Category: technology

software could easily suck less

confessions of a pixel pusher technology

Lazy people suck. Specially if they code something that I am trying to use.

Today I wanted Apple’s shake to read dpx files that I had generated with ImageMagick.
The message I get is:

Dpx reader got an invalid or unsupported encoding value

I don’t mind the error. Fair enough. DPX files can have all sorts of flavors. I don’t expect shake to support them all. What is really really stupid here is the fact that the code finds a value and it does not like it. But it just tells you that. If the coder that wrote this would have any clue then he / she would have included the received value and the range of expected ones in the error. How about the actual DPX header field that this value originates from?
Takes even a moron only 2 minutes to code this, but it would help the whole user community and the coders and the support people to save countless hours.

Stupid lazy people.

Adding -depth 10 did start to create 10 bit dpx files. But shake still was not happy,
I ended up patching the header of the files like:

dpxfileheader.orientheader.XOriginalSize = 1920 ;
dpxfileheader.orientheader.YOriginalSize = 1080 ;
dpxfileheader.genericimageheader.ImageElement[0].Packing = 1;
dpxfileheader.genericimageheader.ImageElement[0].Encoding = 0;
dpxfileheader.genericimageheader.ImageElement[0].DataOffset = dpxfileheader.genericheader.ImageOffset;

and then it worked.

red

confessions of a pixel pusher technology

big deal: the founder of Oakley (as in Sun Glasses) decided to bless the world with a new camera. Super 35 sized CMOS sensor, 2K @ 120fps, 4K @ 60fps, 17,500 US$ price, done by the end of the year.

So they say.

I say: Bullshit.

Naked Emperor number 1.

Absolutely ridicolous. Of course it would be nice if such a device would exist within these parameters. People want to believe it in, hence the hype. The hardcore fans can get a serial number reservation for a mere 1000 US$.

I find it amazing how quickly clever marketing can get you such a fanboy following. As of today there is a cad model of the body of the camera. Which also happens to be where the core competence of the company behind the thing (sunglasses!) ends. They say they will have a lens for 4,500. Of course sunglass -> lens. About the same, right?

The core of the red-1 is the ‘mysterium sensor’ capable of shooting 4K and having full super 35 size. Not much more is known about this. Real life problem is, that it is very hard to make a chip that works at this size. Yield becomes a real problem. Nikon just abandoned full size chips in favor for the ASP ones. That means that they more or less left 40 years of lens buyers lying in the dust. If they could have avoided that, they would have. But the owner of Oakley has a 1000 cameras, so that qualifies, right? Well, actually, it’s the other round: What do you need that many cameras for? Oh, well.

Next phase: 4K @ 60 fps or 2K @ 120fps. Whoa. First of all those are big numbers. Secondly: they don’t make sense: 4K is not twice as much resolution, but 4 times more than 2k. So the 4k mode has double the bandwidth needs than the 2K one. If bandwidth should be the bottleneck then 2K might run @ 240fps. I think this little oversight shows how much the red camera is vapor. And within 7 months it has to work? Laughable!

The Mysterium Sensor (there words not mine) is supposed to have 4520 by 2540 resolution. There are bigger and higher res chips around. But this one can generate -so they say- 60 images a second. Let’s assume that they use 14 bit per channel. The data flow would be 4520 (width) * 2540 (height) * 3 (rgb?) * 14 (bits) * 60 (fps) = 28931616000 or 3.6 Gigabytes per second.
‘Red’ is quick to say that you can compress this data. But at some point you have to handle this amount of data, within that little cage. Great. Mysterirum DSP? In comparsion a HD 12bit stream at 1080 24p results in 223 Megabytes/second. So “RED” can handle 16 times more data than the cameras used on major features right now. Cameras that cost 8 times more.
Great. Maybe “Red” should have started out with something easier, like a flying car or something.

The third area is equally odd: A camera never lives alone. Lot’s of equipment makes it a system. Stuff goes in and out. Like sync, like timecode, like audio. Red performs a mircale again: Every option conceivable is available. From a “red raid” the can capture those 3.8GB/s of data to a intnernal drive that operates compressed. It’s all just there. Or, ahem, will be by the end of the year. Of course the camera supports all existing lenses. Not just a few one, no, all.

“Red” is applied wishfull thinking. If somebody would be able to pull of such a leap ahead, then maybe they should have chosen another area to do so. After all the “Red” team knows as much about cameras as they do about any other topic you might pick.

