Category: AI and Computing

Software Tools for Scripts

On October 12, 2016

From time-to-time, I prepare scripts both in my working life and my diversions. It is surprising to me that people often ask what software I use. The flip answer is “a few billion cells between the ears.” As much as you will be told software is needed, your first priority should be storytelling. Knowing what story to tell and how to tell it counts far more than getting things into the right arrangement of 12-point Courier type. People were writing scripts long before specialized software tools came along. I recommend that anyone starting out putting their efforts (and money) into really understanding story construction. To use a quote attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright when he was asked what kind of pencils he used, he said, “It’s not the pencil, it’s the man.” The tool is not the key issue in script preparation. If you’re looking for a place to start, I usually tell people to start with Robert McKee’s Story and work their way from there.

All that said, there are software tools that can make the job easier. For research, I like having a notebook tool that integrates well with clipping from a web browser as well as taking notes, storing files, images, and other digital whatnot. My favorite these days is Microsoft OneNote 2016, which is included with most Office 365 subscriptions. I used to use Evernote, but I found their note editor lacking for my tastes and recent issues around pricing and security became a turn-off. Microsoft OneNote is in many ways a style-wise clone of the excellent but now defunct Circus Ponies Notebook on the Mac. Unlike Evernote, OneNote uses Microsoft Drive to sync or to keep notebooks 100% offline on a USB device. Some people use Literature and Latte’s Scrivener product for this, but the Windows edition is lacking in several departments, not the least of which the user interface fails to work well (out of the box) with high DPI displays like you’d find on notebooks from Microsoft, HP, Dell, and Lenovo. (I personally use a Microsoft Surface Book day-to-day and love it.)

For the actual writing of script or a screenplay, there are number of dedicate tools. Why not just use a regular word processor like Microsoft Word? Primarily to make your life easier when it comes to format. If you’re submitting material for studio filming, Hollywood has a fairly exacting (and somewhat tedious) format, devised to simulate a typewriter circa 1951. This gives a uniform pagination and readability to most scripts that is demanded by Hollywood system. For other applications of scripts (graphic novels, television, radio, marketing, stage plays) the formats are a little less exacting, and primarily exist to enhance communication with the performers and other production professionals. If you plan to submit work to a particular institution, it’s best to read up on their format—most publish their submission guidelines on the web.

Always submit material (especially unsolicited material) in the format that the receiver requests. For Hollywood-oriented material, agents and studios won’t even look at a script that is not in the standard format.

I’m primarily using Fade In Professional by Kent Tessman these days. I’ve used Movie Magic Screenwriter and Final Draft from time-to-time, but development on Screewriter has gone into hibernation (if not completely moribund) and Final Draft, even in their latest version, Final Draft 10, can’t seem to work out how to use a high-DPI display on a Windows machine such as Surface Book. After an extensive discussion with FD’s VP of support, I concluded that Final Draft was unsure when they would fix the display problem or even to what degree it is a priority to repair. Several of my friends that use Mac’s for screenwriting still swear by Final Draft as the industry standard (at least for Hollywood Screenplays), but other friends depending on relatively current PCs seem to be abandoning it. Being able to clearly read the type is a pretty basic feature for what amounts to specialty word-processor.

Why Fade In? Short answer: Easy, Reliable, and Inexpensive. Fade In uses the same TAB-ENTER paradigm for typing a screenplay that most screenplay tools use, so when you’re typing Scene headings, actions, dialog, etc. all fall into place naturally. It handles the MORE-CONTINUED pagination that is critical to correctly formatted screenplays for the major studios. It natively uses Open Script Format (an XML standard for exchanging scripts), but can handle reading and writing Final Draft’s proprietary format, and easily imports content from MM Screenwriter (which FD still can’t do well.) Being the new kid on the block, it doesn’t have a lot of celebrity endorsements (although it has picked up a few,) but it produces the clean copy you need to capture a screenplay, graphic novel, or script quickly and efficiently. It generates the same format as the others, and it’s less that a quarter of the price of Final Draft for the professional version—with the advantage that you can actually see the type on a modern laptop.

Almost all for-pay product versions have a trial version, so you can try out the different programs to see what makes the best tool for you.

If you’re looking for a zero-dollar solution, I recommend you look at Celtx. It is free for screenwriting, but if you want the bells and whistles, you’re going to be shelling out around $99/year. Adobe Story is another option, especially if you are an Adobe Creative Cloud customer.

For almost all other editing chores I use Microsoft Word. Talking to my colleagues in the comic-book industry, MS-Word is actually one of the most popular tools they use for creating scripts. If you’re specializing in this area, head over to Fred Van Lette’s pages for a free set of templates. Word is available by subscription from Microsoft and probably has more editing tools that most users need. It’s collaboration tools for markup are pretty much the standard for businesses the world over.

