film. The story is told completely from inside a tank, and the troubles of the soldiers manning it during the Lebanon war. We see some gruesome scenes from the eyes of a new soldier. The feeling of claustrophobia enhances the mood, leading to an end that surprised me. A beautifully handled film.

Nobel Chor won that best Indian film (or similar) award. I was disappointed with this one. They had such an amazing idea, but the script and execution left a lot to be desired.

The Tree Of Life deserves all of the praise it’s getting. Only thing that was off was the reaction by half of the audience that seemed unimpressed.

Interrogation was a surprise! A kafka-esque plot. If you get a chance, watch this classic.

A few I missed, but really want to watch: Bloody Boys, Air India 182 and Busong.

The other big thing at BIFFES was the film buffs. I had long conversations with other film buffes. Sometimes the knowledge that there are others out there who share your passion for cinema is invigorating. Handed out copies of Dilemma to a few filmmakers, and buffs.

It’s good to know that a film festival has arrived to Bangalore in a BIG way.

The movie website. Facebook. Twitter.

A short film

This won’t be news if you are a contact on facebook. I’ve spent the last few months studying up and honing my skills as a filmmaker. I’ll be shooting my first short film Dilemma this weekend.

It’s been quite a ride!

When I moved on from Nexenta, I had a couple of options into the future. One continued my journey down the road to technological entrepreneurship. The other, filmmaking, required a jump into brand new territory. What made me decide on the latter? The realisation that there wasn’t going to be a better time to give it a shot.

Over the past few years, I have become a fan of cinematic TV. American cable networks, from HBO to FX to AMC, have stepped up the game over the past decade. And back home, the quality of TV and film content can best be classified as appalling. This signals an opportunity. A huge one. With a potential audience of a billion people, there is a market for enterprising individual who can create content with quality on par with global (and specially US cable) standards.

TV as a format has some advantages over feature films. It allows you to tell a story at a pace you choose, developing characters to a depth you want to. ‘The Wire‘ could never have been a movie.

The second big advantage is the reach. The TV set in these billion homes are a shared common window, that looks out onto a stage. And as a story-teller, you can get access to this stage.

I wrote my first script “Dilemma” in June, and shooting it soon. This is an intense drama with a runtime of around 25 minutes. In early September, we conducted auditions, and completed casting by the third week.

Over the course of this educational journey, I’ve gotten in touch with individuals from disparate fields of artistry. I’d like to give a virtual shout-out to Roy Sinai, who is also part of the Dilemma cast, for his help throughout.

That’s the quick update. I’m funding it via the crowd-sourcing site Indiegogo. Head over the Indiegogo page of Dilemma, and help fund the film! The writeup explains the film’s plot and themes, and my efforts in open collaboration, in more detail. Read through, please send me your feedback, if any.

Oh, and I’ll also be writing over at the Dilemma blog through the course of the film’s production and post-production.

The Chronos kit

“.. and how to avoid the pain”

TI was running a deal, and I snagged myself a Chronos ez430. It’s an excellent low power dev. platform, and you can program your watch! How cool is that?

However, my enthusiasm was constantly battling the dismal state of information online on building OpenChronos (a fork of the official Chronos firmware, so you don’t have to use the restrictive and proprietary TI compilers, and stick with good ol’ gcc!).

mspgcc4, not mspgcc

These are two different projects. mspgcc4 is what you use to build OpenChronos. mspgcc will NOT work (unless you port the codebase. Update: done. see below!). mspgcc4 is also deprecated and no longer maintained. There are no official packages on Ubuntu. The source will not build on Ubuntu 11.04. There is no binary tarball (that i could find) anywhere. Long story short.. you really tear your hair trying to figure out a way to get OpenChronos to build.

I reached out to a bunch of folks who have forked OpenChronos on github,to see if any of them are on Ubuntu, and if they could share their compiler set. rdmiller3 responded, and I now have the pleasure of sharing this binary build widely.