Just for the record:
There will be no working sellable red camera operating at 4520 * 2540 * 60 fps in the promised 11-15 f stops uncompressed ‘444’ by the end of the year 2006. You would need 8 4Gb Fibrechannel interface to transport that amount of data.

Crazy how gullible people are. I hope you come back here in 2007 and read this and compare it to the red-realities that will unfold.

project origami and how it folds

M$ marketing technology

this sounds like a personal Steve Jobs nightmare before Macworld, but it is rather the harsh reality of tech-CEOs trying to use their own products.

Amazing how these companies get to waste Billions of dollars just by ignoring s simple fact:

Features don’t exist if they are not accessible.

The amount of high tech they cramped into those device is certainly impressive. But those don’t do anybody any good if they can not be used.

Windows is not an interface, it’s a hack. People use it since they have to, not because they like to. The biggest miracle is how a crappy system like this could get so far. Trying to resize it into Origami dimensions is not helping.

But let’s focus on something less complex than a OS interface to show that Origami is a dead concept: Battery life.
So it went black during the presentation. That will happen to allot of people. Imagine that the alpha geek you know shelled out seven hundret dollars for this lump of plastic. Eagerly does want to show it to somebody. The chances are rather high that it will run out of juice just inmidst or before this private demonstration. Let that happen a couple of times and your product evangelist moves on to the next gadget. Something that does not let him down when he needs to show off with it.

Origami’s are a debacle. They might get sold to a couple of vertical integrators. But ‘selling’ to big companies and the government does not really count. Those processess share an eiry ressemblance with inner working of the market-economy of the failed soviet empire.

Intel, Microsoft and Samsung might be able to churn out some industrial products in vast numbers. But together they can not innovate. 800 pounds gorillas can not enact a decent ballet.

HD

history internet marketing Sony technology

would be hyperbole but is actually true.

What exactly are media companies thinking?

four steps of history

history internet media technology

“stone age”, “bronze age”
these terms align the history of mankind along the materials being used. While these segments are still valid it is also worth noticing that they have been establlished during the ‘steel age’. It was when technology had reached yet another pinnacle in the industrial use of metals.

Hundred fifty years later information technology shares the same fate: It’s frenetic paced development seems to change the world in unprecedented ways. It is only natural to ‘re-segment’ history along the current dominating paradigm of progress. A very broad separation could be:

1. Language
2. Reading/Writing
3. Printing press
4. Internet

It is certainly provocative to put the WWW in one line with those other three steps of human progress. The importance of each step compared to its predecessors is without a doubt declining. Language separates people from animals. Reading/Writing invented societies that are bigger than a couple of hundred people. The printing press established the domination of the european culture over the entire world. And the internet? Nobody knows. Still, I think it’s importance justifies to put it in one list with the three earlier ones. Human history can indeed be interpreted as the acceleration of the means of communication.

1. Language
Language allowed for a completely new and improved social interaction. Complex schemes could be planned and executed. Ask the average sable tooth tiger: he knows all to well how a couple of monkeys can make your life not only hell, but bring it to a sudden end. In parallel to language tools came into existence. Nobody would attempt to kill said tiger with bare hands. The argument can be made that only language allowed for the making of the tools. If you would try to make a weapon out of a couple of stones you would quickly realize that even though you are much stronger than the average ice age joe you will fail. No matter how many stones you have at your disposal, you are not more than lunch that happens to make funny noises. What you are missing is somebody to tell you how to make a weapon out of a stone. Since mankind seemed not to have hit the branches of the stupid tree over the last couple of thousand years, it seems that language is what brought tools into our world and kept them there.

2. Reading/Writing
Being able to ‘unrealtime language’ allowed for the next jump in human development. Without accounting nobody could have build a pyramid. All non tribal mass societies that I can think of have established a system of writing. Written language can travel in room and unidirectional in time. The commands of a ruler far away can be read thousands of miles away. And thoughts can be inherited. They can even outlast their thinkers. As a kid you see some magic in a treasure map or a message in a bottle. This magic is simply the power of reading and writing.

