And now for something a little different: Dos and Don'ts for DVD commentaries. I enjoy them but it seems somes producers need help.

• DO include commentaries, unless it's a DVD set of some television show that just can't sustain interesting commentary for an entire season. (For example, Friends, which correctly only includes commentaries for three or four episodes per season, which based on my sampling is almost three or four commentaries too many. I don't mean this as a crack at Friends, which I've come to enjoy, there just isn't enough to say about it per episode.) They are cheap (I assume) and add a lot of value for the True Fans; this is especially important if you have a franchise.
• DO include the original audio track under the commentary, having it drop quieter when the commentators talk and coming back when they stop. It is spooky to watch a movie with no audio coming from it at all. It also gives the commentators a chance to refer to things in the video and have us actually hear them if they want.
• DO NOT be afraid of spoiling the current video; you may safely assume we are fans if we're listening to the commentary and we've seen the video already. DO NOT spoil any other video (other movies, future or even past episodes).
• DO NOT narrate the action. Again, you may safely assume we've seen the video, and I don't need to turn on the director's commentary to find out what is happening or what is about to happen. Exception: You may refer to a scene to set context if you intend to discuss it slightly before it occurs, e.g.: "In the next scene, Johnny accidentally sets off the bomb. This posed special challenges because...", narrated on top of a scene you otherwise have nothing to say about.
• DO discuss: Experiences you had during filming, inside jokes, cameos, alternate scripts or actor's ad-libbing, original and unused ideas for the script, what was cut and why, mistakes left in the final product, interesting history surrounding the release ("We had to delay this episode a year because of 9-11").
• DO NOT discuss special effects, unless they are extremely novel or involved novel challenges for the actors. It may still be better to save it for a featurette. Computers have done a lot of unification of special effects techniques, and as a result, they've made almost all special effect featurettes sound virtually identical. Exception: Movies from before the modern special effects era: I find early 80's or late 70's (TRON, Star Trek: The Motion Picture) special effects discussions really interesting because of how wildly different they are from modern techniques.
• DO have at least a sketch of a plan for you want to talk about.
• DO make sure that if you are going to crack jokes that they are actually funny.
• DO NOT spend a whole lot of time praising somebody you happened to work with. Yes, it seems to be part of Hollywood culture to praise someone up the wazoo everytime you mention them, but the praises are stereotypical and unconvincing, especially if you praise a lot of people. Stick with their role and at most a quick adjective.
• DO NOT be afraid to do some mimimal editing to the commentary tracks; if you crack up in laughter, make a comment to your sound guy, please edit it out. If you're not sure if someone is coming into the commentary later or if something is coming in this episode or the next, please pause the commentary and check. (It seems silly when the series creator or movie directer is mumbling something like "Does this happen in the next scene, or fifteen minutes from now?").
• DO NOT be afraid to say something negative, if you can get away with it. If the studio bothered you somehow, say so. If the actor was half drunk, go ahead and say so. Obviously, the commentary track should not be a whine tasting, and you need to consider the potential other costs rationally, but this is your best chance to say something to your True Fans, and we like a little bit of dirt sometimes.
• DO NOT include multiple commentary tracks unless the tracks add value; I recall here the American Pie commentary track with a few of the actors, which largely consisted of the actors laughing at their on-screen antics, a sort of small-audience laugh track. This does not add value. If a purchaser cares enough about the commentary tracks, then they care enough to want a quality track.
• DO drop me a line if you use this list in making a DVD commentary. ;-)

I just had pretty much the worst week ever at work, which accounts for my not posting anything this week. How bad? I just finally noticed today that I didn't post my Monday Iron Lute post.

I can only hope this week is better. Unfortunately, it doesn't show any particular signs of improving, so posts may be slowed up this week too.

This week instead of continuing on with my outline series of posts, I think I may jump ahead and discuss the file format for my outline model, which is what I'm working on right now. Designing a file format to hold the data hasn't been too hard, but it's been a bit of a brain bender trying to figure out the best way to implement it. There are a few interesting things you can do with an outline structure you can't do with a conventional flat file, and I want to make sure that those things are possible. What day this will get posted, I don't know, since I still have to write it.

Hey, good news!

A federal court upheld the constitutionality of the National Do Not Call Registry on Tuesday, finally settling a legal battle around enforcement and leaving the popular list in place for the 57.2 million registered.

You can read the opinion yourself from the court, which is graciously providing it online (PDF, Text, WPD).

