Technology can be cruel. Spent hours this morning to figure out how to really get rid of all extra spacing in tables. Of course one has to set
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
But these was still an extra little space that bugged me. Good thing is it to have friends that know more than Google. Adib knew that the magic line would be:
border-collapse : collapse;
And, et voila, it works in FF 1.5 and safari 2.0 under OS X.
It seems as if there is a system to track all incidents around nuclear power generation. Which is great. It’s also very good that this information is public. It’s not that easy to use or understand. And in all that data the real juicy details might be well hidden. But it’s still a great concept to make the operations accountable to publish their results. I would guess that Iran does not have such a system for their similar activities. But I am afraid that that the current regime in the US would not install a similar system themselves.
I am usually not a big fan of performance art. The whole ‘let’s put a human in a Zoo’ situation is so predictabiliy of interest.
This art installation combines it with a painball gun controlled over the internet, which isn’t new either, and makes it actually interesting. Horrible too.
Saw the Audi A5 today. Actually lots of them. Audi must have had some press event where they put people into brand new A5s and CLKs, BMW 3 coupes and drove them (let them drive?) in groups of 3 cars over some roads where I grew up. Pretty roads those are. That was a good choice. To me the A5 looked interesting enough to ask my wife to floor it so that I could have another look. Little I knew that A5s would be in such ample supply on those roads today. I really liked the shape. An Audi, a coupe, but still interesting. But, I also liked the Mercedes CLS at first for being different. Now I think it’s just a Car to squeeze as many petro dollars out of the E class that possible. They seem to need it: German news paper headline today: “Mercedes gives away Chrysler”
Just finished one phase of a bigger network job. The client probably did spend more money on engineering time than on what those ten network switches would cost. Yet, it was worth it. The guy I was working for is probably one of the most gifted engineers I have ever met. That of course was 90% of the reason of the success of the project. In the end we were able to get a gigE backbone in place, where there was none before. Despite the fact that the hardware existed, connections simply were done in such ways, that there were a couple of gigE islands (many as small as one switch) inside some very convoluted hundred base T soup. Valueable lessons I have learned:
– working with good people makes everything fun. Crawling up on racks @ 3am in the morning is perfectly OK under those circumstances, since the job will be finished
– the mess that accumulates over time in network topologies is huge. And damaging. Network switches are actually very brave in dealing with circular routes and all kind of crazy and unintended ways to connect things.
– snmp can be a great tool. It’s worth getting managed switches just for that. Apple’s Airport Base Stations require -of course- some extra care and work. All other network gear I used behaves very much alike. No matter which vendor. Of course Apple thinks they need to ‘think different’ even when they shouldn’t.
– Dell uses cross over serial, while Linksys uses straight ones. Xon/Xoff in Zterm on Mac does not work as advertised. Linksys latest srw2024 firmware will break the switch. It simple will no longer boot. (see comments) Linksys support is trying to help but is in general a clueless waste of time. Managed Linksys switches like the srw2048 or srw2024 I can not recommend.
– Hardware cost is in no relationship to the cost of configuring things. There are ample parameters to configure and tune your network. I doubt that the knowledge how to do this widely exists. I understand maybe 5% of what a 600 US$ managed switch can do and how it really works. Applying what happens with network to cars would mean that people drive around without tires. On their rims. It’s loud. Traction is lousy. So they buy a Ferrari (without tires) since the Porsche did not do so well (since it missed tires) and the rims were grinded down. And, yes, with a Toyota and some rubber around your RIMs you can be the fastest kid in town.
– crawling around racks I realized how much wire their used to be for Video and Audio. And just a couple of Cat5e cables can replace so much of it. What a concept that you need a different piece of copper depending on what kind of content would flow over it! Sure, realtime and all. But at what cost? Converter boxes, routers, distribution amplifier, patch panels, spliters. And then you are locked into, let’s say NTSC. It’s ridicolous, and much of it will go away. Writing a telegram was a great way to communicate. Once upon a time.
With managed switches, snmp and the dns database we had before we can now find the port / switch for every machine in the building. There are ample uses and applications for this. Looking at network traffic. Finding uptime. Hell, one could even track peoples work hours by that. Or at least give them access to it, so they can use their MAC address’ existence in the network as evidence for them being at work.
