Month: January 2013

How to make Movie Barcodes (OS X)

Inspired by the movie barcode tumblr I wanted to make some barcodes of my wife’s films.

Here’s one I made for her latest short:

I found some instructions on Mr. Reid’s site and with the help of the comments and some tinkering I came up with this final process on OSX.

You will need mplayer and ImageMagick installed, both of which can be found in MacPorts.

$ mkdir /tmp/barcode
$ cd /tmp/barcode
$ mplayer -framedrop -speed 100 -vf framestep=90 -nosound -vo jpeg [path/to/movie-file]
$ mogrify *.jpg -resize 1x288\! *.jpg
$ montage -geometry +0+0 -tile x1 *.jpg barcode.png

If deployment hurts, do it again.

Frequent painful deployments force you to automate and improve the process.

Your development environment may be wonderful. Your test coverage may be high. But your code has to go live. If that’s an infrequent process of giant merges and close-your-eyes-and-hope code pushes you risk bugs. “Little and often” reduces risk and decreases pain.

The logical conclusion: continuous deployment.