Download msp430-gcc-4.4.5_gdb_7.2.tar.bz2 [mirror] for Ubuntu 11.04 -x86.

Building OpenChronos

It’s as simply as grabing the copy from github, make config, and make!

I have some ideas on how I want to change the firmware. I’ll hopefully get time to work on it.

Centralizing the Information

I’ve been considering throwing up a wiki to organize all the information there is on the platform, in one accessible place. If you are a Chronos developer what do you think?

[update] : dobfek successfully got mspgcc4 to build on Ubuntu 11.04, and sent across these instructions.

[update 2] : not 24 hours have passed, and i found out work was afoot to port to mspgcc. I’ve merged these changes into my github fork. Thanks to Angelo Arrifano. You can install the mspgcc package from this repository on Ubuntu 11.04.

[update 3] : All of us OpenChronos devs are rallying around at the google group. It’s the place to get answers or collaborate on Chronos development.The current effort is to make the code structure more modular, so you don’t have to edit a bunch of files to get your app in there. It’s shaping up well!

SSHplus Appindicator

My previous little utility – sshlist – got quite some attention, and helped out a lot of folks who were missing sshmenu on Unity. You can read more about the intentions behind this utility in this entry. Benjamin Heil further modified it giving it a simple parsable configuration format, and supporting launching applications.

SSHplus builds on both of the above, adding one the most requested features : supporting sshmenu configuration. SSHplus adds simple identification of sshmenu configuration – it grabs the title, and ssh parameters and sets them up in the menu (as shown in screenshot). It does not yet recognize  other items like profile etc. If you need an entry with very specific formatting, you can simply add the right arguments in sshplus configuration.

Features

• Launch SSH, rdesktop, etc.
• Compatible with sshmenu configuration file
• Launch any application – for ex. VLC hangs a lot on me, and I need a simple way to kill it (screenshot)
• Supports nested folders (but not yet for sshmenu nested entries – coming soon)

Setting up SSHplus

• Download the latest sshplus.py  file from the github repo.
• Copy file  to /usr/local/bin
• Edit file .sshplus in home directory using simple configuration (explained below).
• Launch sshlist.py
• Or better yet, add it to gnome startup programs list so it’s run on login.

Example Configuration  ~/.sshplus

# Application launchers in a folder
folder:Applications
Show top|gnome-terminal|-x top
Kill VLC|pkill| -9 vlc

#back to main folder
folder:
#sep adds a separator
sep

# label: adds labels to the menu
label:SSH connections

SSH server1|gnome-terminal|-x ssh root@google.com
SSH server2|gnome-terminal|-x ssh -p 456 server2
Find the source|gnome-terminal|-x ssh neo@theone.com

sep

# Use rdesktop to connect to Windows Servers
label:RDesktop connections
Win-Server 1|rdesktop|-T “Win-Server 1″ 1.2.3.4
Win-Server 3 (with many arguments)|rdesktop|-g 1320×680 -T “Win-Server 3″ -x l -P -r sound:local 1.2.3.6

sep
label:Putty Connections

# PuTTY
PuTTY-Session 1|putty|-load SavedSession1
PuTTY-Session 2|putty|-load SavedSession2

#If present SSHmenu connections will be automatically added

Thanks to the users and commenters on sshlist who provided feedback, and to Benjamin Heil and Fabio for their modifications. Feel free to fork the project on github.

sshlist in action

[Note: SSHlist has been deprecated,in favor of SSHplus. SSHlist will no longer be developed, but is still made available]

Since moving to Ubuntu Natty, I’ve missed the sshmenu applet a lot.

So I spent an hour to writeup a functionally equivalent appindicator menu. And so sshlist was born.

Using sshlist is simple. From the instructions:

• Copy file sshlist.py (this file) to /usr/local/bin
• Edit file .sshlist in home directory to add ssh host (one per line)
• You can if you wish add additional ssh options. The line is appended to the ssh command
• Launch sshlist.py
• Or better yet, add it to gnome startup programs list so it’s run on login.

