I have no idea how I came about to find this site devoted to the Scanimate System. I did order both DVDs and am very happy to have done so: They give a very interesting peek into the technology, art etc of those times. Who knew that I would find out eventually how all those apparently not hand drawn animations I saw on Sesame Street were done.
Category: technology
This ‘news’ about generating energy from burning saltwater is ridicolous bullshit.
Here we are, using those internets, which are run on computers (just ask Homer) and other products of science to mock it’s very contents and basic laws.
Of course it is an extreme example. But the same principle seem to apply frequently: Those creationists should be consequent and stop using the products and merits of science. All of them. If they don’t like what science has discovered.
Two hundred years ago when people even in the more developed countries were dying left right and center on odd diseases and epidemics there simply was no question: Science was good. Now, that we are reaping all those benefits and so many of us have these careless existences some people think, that the current state of society and wellfare would just be ‘normal’, or god given.Well, it is not. The default is much much more grim. Over the last four hundred years people worked really really hard to make all this possible. It was not easy to harvest all this knowledge our econimies and factories run on. All these efforts were based on the absence of stupity. Now it seems as if some people start to take stupid stuff serious. Since it seems that they can afford to. People living in Rome two thousand years ago were in a similar position. Why would they care? Of all Shakespear plays I liked Coriolanus the least. Now that’s starting to change. Somehow I think that it’s message is not that off after all.
Good thing that the new iPod touch from Apple is compatible with Interdubs. Quiet a nice player for all those commercials being made that are hosted in Interdubs. And, upside: you get to see how things will look on this player from day one.
Voyager still has contact with earth.
It looks like there is all sorts of stuff flying arond out there.
The other day I saw an image of the Pioneer Plaque and wondered if Nasa would be free to send almost authentical depections of naked people into space these days.
NAB 2006 Red announced a new camera, and I wrote that it would never be a reality. Well, not quiet that, but I thought it would not go anywhere. I was wrong. Cameras up to serial number 25 have been shipped and there are an amazing number of orders. Fxguide has anice article about the delivery of Red Camera #22.
I find it very impressive that a couple of dedicated people were able to pull this off. The deadlines announced during the launch of the brand did slip. But keeping those would have been a miracle. It seems that the way RED handled the delay and other modification to their initial plans was what saved the day. People are still happy and excited about the device.
Now comes the interesting part: How will the images intergrate. How much of difference does the real life existence of the RED camera actually make.
Of course I can not resist to follow a failed prophecy with another one: It’s not gonna change that much. It’s not only the camera that makes a movie a movie.
Interdubs hit another milestone: I just pushed code update number 500. One of the beauties of an internet application that you host is that the code can be changed easily. All clients always run the current version. Since all information of interdubs exists in a database it is pretty easy to update and change code. Users suggest things, and it is often quicker to just write the feature and see how it is been used. If it is not gets used then it will go away again. That is the other beauty of a web application: you can see exactly how people are using the application. When I develop the interdubs code I usually develop it in a test segment. Once it works, or at least I have convinced myself that it would, I publish or ‘push’ it all client segments. I wrote a little version control system for this, and one of the features is that it does count the updates that went live. And just now I did update number 500. Five hundred times I put my results out there to make Interdubs better. It’s fun. For me and for the people that use Interdubs. Seing your suggestions and ideas getting implemented is encouraging users to think what could be better. Most of what makes Interdubs so useful resulted from user feedback. I just put a platform out there that worked with what I thought would be good feature set to start with. The plan always was to develop Interdubs around the needs of the users. With thirteen different customers right now I get a very healthy mix of feature requests: The rule is that if two people from different companies ever asked for a feature or have a similar issue with an existing function the task instantly bubbles up in priority and gets done as quickly as possible. The other nice effect of those five hunderd updates is that new users have a much better time with backend interface then they used to a couple of months ago.
Back in the day it was widely mentioned that you had to spend 20% of your worktime at Google at an project that you personally care about and that is not directly your ‘day job’. Rumor has it that gmail got started that way. I could guess that the google earth flight simulator was such a thing. It must really really suck to work for Yahoo and having to observe how your competition runs circles around you.
On the other side people are guestimating that the average google employee gets up to half a thousand emails originating at google. A day. It is interesting to see how Google will do in the future. It’s history and application are truly unprecedented. It’s impact is quiet astonishing. My daughter, being 7, never was on the internet. Try to keep it that way for as many years as possible. But she is a curious person. The other day she wanted to know what I am doing. I explained that I added another internet server. She wanted to know how many I had and what they were used for. The next question she had after she heard me talk about my current and future setup was: “And Google, how many servers do they have?”.
Tried DriveSmart today. Bad software. TumbleWeedWare for lack of a better term. Install is fancy. Application crashes. Uninstall shows empty dialog box. Clicking yes tries to reboot the machine. So, not a good idea.
A couple of years ago, during those preYouTube days – in case your memory goes that far back – I thought it would be neat if there would be a site where people could store videos and share them. I wrote a quick little thing, called it vilodex and shared with a couple of people. It’s by invitation only. Some people watched, it has an RSS feed with media enclosures. So you can subsrcibe to it via iTunes for instance. All this was, as said earlier, a very long time ago. I still use it to keep copies of interesting things that I find. It did annoy me that I could not find a link, or that content simply had vanished, when I wanted to reference it.
Something else had happened as well. I noticed, but did not care. Nor do I know. A couple of Skate Board Enthousiasts started to use it. There are more than 200 logins in Vilodex, created by people posting videos like this. Why they would not use one of the gzillion video sharing sites that bloated with VC millions all want to become the next youTube (good Luck)? I have no idea.
It would have been nice if I could have let this continue to grow. The problem is that links to those skate boarder clips appeared in their forums. That I can totally understand as well: You want to share what you did. But it also means that there could be significant bandwidth uses. In the end something I would need to pay for. Digg hits one cool clip and overnight I have amused some hundred thousand US teens. Nothing wrong with that part, but paying for it? No, thanks. Ask Murdoch or Google to do that. Please.
So I started to move the clips around. They are still all there. When you login to vilodex then they work as usual. It’s only 16GB. I couldn’t care less about that part. But all those links to those clips do no work anymore. Updating them would be short sighted: I could tell the computer to move them automatically to random positions. So, kids, sorry:
Stay on my lawn, but no more free Pizza deliveries on my account.
Over here everything is high tech. Pointless or not. Of course there are ads on the paper towels. Not real time printed blog content (yet). Missing urinal feature: real time analysis of blood alcohol. Bonus for womens restrooms: instant pregnancy test. Imagine the possibilities: Google could place ads for abortion options and/or pregnancy products on the paper towels. Right now health insurance companies could track your lifestyle a little bit via your credit card trace. Technically they could. Not sure if that is legal, and if they are smart enough to do so. But with personalised mini lab in every toilet you would get an interesting trace of activities. Of course lab technology does not follow the trend of hard drives of other micro electronics and computer related stuff. So this brave new world option will remain scifi for quiet some time. Possibly forever, since we just might run out of cheap energy -that is the basis for all of your lifestyle after all- before high tech might become that sophisticated.
Update:
Like with any sci-fi story there is a google angle popping up minutes after I ramble about it. Coincidency? Of course. Almost everything is. Actually. Get used to it.