How to create a decent fansub in two to three hours

Fansubbing is kind of a hobby of mine, and in the time I've been doing it I've collected a lot of tricks for speeding up the process (and then come up with a few of my own). Currently, the only groups I know of that even come close to three hours do so by cutting out major portins of the subbing process (like, say, editing and QC :p); the groups that do decent quality speedsubs generally do so in a 12-24 hour timeframe.

You will need:
1 encoder, with a fast Internet connection (or better yet, a server dedicated to encoding)
1 or more translators
1 timer (the person who synchronizes the subtitles with the video)
2-3 editors / QCers
1 typesetter (the person that places/styles signs correctly, and stuff like that)
Some kind of collaborative editing system, there are a couple of good ones
Plenty of motivation

Step 0. Encoder downloads the raw, and creates a workraw. A workraw is a raw that's had commercials cut in the same way they'll be cut in the final release, and is usually encoded at a low bitrate. With some raws, such as TV-Japan raws, this can be omitted since the raw is already cut pretty well. (30 minutes)
Step 1: Everybody downloads the workraw. (5-15 minutes, depending on connection speeds)
Step 2: Translation (30 minutes or so)
Step 3: Timing (30-45 minutes, depending on the timer)
Step 4: Editing / QC / Typesetting - These three jobs are traditionally separated, but they're similar enough that they can be combined into one step if you're in a hurry. The fastest thing is for all the editors and QCers to work on the script collaboratively, since at this point there should be no more structural changes to the script. Meanwhile, the typesetter can do their thing, and merge in the changed lines. (1 hour)
Step 5: Final encode - During all this, the encoder should have been doing the final encode(s?), and they should be uploaded by this point. (2 hours)
Step 6: Mux - With softsubs, the finished script can be added to the video in a few seconds, from the command line.
Step 7: Party :3

Notes:

Pipelining: You can often get some not-insignificant speedups by splitting the episode into chunks of a few minutes, and doing those individually.

The main problem with this method is the difficulty of getting everybody together in one place at the same time, which is probably why it doesn't happen. In the group I'm in we tried it once, and despite the usual problems associated with trying anything for the first time, we managed to sub an episode of Naruto from start to finish in about three hours. 

Some neat stuff I saw at Maker Faire

A few weeks ago, I went to Maker Faire here in Austin. Maker Faire is a fair primarily sponsored by MAKE magazine, and built around the idea of making things yourself. Needless to say, there was a lot of cool stuff:

Mad science blocks - These things kind of speak for themselves, actually. Because really, do you know any kids that are getting enough mad science in their lives?

The Diet Coke and Mentos guys - Now imagine this video, but live. It was really neat to see, even though there was enough of a crowd to prevent me from seeing very much. Afterward, they handed out the (mostly empty) bottles of Diet Coke - apparently it tasted minty for some reason. >_>

Robot battles - Do you remember those TV shows they used to have, where the robots would go into an arena and try to destroy each other? (If not, you seriously missed out.) After taking that robotics class last year, I feel like I could probably design a way better robot than the ones we saw; maybe I should try it sometime.

Musical Tesla coils - The video explains it better than I could, actually. This was by far one of the coolest things I saw that weekend.

CNC Lasers - Seriously, who doesn't enjoy watching things getting cut with lasers.

Rattlesnake skeleton bike - Yes, it's an actual bike; no, I didn't get a chance to ride it. Just watching it was pretty impressive in itself, though.

That's all for now; there was more cool stuff, but if I don't start studying for the tests I have tomorrow then I will literally die. :(

Late post #1

So, it seems that somehow, in the rush to finish my networks project, the frustration of having it fail for no reason, and the eventual realization (five minutes before the project is due) that the bug I'm chasing is actually in their code, I forgot to blog today. :( Lame justification: not asleep yet, so it's still the 5th. >_>

Here is a blog post which I have only just realized that I have wanted to write for a long time.