That’s about it for my scripting software tools. Of course, there’s other things in my bag of tricks like Powerpoint, but it’s more for collecting information together for producers and artists, than actually writing. Likewise, I keep a stable of apps on my iPad for writing, but my best investment was a small, inexpensive Bluetooth keyboard (a Logitech K380) and a lightweight portable stand. I toss both in my briefcase when I’m traveling light. I tried keyboard iPad covers, but they turned out to not be for me. I like to have my iPad light when I’m reading and the keyboard covers weighed me down. A Bluetooth keyboard gives me a quality typing experience when I need it with little fuss. It’s helped my productivity when writing more than any app on the iPad.

Tablet Buttons?

By Tom

On November 1, 2015

In AI and Computing, Art

I like sculpting with Zbrush on a tablet, but Zbrush really needs a few buttons to modify what the stylus does, notably Shift, Ctrl, and Alt. There are a handful of other functions that is handy to have working on buttons rather than menus. Unfortunately, most tablets really don’t have enough convenient buttons in place that can be easily customized. This goes for my HP Spectre x360 and the Micrsoft Surface. I’ve tried a few software solutions such as Radial Menu and TabletPCMouse, which give you pallets of onscreen “buttons.” These work well enough for “tap-and-go” functions like “save” or “undo”, but they are less effective for function modifies such as “hold down shift for smooth” or “hold down alt to reverse the stroke depth.” Because of palm rejection software/firmware, simultaneous touch and stylus is often rejected. This means it’s hard to touch the screen with a finger at the same time as the stylus. This leads to lifting the pen far enough from the screen before you can activate a screen function with your finger tip. After a while, it was clear this was “clumsy” to coordinate getting the stylus an inch from the screen before I could press a button. Tools like radial menu can make buttons “sticky” (press once for “on”, again for “off”), but this too has its workflow weaknesses by adding an extra press of a button.

It was becoming clear: I needed the feel and simplicity of buttons.

One solution was just to pair a Bluetooth keyboard, but when working with my computer in my lap or on the go, this was inconvenient and often more than I needed. I could, of course, work with the Spectre X360 in laptop mode, but this also felt a little off, because the open screen is pretty far from my face and I like the intimacy of a sketchbook feel. The tablet form factor was more comfortable than laptop form factor. I thought of building a button box out of game controller (as some have done on the TabletPCReview forums.)

Then I saw that Wacom had just released a small button box originally designed for Wacom Cintiq 27HD. It’s called the Wacom ExpressKey Remote. At $99 it isn’t cheap, but using Wacom Cintiqs and tablets, I knew they were well experienced in making artist tools. I ordered it the first day it was available, week before TechEd 2015, without hesitating. It was waiting for me when I returned.

It connects to your computer by a small USB 2 wireless transceiver that sticks out about 10mm from the side of your laptop (it would be nice if this was bluetooth instead.) The Expresskey Remote is in a thin little package about 50mm x 135mm and 10mm thick. It has a soft rubber back, so you can set it on the screen and move it around as needed. I let it sit next to the tablet on a customized lap desk that Vaughn constructed from unfinished bed desk. Despite some comments on the web, I found that you did not need any other Wacom product installed. I installed Wacom’s 6.3.15-1 driver without a Cintiq connected (although the transceiver for Expresskey Remote must be plugged in.) Wacom intends the ExpressKey Remote for use with their profession products, so your mileage may vary, but I did not need to plug in any of my other Wacom products to install or later configure the Expresskey Remote. (Hoperfully Wacom will clarify this aspect themselves in their FAQ, but as a customer of theirs for more than a decade, I wouldn’t count on it.

One install note: If you’re using Microsoft/Ntrig’s wintab driver, you may need to reinstall or “repair” it after installing Wacom’s drivers. I found that pressure sensitivity was in my stylus was lost until I repaired wintab-1.0.0.20-64.

Wacom obviously knew Zbrush users would want this. As soon as I started Zbrush, a custom template was installed for the ExpressKey Remote. It’s a great starting point to my eyes. I have so far only made one change, which was to add the “M” key in place of the one of the less use buttons. All-in-all, the 17 buttons work quite well, though my old friends, ctrl, shift, and alt are the principle ones I need. I may re-assign another button to be “ctrl-shift” simultaneously just to simplify selecting meshes. So far I haven’t felt the need to do this, but on many of my Cintiqs, I set one key aside for this just to avoid “fat finger syndrome” where I miss getting the two keys just right.