Of course, much of that could be automated, patched and/or packaged. For now simply head to the repository, click on “sshlist.py” and grab the raw file, and follow the above instructions.

Patches welcome.

Update: Benjamin Heil extended sshlish for simplestarter, which allows launch of multiple applications with various arguments. It might suit your needs.

Update 2: SSHplus is better! This version will no longer be maintained.

Continuing the series on customizing and reviewing Ubuntu releases (Lucid here, Maverick here), below are my random thoughts on the latest release.

• All the vertical space saved by default! The various hacks you needed to pull (mentioned in previous articles) to get more vertical space on netbook are no longer needed. And the dedicated effort towards it shows.
• Menu bar, Titlebar, and panel have been combined to one. The menubar/title bar changes on hovering in the panel.
• Try to treat this setup as normal gnome desktop, with docky on the left side, and you’ll feel right at home. Because that is exactly what Unity is. Having used it for a week or so, I dont see what the big brouhaha was about the move from Gnome 2 classic desktop to Unity. It is not a revolution, just simple evolution. And it looks good.
• This release continues the Canonical/Mark Shuttleworth push to focus on polish. The font is looking more integrated than ever.
• You do need to set a g-conf value to have classical taskbar status icons. You’ll almost always require this if you want to use anything from gnote to audacious to others that have not yet implemented app-indicator support. The command you need to run in terminal is:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist “['all']“

• Chrome seems noticeably faster than firefox on my netbook. Of course, the 15 different addons I have installed might have something to do with that.
• Reduce the font size by 2 points to get more on the screen. The values in my Appearance Preferences > Fonts read 8.5, 8.5, 8.5, 9, 8.5
• Start following OMG!Ubuntu. It’s the best Ubuntu blog around now. By some margin.

There are tiny bugs in Unity, but none that come in the way of a power user working on the setup. I recommend an upgrade to this release for all, specially on your non-tech uncle’s PC.

Setting up E-Mudhra on Windows 7/ IE 8

• Pop in the CD that came with the dongle and install the driver. Skip the other reader and download manager crapware.
• Once installed (and rebooted if you wish), plug in the USB. Windows will ask you if you want to add the root CA E-Mudhra. Answer yes.
• Now to setup IE8 to behave well with the tender sites. Note this will render IE8 highly insecure. Once you make the below changes, use IE8 only for tenders. For all other internet activities use Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
• The tender sites require full ActiveX control to work correctly. Do the below to setup IE8 to behave like earlier versions.
• Goto Internet options in IE8, and set compatibility mode to on. Next click under security, and choose the lowest level (which is Medium). Click on “Advanced”, and enable all the disabled ActiveX features. You will note that these new options are labelled “Insecure” and will turn red when you choose them.
• Save, Reboot. You will have done all the things correctly if you are not presented with any “ActiveX popup warnings” when browsing a site, i.e, all ActiveX requires are accepted by default.

Rant

Why the hell do the Indian government website designers choose the most lax practices of the lot. They need to be strung up and given a lesson on webdesign after the year 2003. Jesus fusking christ.

And what’s behind the REQUIREMENT to use e2gov.in for digital certificates. There’s free ones, or others with a nominal fee available. One which don’t bloddy require you to add a FRIGGING ROOT CERTIFICATE to your machine.

And activeX?!!!@!!!!!! Microsoft has basically disavowed it. And I counted 2-3 different controls that are loaded. May I introduce you to much more modern alternatives, like perhaps a reasonable java applet, or even better, a native app? Or just don’t require a login process that requires a friggin digital certificate. There’s simpler way of digital identity that what’s currently setup. Like squishing out the fluid from my eyeballs and mailing it out to you.

FUCK!

Forget Jesus.. the stars died so that you could be here today.

- Lawrence Krauss, on the most poetic thing me knows, from his lecture A Universe from Nothing

The talk is an hour long an well worth the time.