5 things I hate about Firefox:

1. Memory usage - I know, I know, people have been whining about this forever. I have heard time and time again the arguments in favor of Firefox's memory use: It aggressively caches stuff to make browsing faster, it scales its memory usage based on the amount of RAM you have, blah, blah, don't really care. The least it could do is free memory from closed tabs, but apparently un-closing tabs is a common enough case that Firefox needs to keep them around basically indefinitely. On my system the other day, after having Firefox open for only a few days, it was sitting on over four hundred MB of RAM, with one tab open. Here's an idea: Let me manage my own damn RAM. :(
2. Image scaling - This one stands out pretty badly, now that Firefox 3 supports page zooming. When you zoom in on a page, the text looks really nice, and the images look like blobs of massive oversized pixels. For some reason, Firefox can't do any better than nearest-neighbor scaling; meanwhile, mplayer can do Lanczos image scaling in real-time on an HD video stream. I've heard that image scaling actually looks much better on linux, though, which brings me to the next point...
3. Halfhearted Linux support - I'll give an example. On Linux, if you don't have Gnome installed, the application selector is just a big blank box. This is a known bug, the solution is pretty obvious (have some kind of KDE and/or generic fallback), but somehow nobody's actually gotten around to fixing it. If you're going to support a platform, then actually support it; don't just put something together that will work for most users, most of the time.
4. Malicious web pages can really mess you up - Can somebody please tell me why web pages were ever allowed to create windows, move them around, resize them, and do various other things that can crash Firefox, or even your computer? This bug is my favorite example - the problem is well understood, the solutions are well understood, people are actively exploiting it, and it's no closer to getting fixed than the day it was reported. Also, look at the date on the bug. If you know your history, you'll realize something else neat - this bug is almost twice as old as Firefox. The bug was reported eight years ago today, and Firefox was first released as Firefox in mid-2004.
5. Plugin compatibility breaking - I'm usually an early adopter, so I always have the latest version of Firefox when it's released. Unfortunately, with major upgrades, this usually means a few weeks spent without some subset of the plugins I use. Since plugins are a major reason I'm still on Firefox, this is kind of a big deal. It's not only a pain for me; plugin developers also have it rough, since they have to choose between keeping their plugin constantly updated for API changes, or letting it die a slow death. Is it really that hard to make a consistent plugin interface and stick to it?
   

Requisite politics post

At the time of this writing, I don't know who's going to win this election. Obama seems pretty likely to win, and that makes me happy, because if I ever had to say the words "President Palin", I'd probably have to kill myself first. McCain seems not so bad, and as politicians go he's definitely one of the better ones, but Palin just worries me.

But, that's not what I'm planning to talk about today. My impetus for writing this post is this. Somehow, I've ended up on the spam lists of both major parties, so I've been reading both sides of what the party faithful are hearing. (I'm kind of like a double agent, I guess?) And let me tell you, there's a huge difference between Democratic and Republican political spam; it's like night and day.

Democratic political spam is pretty straightforward - begging for money and volunteers. The overall mood is pretty upbeat, though, which makes sense, given the whole "yes we can" motif the Obama camp has going. There are definitely some smear emails, but not as many as you'd expect. I'd estimate that less than a third of the emails I get are even about the other guy.

Republican political spam, on the other hand, is just scary. This isn't just me being a narrowminded liberal blogger, either. It seems like the Republican party has decided that the best way to get out the vote is to make the party faithful absolutely terrified of the prospect of an Obama presidency. The emails are full of phrases like "crushing tax hike" or "defeat in the middle east" or "unstoppable liberal majority" or "the Apocalypse". That last one wasn't actually in any emails, but honestly, it wouldn't have shocked me to see it, such has been the overall tone.

If there's one thing I am sincerely hoping for out of this election, it's that Obama's (predicted) victory sends a message to the GOP: We're not as scared as you think you are, and we can't be chased around that easily by bogeymen.

Super five-minute post!