The Expresskey Remote definitely has made working with a tablet much easier and more comfortable. To me it feels similar to working on my large Cintiq 21UX, but in a nice portable package. The bottom line question I expect to be asked, is it worth $99? I’d say yes if the comfort and time for art counts. Compared to other approaches, I feel I can work faster and easier. Could it be made better? Probably. For example it would be nice to use Bluetooth rather than a proprietary receiver. Some might want fewer buttons and others more. Some might want a bigger device and others smaller. It’s hard to please all the competing ergonomics, and I have only focused on one application, Zbrush. Overall, I think Wacom has hit on the right accessory device for tablets and two-in-ones.

ASUS Zenbook UX32VD Dead iSSD Workaround

By Tom

On October 6, 2015

In AI and Computing

A little background: The ASUS UX32VD was a slick ultrabook 2-1/2 years ago. It featured an i7 Processor, 512GB of Disk with a 24GB iSSD cache and easily outfitted with 10 GB of RAM. A nice little zBrush and Photoshop machine.

My trusty unit had been running great for the last two years. Out of no-where it suddenly developed a terrible flaw: It took more than five minutes to boot, and almost as long to shutdown. Reinstalling the OS didn’t help, repartitioning the main drive didn’t help. Reloading drivers didn’t help. Wiping the system clean didn’t help. It seemed to be a motherboard problem and no combination of BIOS settings could get me around it.

A quick chat with ASUS confirmed my worst fears. It’s out of warranty, the mobo probably needs replacing and I can mail it them for diagnosing (for a fee) and likely have the motherboard replaced (for a really big fee) and pay shipping both ways. It was too much to invest in a 30-month old computer (hence I’m now typing this on an HP Spectre x360.)

What nagged at me was that after it got past booting (or shutdown), the ASUS worked reasonably well. If I could get past this strange boot-up problem, it would make a handy backup machine. I started going through the internet and found this is not a novel problem with the ASUS UX32 series. It seems that iSSD chip can fail (whether it’s the chip or its connection to the motherboard is a matter of debate) and when it goes, it causes the BIOS to have some real problems. The standard solution: replace the motherboard. Having rejected the cost of motherboard replacement, again, I was stymied.

Then I ran into his thread in the NotebookReview forums. It turns out some folks were doing the unthinkable: remove the iSSD chip from the motherboard. This was clearly a job requiring a delicate touch, finesse, and a steady hand. Putting my experience in theoretical mathematics to work, the solution was obvious: get someone else to do it.

Fortunately, I had at my disposal my roomate Vaughn, who, besides having a good nature, is a trained mechanic with steady hands, patience, and skills with all manner of tools large and small. After a bit of study and debate, we agreed we understood what chip needed to go and that with some persuasion the chip could be freed from the motherboard. The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley …

The surface mount technology for the ISSD chip was definitely pretty tough. Through warming with a soldering iron it loosened unevenly. There was a loud “snap” from the motherboard and half of the chip broke free. A suitable amount of heart stopping examination revealed the motherboard seemed intact, so Vaughn proceeded to free the remaining half of an SSD chip from the circuitry. A few minutes later, the other half chip was lying aside.

To cut a too long story short, a piece of insulating tape was applied to the wounded motherboard where the iSSD had been. A few minute of re-assembly and the old ASUS UX32VD was booting in less than 15 seconds and shutting down equally quick. It was a radical repair, but for less than a half-hour’s work, the ASUS UX32VD was returned to working condition. Definitely not for the inexperienced, but it’s several hundred dollars less than an a motherboard replacement.

Hope this helps out someone else with a mysterious misbehaving ASUS UX series!

Analytics & Advanced Analytics: What’s the difference?

By Tom

On June 14, 2015

In AI and Computing

“Advanced Analytics” is a relatively new term in the data management and data warehousing business. “Basic” analytics is relatively a straight forward affair, mostly involved in answering ad hoc questions (that is, questions that haven’t been pre-planned) about a set of stored data. Most often these are business questions such as “How many customers have bought product X but haven’t bought product Y?” or “Did the London office sell more of product T than it forecast?” The mathematics of the question isn’t very hard… generally it is basic arithmetic logic like adding up totals or perhaps computing a single average. Nothing exceptionally sophisticated or complicated.

By contrast, advanced analytics has grown out of the scale of the data we are now dealing with. Even before there was big data, we started collecting enough data that we could start process it statistically. So advanced analytics is often the intersection of large amounts and statistics. We can start to answer some more interesting questions, predictive questions likes “Based on the last 12 months sales and social media trends, can we expect to sell more drought resistant crop seeds?” or “Is the current availability of low cost transportation going to suppress the costs of moving our heavy machinery for the next six months?” These predictions can help business optimize or improve their offerings by better understanding market and customer needs.