Old and rotten APIs should be politely guided to the graveyard of history. And freaking shot! But, no, some clueless public prodcasting people still enjoy the merits of using ‘real player’. Now Microsoft and Adobe get into a fight over movie playback systems. At least that’s what the tech journalists tell us. Very same people that speculated for years wether Microsoft or Sony would take the next gen crown of gaming. Until there was the Wii. Microsoft vs Adobe during NAB was one of these non stories that became one, since Journalists could write so easily about it.
The reality of quicktime is actually pretty grim: People are able to make movie files that are plain insane. Client of mine likes to produce anamorphic qt’s. Don’t ask. Displaying them on a website, you kinda need to know about that, otherwise they look squeezed. Only problem is: The quicktime player magically knows. But nothing else does. Probing the transformation matrix via javascript returns the most innocent matrix there is: 1.0, 0.0, 0.0 0.0, 1.0, 0.0 0.0, 0.0, 1.0.
ffmpeg, usually so brave in dealing with all this, has no clue. Apple documentation acknowledges the existence of matrices and even teases on this page with the existence of some documentation about matrix functions. But of course the link maybe having some answers goes nowhere. Which is pretty common in Apples online quicktime documentation. It’s huge, it’s old, in many cases examples require OS9 to compile. There are actually very very few working and helpful examples on Apples sites. Whenever the quicktime API gets extended again by some mostly unwanted function there are some files in the development environment du jour. But after years of operating systems and development environments moving on they mostly become a joke or grim reminder of times when Mac’s where beige. Yes, it really is that horrible. And then some.
Quicktime was a good idea. One that got out of hand. Fueled by the success of Apple and it’s other products, it could survive the total failure in gaining any consumer traction. Youtube is flash based. Looks bad, but nobody cares. Unfortunately there are not any alternatives to quicktime. Which is a shame:
It should not be that hard to just have a simple working container format for audio and video. xml works, all these modern things. And quicktime?
Moov containers. nested in each other. Trying to hide their shameful kludgyness. Only thing that Apple did that is worse than quicktime is AppleScript. But we don’t go there. Oh, no. We will not. Sal, oh, Sal, why don’t you go where people wear the had that you do??
Quicktime VR? Who gives a shit? Sprites? Excucse me? You can write actually lots of things in quicktime. Too many. We don’t need an interactive system that would run of a CDROM. Really not. Anymore.
I will have to deal with quicktime in the next five years. And I am seriously not looking forward to all those oddities that will creep up. Not at all.
Apple should define a simple, fast, well documented (examples!) ‘core-qucktime’ subset that actually gets used and that all application should
and can support.
I don’t watch TV. Don’t have a set. Scott had pointed me to the ‘eyeTV hybrid’ USB adapter from Elgato. Finally I got around to get one for around 150 US$. Recently I also had extended the screen real estate of the MacBook Pro via an Acer AL2216W. Not an amazing monitory, but 1680×1050 for 250 US$ is a great value. So for 400 US$ and change I have now the ability to watch TV. HD or SD, analog or digital.Which is not bad at all. In this configuration NTSC resolution commercials fall on their nose inside of a HD broadcast: I am watching Red Sox vs. Yankees in 720p right now. I will never understand Baseball. But the picture looks great. An alternative would be some icehockey game in 1080i. Which does not fit the screen. And with interlacing that is kind of a problem. I don’t understand how anybody could consider an interlaced format: It was made for Glas Tubes, and glas tubes for TV are on their way out. And especially for HD there haven’t been many around in consumers homes. There are ways to deinterlace etc, but that’s a hack. Any hack will degrade the image. More or less.
The LA Time has a simple yet interesting breakdown of the costs and revnues of Sahara. I must have lived under a rock when it came out, since I had not heard of it. Sounds like I didn’t miss much.
Looking at those number I wonder how ‘revolutionary’ the Red camera actually is. Or rather isn’t. The Jackson scoop is of course yet another move of brilliant PR. And the tech world would definitely less interesting without the red-bubble-cam-project.
Intel showing us some bad sci-fi:
The problem with bad sci-fi is the same problem that most bad things have: Lack of originality, inspiration and flawless execution. A year ago Intel, Microsoft and Samsung got very excited about UMPC. While the rest of world simple uttered ‘umpc!’ So it didn’t go anywhere. Nor will it ever. Intels new ultra mobile vision is as inspiring as Ariel