just found
iptraf
and it is real nice and handy tool so see what is going on the network ports.
Very helpful.
Category: internet
Just saw the Boards Summit opening reel:
They made a big deal about the QR Code.
But INTERDUBS clients can use QR Codes since January
We like it that way.
Back in the day an electron beam was running across the TV screen. NTSC was running with 30 and PAL with 25 frames a second. If the beam would go line by line the screen would flicker. The solution was, to let it run twice over the screen for each frame: Once for all odd lines (1,3,5 etc) and then again for all the even ones (2,4,6). That looked better. It is called ‘interlaced’. Each of these passes is a ‘field’.
Film cameras liked to run at 24 frames per second. Cinema does not flicker since each frames is shown twice, but that is not the point here.
When you have 24 fps footage and your TV runs at 30fps, what do you do? The solution was to insert a so called 3:2 pulldown to make 30 frames out of 24. This was done based on 60 fields to make it look smooth.
Interlacing is dead. There are no electron beams going over glass tubes to make images to speak of.
If you like to compress an NTSC spot that was shot on film, and that has the 3:2 pulldown in it, then you should go back to the 24fps version first. Since I could not find anything that worked I developed this. In 1998. Then, in 2008, I needed it again, and so I looked again. Much to my surprise, nothing really worked the way it should be. Many tools have the button to do an ‘inverse telecine’. But none detect cuts and deal with changing cadence patterns. So, I wrote it again. This time based on quicktime.
I decided to give it away: 32none is a free tool now.
Enjoy.
A great idea implemented right can be so freaking awesome. I started using replylater.com and I must say it is great!
I tend not to get excited about computers, websites, software and services that much anymore.
replylater.com is different.
it is so simple:
For instance. you send / forward an email to tomorow@replylater.com
and it will send it back to you tomorrow.
Google should buy replylater.com and make this an internal feature of gmail. They don’t need to technically. It would be just a nice acknowledgment.
My project management is much based around email. At any point I have between ten and thirty projects going in the same time. And I need my head for something else, then to keep them all in there.
With a mail based workflow it is actually pretty easy to juggle so many things. replylater.com just adds a wonderful time dimension to it.
really love it.
For years now there have been gmail keyboard shortcuts. Finally enabled them. After 2 hours I can not wait to get more email so that I can handle it without reaching for the mouse. Extremely awesome.
Dennis Baron’s book “A Better Pencil” does not only has a nice title, but going by this Salon Interview it seems to well worth the read.
I tend to disagree with him when he proclaims:
And the funny thing is that you could put anything out there, and somebody is going to read it.
I think there is an awful lot of things that get written today and that will never be read. And not only on Twitter. We tend to apply the existing rules, concepts and understandings for way to long. Cars looked as if you were to put a horse in front of them for way to long. In the past if something got written then it indeed got read. Varying audience. But since publication cost was significant filters on many levels made sure that it was recoverable.
Now publication cost is zero. Yet, we still assume that we publish it and they will view it. This does no longer apply, since their is simply not enough readership to go around.
The corpus of unread things we cared to write is not a bad thing in itself. If we were aware then it would regulate itself.
The error of an assumed audience becomes expensive when you pour resources into something that will never find an audience that justifies the efforts that went into it. That video that you crafted so nicely for your company was not worth it when only a couple hundred people will ever watch it. Company websites cost sometimes 5 dollars or more per visitor. A visitor that most of the time will have forgotten about it after 2 seconds.
September 26th 2000 I started to count how many pages google had for specific terms. I am moving some data around, so while it was going by on a terminal window it caught my eye. Here some excerpts:
Peace
was: 6,290,000 today: 258,000,000 41x
War:
was: 16,000,000 today: 865,000,000 54x
Sex:
was: 24,200,000 today: 650,000,000 26x
Love:
was: 24,900,000 today: 1,500,000,000 60x
Apple:
was: 5,920,000 today: 342,000,000 57x
Microsoft:
was: 15,000,000 today: 503,000,000 33x
Linux:
was: 27,500,000 today: 301,000,000 11x
An interesting look at actual web usage of news papers. I like how the author takes abstract numbers and puts them in a meaningful context.
Newspapers used to run things. They used to be everywhere. In Paris a couple of weeks ago I realized at some point that we had not seen anybody reading a paper. Even books were rare. It was not only a sudden but also a complete change of habits.
I think we have no actual idea what this means and will mean for the future. Technology develops in a certain pace determined by the problems to be solved and the momentum and financial interests behind it. Peoples use and application thereof is a completely different story.
In hindsight things seem to make sense. But actually only if you choose to ignore facts that don’t fit the pattern. Texting for instance, now a billion dollar revenue stream for cellphone carriers, was never intended to be used by people. It was considered a byproduct of some engineering mode for cell phones.
The invention of the Kinetoscope preceded the existence of movies as we know them by more than a decade.
Technology for pre – internet media was unable to adopt. It took great efforts to shoe-horn color into black and white TV signals. 35mm was the dominantly width in use of film strips used in movies as long as movies existed, and before they became digital.
The internet connects mostly computers with each other. This simple fact puts it into its own league as far as media technology is concerned. MySpace goes and Twitter comes at break neck speed. Limited only by peoples imagination and their willingness to adopt.
Trying to apply mechanisms and rules from ‘old media’ in the Internet space will be as successful as the applications of lessons learned from WW1 was helpful to France when they felt save behind the Maginot line.