So, I *totally* almost forgot to blog today, but it's okay because I can definitely write this post in the next five minutes. If not for DST I'd be even more screwed I suppose, but it happens. I have a post written in my head for tomorrow already, as it happens, but I'd rather not move it up to today since I don't really want to talk about politics for two days in a row. So, today will be one of the emergency posts I've prepared in my head: webcomics!

Now that Dresden Codak has actually finished the Hob arc, I don't feel quite so bad recommending it to people. It's a pretty nifty transhuman sci-fi story, and the art is really neat too. Pretty much the only downside was DC's weird perfectionism, combined with his tendency toward debilitating injuries, which usually led to comics getting released on a monthly schedule, or worse. DC's regular comics are much less structured than the Hob arc, and were all basically standalone comics; now that the arc is done, nobody's really sure what the comics will be like. Well, except that they'll be awesome.

Another awesome webcomic that everybody should read is Dinosaur Comics. This is pretty much the polar opposite of DC, as the art is basically nonexistent - he uses the same pictures every single day, for crying out loud! And yet, somehow, the writing is incredibly good; of the webcomics I read, Dinosaur Comics is the one that's the most consistently funny.

(Hmm, I'm past my time limit. May as well write this properly, then. >_> Flimsy justification: the day doesn't really end until I go to sleep, right?)

Gunnerkrigg Court: I hate to compare this one to Harry Potter, but the comparison is probably unavoidable - the setting and the mood of the stories is just too similar. The story follows Annie (short for Antimony), as she explores Gunnerkrigg Court, as well as her own mysterious past.

Somehow, five minutes became fifteen, but whatever. Close only counts in horseshoes and blogging, or something like that, anyway.

EDIT: So, apparently, Blogger saves the post time as the time that you *start* writing. Therefore, victory! :3

The unbearable lightness of beginning

A problem I have always had, and which I don't anticipate getting rid of anytime soon, is my tendency to start projects and then leave them half-done. Over the past few years, I've accumulated some depressing number of incomplete projects, which I left with every intention of coming back within a few days, a few weeks, eventually. Starting things is easy and fun, finishing them is... usually not.

You may legitimately ask, "Why are you bringing this up now?" Certainly, it seems like tempting fate, to blog about my history of not finishing things the day after I've started. But, it's not like tempting fate ever works, and even if it did I have awesome luck. Everything will probably work out just fine. (Is that just tempting Fate more? We'll see, we'll see. :3)

I suppose all projects kind of have the same life cycle - there's the beginning part, where all the core work gets done, when everything's still pretty novel and interesting. Then there's the middle part, where interest slowly wanes until you stop working on it altogether. There's never really an end part, unfortunately; the project ends not with a bang, but with a whimper.

(Aside: this is probably why the UNIX pipe model works so well, now that I think about it. Simple programs that you pipe into/out of have much lower overhead in terms of miscellaneous stuff you have to do to get it working, so a greater portion of your time can be spent on the interesting bit, and you can actually finish the program before you get bored of it.)

Then, there's also the ADD factor; once you've begun something, you're susceptible to random urges and obligations pulling you away, sometimes indefinitely. For example, I have to go do readings for government now

Na Blo Po Mo?

So there I was, sitting around and planning to do homework or something all November, when suddenly my awesome friend Kiriska asked me to go and write stuff nonstop for the entire month instead. Well, it turns out I'm too much of a wimp for NaNoWriMo (maybe next year), but NaBloPoMo seems a little more doable. >_>

I kinda have a problem with NaBloPoMo, though. Other than "make a post every day", which is kind of vague and easy to squirrel out of, NaBloPoMo doesn't really set any goals, which makes it a little hard to get excited about. To keep myself honest, then, I'm kinda revising the goal, from one post per day to one worthwhile post per day. (Granted, I'd probably do this anyway, but it's more fun if I actually say it, right?)

The trouble, of course, is that I was already kinda overloaded before this month, and I'm not really expecting that to change much. So, expect some occasional inevetable complaining during this month. I figure that blogging will probably cut into my "screwing around on the internet" time, which is good - I really need to cut from it more often, honestly.