On Saturday I saw a performance of Dealer’s Choice, a play about male ego, stupidity, throwing good money after bad, and not knowing when to quit. Although I can wholeheartedly recommend the play, I evidently didn’t learn anything from it, because it didn’t stop me wasting a whole load of time over the weekend trying to get a good result out of Windows Movie Maker.

Movie Maker is an "easy and fun" video editing application that ships as an embedded part of Microsoft’s recent Windows operating systems. It has a relatively poor reputation, so I should have steered well clear, but I kind of accidentally got sucked in to using it. And initially I started to feel that it wasn’t actually all that bad.

Anyway, the details of why I ended up using it are unimportant. Suffice to say that I now feel its poor reputation is deserved and I won’t be using it again. But, male ego being what it is, I didn’t know when to quit. Along the way I learned some lessons that I’d like to pass on to other unfortunate mugs like me, who are having problems with Windows Movie Maker:

1. If you’re tempted to use Windows Movie Maker, don’t.
2. If you’ve ignored step 1 and find you have a completed Movie Maker (.MSWMM) project file, you may surprise yourself and be quite pleased with the result. By which I mean it may look quite good in preview mode. However, the best bet is to give up now. Don’t be tempted to click “Save Movie File” on the File menu, to export a finished edit. It will only lead to heartache and disappointment.
3. If you’ve ignored step 2, you may find that the .WMV file created by Movie Maker exhibits a picture-size different from your source material. Movie Maker only exports in the frame sizes and bit-rates it deems suitable, so if they don’t suit you, then the best bet is to give up. You may also find that the audio on your file sucks. I mean sucks. Like you’re listening to the audio with a kazoo jammed in each ear. Give up now.
4. I’m assuming you’re pressing on. Download Microsoft’s Windows Media Encoder. Unlike Movie Maker, this is a decent program, albeit a relatively unfriendly one. Don’t be tempted to ignore its onerous system requirements: if your PC isn’t up to snuff then give up now. The software will run on a sub-spec PC but it will produce movies that look like Ray Harryhausen shot them in 1955.
5. Media Encoder will let you resize your WMV file and it will do a reasonable job of preserving visual clarity and audio fidelity. You will probably need to go back to Movie Maker and create a new WMV source file using the “High quality video (large)” setting. Then you can use Media Encoder to create a file at the exact frame size and bit rate that you wanted originally. You may be lucky enough to get a good result from this. However, if you’ve used any fragments of non-native audio in your Movie Maker file - MP3 music, say - then Movie Maker is still going to bite you. No matter what quality setting you choose, it will create a WMV file that sounds like a bee has flown into your ear. Media Encoder can’t fix this. The best course at this point is to give up.
6. If you’re still with me, you poor deluded fool, then you may have acceptable visuals with terrible sound. You’ll need to use something else to edit any sounds that you’ve added like background music. Go back to Movie Maker and make notes on the timing of your introduced sounds. Then delete them, and create a new, high-quality WMV without them. Check any remaining audio. If the native audio is still hopeless, you will need to give up. If it’s acceptable, then you can run the file through Encoder again to get the frame size and bit rate you want.
7. Take the audio fragments you wanted and, referring to your notes, use an audio editor - Audacity, say - to create a new file of the right length, with the right sounds in the right places to match your Movie Maker visuals. Take the resulting MP3 file and use Media Encoder to convert it to the Windows Media Audio (.WMA) format. Then locate Windows Media Stream Editor (it will have arrived when you installed Media Editor). This lets you combine different media streams into a single output file (confusingly called an Audience). Use it to splice your WMA audio overlay with the WMV visuals and audio.
8. You may now have a WMV file of acceptable quality. Enjoy it, but learn your lesson. Don’t go near Movie Maker again.

Update, 29 Jan 08:
A simpler alternative to steps 6-8 is to pass any MP3 files or other non-native audio through the Media Encoder to create .WMA files. These can then be readily dropped into Movie Maker's Audio/Music track and edited in-place as required. This will provide acceptable, but certainly not hi-fi, audio for your movie.

Why would anyone complain about the government's announcement of £140m funding for science and maths teaching in schools? It seems like a good move all round, right?

Employers’ group the CBI is full of praise, with the body’s director of human resources policy, Susan Anderson, saying, “This is very welcome investment which should lead to more specialist science teachers who can be inspirational, confident and enthusiastic about their subject. That is crucial if we are to raise young people's interest and attainment in science, technology, engineering and maths subjects and if the UK is to stay a leading world economy, able to compete with the emerging economic powerhouses of China and India.”

I’d be enthusiastic too, had I not been collared at the weekend by an apoplectic particle physicist. Rather than probing the inner workings of the universe, my academic friend is currently staring into a financial black hole. Tearing at his remaining hair he railed against the kind of blinkered central-government budgeting that advances funds to build a research centre one year and then denies the funds to run it the next. More than 10,000 scientists have signed petitions complaining about this year's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) spending plans, and an £80m shortfall that will see lots of researchers looking for new posts. And with the funding crisis affecting the whole of the UK, a lot of good people will naturally be forced to look overseas.

So while I applaud moves to encourage our most intelligent young people to pursue a career in science and technology, it would be helpful if the money were made available to hang on to the brainboxes we already have.

The following is a list of mistakes recently made that really ought to have been obviously iffy from the outset:
1.    When providing IT to a distant retired relative for the first time, don’t forget to install remote access technology. After many painful sessions on the phone asking, “What does it say on your screen now?” I’ve since made a personal visit and installed LogMeIn. Which is bliss as long as the problem is not being unable to get online, with which remote access cannot help. 
2.    For reasons that are blindingly obvious, when organising two roundtable events for two different brands at the same time on the same day, don’t hold one at a Gaucho restaurant and the other at the Groucho Club.
3.    For reasons that are scarily obvious, when building a new airliner, don’t install a single data infrastructure for both critical flight data and passenger internet access. Unless you particularly want your approach to Heathrow to be controlled by the nine-year-old in row 27 via his PlayStation Portable.
4.    For reasons that are not at all obvious, don’t stay logged into your web email or online bank account in one tab while browsing other sites in another. As Tim Anderson relates, you could easily end up doing a Jeremy Clarkson.
5.    As Clarkson proved, don’t blather on about things that you know nothing about. Which is a good reason for this particular post to stop now.

Today, via Dennis Howlett, I reached the blog of Charles H. Green, which is focused on the issue of trust in business. It’s well worth bookmarking. I particularly liked Green’s simple observation that “the best way to be trusted is to actually be trustworthy”, a tenet that my bank used to appreciate but seems to have forgotten over the last 18 months.

Today, Green has posted about loyalty and credit cards, but there is a lesson or two for everyone in it.

Green first notes the following three reasonable business principles:

1.  Profit is a measure of business activity effectiveness
2.  Measurement is a valuable tool for management
3. Activities can be disaggregated into smaller, measurable activities.

And then lists the three bastard children into which the above have evolved:

1a.  Every business activity has value only insofar as it increases profit
2a.  If you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it
3a.  Anything worth measuring is even better measured in shorter durations and smaller units.

As Green goes on to say, “This extreme thinking has meant that the management of business these days is centred on short-term profit manipulation - not on long-term value creation.”

I’ve heard 2a, in particular, from quite a few enterprise application vendors. It makes me wonder how much responsibility the tech sector should bear for the metamorphosis of reasonable business methods into the short-termist, self-defeating competitive lunacy that we see all around us.