I am currently working on my first movie since moving to Berlin - it's a short for the admission to the DFFB film academy here in Berlin. The movie tells the story of Paul, a young man who has filed an application for an "allowance of emotions" about 7 months ago, but he still hasn't received it. Upon inquiring, he is told that the allowance was denied - to learn the reason why, he has to file a protest. Whether this is a good idea remains to be seen...

Shooting has been completed last week, I am currently busy cutting the film. It will probably be finished by mid-december, and will go online at UTV early next year. Stay tuned for more info!
 

I just completed a first version of a backup-script that shuts a few apps down that lock important files, starts a backup-process and waits 'till completion, then sends the computer into hibernate. I run this script now before I go to bed, this way everything gets backed up at a time when I know it doesn't bother me, yet as soon as it's done it goes into hibernate mode to save electicity.

The script is attached below. It is written using the nifty AutoHotKey software. It uses peters backup as a backup solution and Wizmo to send the computer into hibernate mode. The script is a simple textfile so adjust anything according to your needs. I left all the paths I used in the script so that you have an idea of a real-world scenario.

I recently implemented a custom locking mechanism for files that works through creating a file with the same name and .lock appended. When the file exists, another user of my program has the file locked, when it does not exist the file is not locked. Inside the lock file I store only the name of the user who owns the lock, so that communication can take place between the users.

For this, I wanted to open the .lock file with the option FileOptions.DeleteOnClose and FileShare.Read . This however, does not work, because DeleteOnClose does not allow FileSharing! Since this is not documented anywhere and apperently never came up in any newsgroup, I thought I’d post it here. The solution it seems is to take care of deleting the file when you close it.

Photos are online now from our trip to paris in early october. Check them out.

For those of you who don't know the term "slashdotted" - slashdot.org is a geek site that has an amazing amount of visitors where links to interesting websites are posted. This often has the effect of "killing" a webpage that gets a link from slashdot, because all of a sudden several thousand users want to access it. Well, I haven't yet had the honor to be linked at slashdot, but Gregors e-mail about the wedding pictures we put online on this site had a similar effect to our poor server. See the statistics here.

In other news, I'm back in Berlin and attended a coming-together of a bunch of short filmers from germany, most of them from Berlin (Kudos to Marc for organizing this great event!). Even though I couldn't be there all the time, I'm glad I could participate in the inspiring talks.

One of the topics that I was particularly interested in was the distribution of short films via the internet. Berndt from the Bundesverband Jugend und Film is currently trying to organize a national (for now) database for young no/low budget directors to inform themselfes about and, at a later point in time, submit their films online to several german and international film festivals. Interesting stuff! We talked about the problem of getting as many films online as possible - like UTV does in Vienna. Since every movie that gets submitted to such a system has to be screened (to secure the system against politically or otherwise unacceptable or illegal material), a system such as this one would benefit enormously from the screening systems already in place at many festivals around the country.

This of course means a preselection that is biased. One idea I presented that has been growing in my head for a few weeks now is to use peer to peer software such as BitTorrent to distribute shorts without a need for huge servers with limitless capacity and bandwidth. A network of blogs and newsletters could direct attention to some outstanding work from a bottom-up perspective. Since this is a complicated matter, I will write a special blog entry about how I envision such a system in the next couple of days. Stay tuned!