Category: misc

Dodge 600

misc

Last August I stopped working at Method Studios in Santa Monica. Among other things I did their website. Today a new design and back end went live at www.methodstudios.com. I have nothing to do with this version of the site. Of course I have an opinion about it:

To make things overall lighter is a nice touch. That’s where the good news about the new site ends. It’s design is cluttered. “Copyright 2005” prominently points to what seems to have been a rather long internal process. (Has been corrected.) Much care went into the usability of the original ‘dark site’. It tried to connect people quickly with the content that they would be looking for. None of this is left. Changes in navigations are sometimes needed. But ignoring years of user interaction is plain stupid and arrogant.

Method Studios had a website from it’s inception in 1998. The concept of the site was to show all the work that the company had ever worked on. At least this has not been changed. Just that it’s connection with search engines and users will be different and in parts is broken.

The internet has changed since Method’s site went online. It is saddening to me to see that none of these changes were able to alter the current site. It’s just a failed rip off.
It reminds me strongly of the Dodge 600

tape robot error

misc

If you should run an exabyte 1×7 robot and get an error message like:


libTool V1.62 - (c) 2002-2004 Exabyte Corp.

/dev/sg0 - Device recognised as Exabyte Magnum 1x7
/dev/sg0 - Closing the door...Sense=04H [Hardware error], ASC/ASCQ=44H/00H
Internal target failure
Failed

when you try to load a LTO tape, then make sure, that the Barcode faces IN. The arrow on the cratridge might lure you into doing it the other way round and will result in this cryptic error message.

Aperture 1.5

confessions of a pixel pusher misc

Aperture 1.5
Finally it can deal with images that it has NOT ingested into it’s own ‘vault’ system.
Took Discreet Autodesk Advanced Media Division years to figure that out for moving images.
Apple was faster, but started with the 1.0 Version in the wrong direction nevertheless. Apple is very very secretive with their product developement. Great if you want to fill the pockets of the world population with mp3 players. Not so great in the pro Application space: People making their living with and around a software will give you very very good quality feedback, information and direction. If you set up a couple of coders and mad scientists in a lab, and let them boil in their own juice for a while, you get something interesting. But also something that more often than not will not fit into the real world. Like Apertures file handling.

ramadan

misc

Ramadan started today. I am glad that I am not in a country that observes it. No food during the day. After dawn people try to make up for what they missed during the day. Big freaking food orgies. Men shop for food during the days, and of course they buy allot, being hungry and all. Then the women have to cook it, and throw most if it away. Rinse. Repeat. One month of that.

an alternative approach

confessions of a pixel pusher misc

Just heard an interesting interview with Jon Favreau who will make Iron Man the movie. At some point the show should be available as a podcast

He seems to consider carefully where to use CG, and where not to. He cited “Top Gun” allot, which I saw for the first time yesterday. Which would be in itself worth a longish blog post, but I have to work today. Sundays are great for work, since there are less interuptions.

d new tunes

Apple misc

iTunes 7. It’s blue. Again? Wasn’t it already? Album art is nice, yet also scary: I think you need an iTunes login to use this feature. So in theory Apple knows what Music you have. They say that they will not keep this data. It would be a big blow if they would. For everybody. I wonder if the RIAA sharks start to circle the infinite loop.

Apple could use this data. Big time. Imagine what kind of data mining they could do. Knowing about the Music collections of millions of people. Think Amazon’s ‘people that bough this also bought that’ feature on steroids.

Just let’s pretend that Apple sticks to their word. And let’s hope that as well.

Video playback is nicer now. It was actually a horrible hack: “Ze Frank” was mostly tugged away in the lower left corner of the interface.

red on youtube

misc

the RED presentation on YouTube

saturday links

misc

some known and some unknown OS X shortcuts and functions

rare good review of “idiocracy”

google movie reviews are actually kind of usefull. Just prepend your search with movie:

It looks like somebody is benefiting from Sony’s PS3 debakle: This is waiting dot com from the same people (person?) that brought the world Wii60. Wii60s tagline is that youshould buy a Nintendo Wii and a Xbox 360 instead of one Sony PS3. Cost would be probably the same. Of course neither Ninento nor Microsoft could sponsor such a site. Sony does through their actions. Why the site owner do it? Simple: Money. It’s an easy way to get traffic to host these things in time. And if that does not help then you add a little bit of search engine spam:
if you scroll down on this page then you see how that looks these days

the red camera creates images

confessions of a pixel pusher misc

It seems that the Red camera does create images. People say so. I have not seen them myself, nor did I have personal contacts with the people involved yet. But at this point I have to write that I did not think that the Red camera would get that far. Still miles to go to be a solution. But, again, my assessment needs correction. I thought we would see images mid next year and would be underwhelmed by them. I was wrong it seems.

6 years in five minutes and other links

misc

Noah Kalina

Paris a la Banksy

google news archive