Advanced analytics often relies upon both complex algorithms and statistical processing to tease out trends and correlations that is not directly obvious from the data. What is often overlooked is that power of advanced analytics needs to be unleashed through availability of well curated set of data in the first place. That’s where data warehouses come in and the power of high performance data management systems come in. As we see the amount data available to us continuing to build, we begin to see the data warehouse paradigm will need to shift from basic analytics towards advanced analytics.

Will Artificial Intelligence Be The End of Us?

By Tom

On April 30, 2015

In AI and Computing

Recently there has been a bit of talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) bringing about the final end of human kind. Luminaries such as Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk suggest that man will soon invent what is called “Strong AI” and it will be the end of humankind.

I personally don’t believe it.

First of all, this is all too much like the techno-driven nightmares of the twentieth century. With the industrial revolution having fully taken hold, it seemed man was always inventing better ways to kill his own kind and that inevitably the tools of total human destruction would be in hand. That threshold was likely reached with the thermonuclear device, which, in quantity, can conceivably render the planet uninhabitable. Waiting in the wings were new terrors as well, such as biologically engineered disease, pollution-driven global warming, and a host other ways to compromise the biosphere we depend on for life.

On a personal level, I’d place bets on these more proven forms of deadly technologies before I’m going to worry about my iPhone turning on me. After all, the devastating power of thermonuclear weapons can go largely unquestioned with the demonstrations of their power throughout the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. Couple with very real if theoretically demonstrated concept of nuclear winter and other devastating after effects of a mass nuclear exchange, it simply seems a more plausible way for the world to come to end. Bioengineering, also has a distinctly higher plausibility, since we’ve experienced the devastating effects of plague as a species. The Black Death left such an emotional scar on our race, we still sing about it in nursery rhymes hundreds of years later: “Ring around rosy, a pocket full of poesy…” recalls the fear of the first signs of the plague and the idea that fresh flowers in your pocket might ward off its terrible effects.

Artificial Intelligence on the other hand seems to be a much more feeble threat. For example, today we are surrounded by natural animals with varying degrees of intelligence, yet as an apex predator we feel little threat. And today, Artificial Intelligence is seldom credited with being much smarter than a mouse. The run-away effect that AI might somehow get away from us, expand its own consciousness, and throttle the life from our species seems strange if not all together implausible. Modern computer architectures as staked out by Alan Turning and John Von Neumann are ultimately deterministic. In other words, the do what they are told. Make no mistake, we can wreak a lot of havoc on ourselves by mis-programming a computer; however, the computer is only doing what we told it to do. There is no creative spark, no “will to make Evil” that a deterministic device can create of its own volition. It can only inflict on us what we will it to do. In a sense, we should fear our kind more than a soulless collection of electronic components.

The next barrier to Strong AI threatening us is whether it is even possible with our current understanding of how human consciousness works and how the machines we make might attempt to emulate it. At the end of the day, the question becomes, can a machine of our devising, with our current understanding of electronics ever become conscious?

The key here is that I believe human consciousness implies a sense of free will and the ability to exercise that free will. There are good number of reasons to believe this is true, rather than consciousness and free will merely being an epiphenomenon of electrochemical reactions in the cells of our brains. If we were to assume that human consciousness lacks free will, it would imply a host of new problems around good & evil, crime & punishment, altruism and many other distinctly human behaviors. These issues are probably worthy of a philosophical essay in its own right, but when it comes to AI destroying human kind, it is probably axiomatic that it is acting upon some form of consciousness and will.

And this becomes the problem for computing machines. Free will by definition must incorporate a non-deterministic behavior, or it isn’t free will, merely the obedience to the will of the programmer as defined in its algorithms and supplied data. The mathematician, Roger Penrose, often refers to this exercise of non-deterministic free will as intuition. He points to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem to suggest that there must be an incompleteness in our understanding of consciousness as it would relate to computers and that this incompleteness cannot be solved in a purely algorithmic way. This essentially throws into doubt that Turing machine implemented on a Von Neumann architecture can ever really be conscious. Essentially Penrose’s argument, best framed in The Emperors New Mind (1989), suggest that a conscious computer, self-aware, or even “spiritual” is, at present, quite unlikely. (Penrose does make allowances that advancements in quantum theory might ultimately unlock some of the mystery of conscious, but to date his theories remain speculative.)

So although some the super-rich technologists entertain the press with prophesies of doom, for me it looks the old villains are still more frightening. It is a re-telling of Frankenstein with transistors. If the end comes by our own hand, I suspect the hangman will still have a human face.