The summary from the beginning of the opinion:

The four cases consolidated in this appeal involve challenges to the national do-not-call registry, which allows individuals to register their phone numbers on a national "do-not-call list" and prohibits most commercial telemarketers from calling the numbers on that list. The primary issue in this case is whether the First Amendment prevents the government from establishing an opt-in telemarketing regulation that provides a mechanism for consumers to restrict commercial sales calls but does not provide a similar mechanism to limit charitable or political calls. We hold that the do-not-call registry is a valid commercial speech regulation because it directly advances the government's important interests in safeguarding personal privacy and reducing the danger of telemarketing abuse without burdening an excessive amount of speech. In other words, there is a reasonable fit between the do-not-call regulations and the government's reasons for enacting them.

As we discuss below in greater detail, four key aspects of the do-not-call registry convince us that it is consistent with First Amendment requirements. First, the list restricts only core commercial speech i.e., commercial sales calls. Second, the do-not-call registry targets speech that invades the privacy of the home, a personal sanctuary that enjoys a unique status in our constitutional jurisprudence. See Frisby v. Schultz, 487 U.S. 474, 484 (1988). Third, the do-not-call registry is an opt-in program that puts the choice of whether or not to restrict commercial calls entirely in the hands of consumers. Fourth, the do-not-call registry materially furthers the government's interests in combating the danger of abusive telemarketing and preventing the invasion of consumer privacy, blocking a significant number of the calls that cause these problems. Under these circumstances, we conclude that the requirements of the First Amendment are satisfied.

Atom has a big hill to climb, but through skillful PR it may not look that way. What this does, as others have observed, is put a freeze on development, while we all wait for the dust to settle with Atom. We must not allow this to happen. The most important thing is to keep the ball rolling.

I support Dave. Let the Atom folk do their own thing but do not let them impose anything on us, no matter how loud they may be. Since patriotic quotes seem to be the theme today, how about the old chestnut "United we stand, divided we fall." And there is simply no reason to be divided.

Everyone's so worried about the Microsoft source leak. "It could open new security holes!" they say. But check this out, the source for Linux, a popular Microsoft competitor, has always been available, and this is promoted by its advocates saying it makes Linux more secure, not less. More programmer eyeballs looking for bugs. Maybe some white-hat types will try to check in some fixes for Windows 2000? Stranger things have happened. - Scripting News

There's no question that it was extremely fortunate that this multi-nation plan was exposed when it was, even though it's likely that either Iran or North Korea have already managed to create enough fissionables for a few weapons. It would have been far better if it had been exposed earlier, but an additional ten year delay would have been catastrophic.

There is equally no doubt at all that those revelations were a direct consequence of the war the US is prosecuting, most especially in Iraq. It is by no means clear that without our war there would have been a significant chance of the plot being exposed until too late.

Nothing returns the joy of weblogging like a new weblog management system. ;-)

In his book, Dr. Atkins recommended against consuming Nutrasweet while trying to lose weight, citing studies that suggest Nutrasweet inhibits weight loss. (I don't there's actually anything specific to the Atkins diet in that regard.) He recommends Sucralose be used instead, which as artificial sweeteners go is pretty cool: It can be used to cook with, it definately doesn't taste exactly like sugar but it's easily the closest of any artificial sweetener I've tried, and of course it has no calories in it.

[re: signing weblog comments] There could be a niche for a minimalist “sign this text” application, if PGP were to soak into general net infrastructure. - Mark Pasc

Pondering the comment issue, I've come to the same conclusion. PGP and GPG are a little too excited about high levels of security, and seem to feel that it's more important that everybody immediately jump to 100% then to allow a more gradual use of the system. (As a result, nobody does; a better way to get people's toes in the water then WWW commenting I can't imagine, but that's not an option, so instead of a 90% solution, we get a 0% solution.) I'd like to see a key type that explicitly says "I'm a low security key! My public component may be hosted on a somewhat insecure webserver, and there is at least some responsibility on the part of my owner to make sure I'm still secure!"

Incidentally, I'm planning a mini-review of PyDS against Radio Userland in a while here, but here's one thing I've gotten to work in PyDS I could never get in Radio Userland (without doing unsupported hacking on the Weblog core): Posts without titles, that actually can modify the generated HTML instead of just sticking an empty string in the template.

As you can see, I like to put boxes around my titles, and in Radio Userland, an empty title results in an empty box. Yucky. So I always wrote a title, even if I had to stretch. I'm thinking this may have inhibited some of my more off-the-cuff comments... like this one.