3. Printing press
What one person writes could be read by many, but only the printing press invented real mass communication. It allowed the word to spread. With this infinite multiplication concept ideas became ultimately powerful. The moment a printing press was churning out the first book all oppressive societies were doomed. Burning books became a sign of the desperation of the powerful people to maintain the un-maintable status quo of their rule. China and Europe were more or less on the same level of development in the midst of the last millennium. If there was a difference then China probably had the edge in many areas. Still, three hundred years later the entire world was ruled by a few european nations. The printing press allowed Europe to leap ahead in the global competition.

4. Internet
Since the internet is so new and evolving so quickly I am on the grounds of pure speculation now. Looking at the first three steps of culture technology advances each one spured a gigantic leap in human abilities. The Wright brothers could read about physics and metal technologies in books. Augustus could write laws for his far reaching empire that many people could read and copy. Many people that names we will never know lived a couple of years longer because of a story they have heard.

The internet allows knowledge to be shared in an entirely new ways. Knowledge wants to be shared. Even this text will be read by somebody.

The hype around google and very certainly it’s stock price have reached ridiculous dimensions. However, in the core this almost religious feeling towards an ugly website has a sound core: “Organizing the worlds information and making it accessible” is a pretty good glimpse on the real potential of the internet. We are only at the beginning here. The possibilities can only be guessed.

five years

Apple M$ OSX technology

OS X is out since five years

Almost as long as Vista is delayed.

I think that the PS3 and Vista will both come out together: Never. They share the sickness of the incumbent king. Too fat and saturated to really move. Sony is dreaming about 100 Million PS3 sold, only because they did so with PS1 & 2. And likewise Microsoft thinks that everybody will have to have Vista. Both are in for a surprise.

The same patterns can be found elsewhere: Google Video is not really amazing. It’s outright lame. Google is the incumbent search engine. Not their core business sucks yet. But new launches like Video or base or personal pages are less than great.

A380 making of

history internet media technology

The soundtrack is boring. The editing uninspired. The camera angles lack anything that I would consider to be good work. It’s seven minutes long. It’s about an industrial process.

And still I think it is really really great. I am a geek and I like technology. I spend to much time in airplanes not to care about them. Every new A380 will fly over my house once when it will go from the Factory in Toulouse to the client center in Hamburg where it will get readied for the hand over. I think that clips like this will have a great future. There are fans for all sorts of products. People care where things come from. And most things are being made in a very interesting environments. You think people would watch a clip how an iPod is been made? How workers in a google data center push a shopping cart with replacement servers down an ever ending aisle of computers? Of course we care. Enough people do. If Airbus would have needed to buy 7 minutes TV airtime then they would have not had a success at hand. With those internets that is a different story now. Different technologies have allowed content to develop and take new forms. It takes a surprisingly long time though. For years early movies were nothing else then filmed theatre performances. For years the internet had to cary TV movies and ripped CDs. Only recently people realised that the internet can cary different content than existing / older media. There are hundreds of new genres to be discovered. This clip is a good example for one of them.

the ten k dell

technology

Sadly I know people that would file a PO against it if it were not for the flames on the chasis.

And on the same day they say that they will buy Alieanware

worse is better

confessions of a pixel pusher history technology

It used to be to that I spend Sunday mornings with the paper. If you don’t go to church on Sundays, then you have this amazing time that you can read just for your own joy. These days it’s the internet. Of course. But I follow different stories on a Sunday morning. Today is was Worse is Better by Richard P. Gabriel, via Math for programmers via BlogsNow background info on this important essay from seventeen years ago. It probably is so important that I should pretend that I woul have just ‘reread’ it. But, no: Never had heard of it before. Much like a really good movie that you see for the first time after it has been out for 20 years and that you picked up via DVD it makes you feel good since there might be countless other gems out there. Burried in all that history, waiting for to come back to light much like diamonds emerge from the soil in heavy rain. The “test of time”. Or it can make you sad, since you lived without this piece for 20 years. Might have gotten hundreds of references and jokes not all or only half way. Digressing entirely here I am considering to show my seven year old son the original Star Wars movie, even though I think he is WAY to young for that. But there are so many references in the culture around him that I feel he should see it, only that he can decipher all those references. Finally the fact that an important piece went on noticed for me for so long could also have a vastly depressing aspect: How many other items are lingering out there and I never came accross them. And, at least that is a fact, I spent the last seventeens years rambling about everything, including software creation, without being able to put into a context to “Worse is Better”. Now that I have had it my coffenated head for half an hour I am almost tempted to reference to it as “WIB”.

The essay might also only intresting to me, since I was writing in Lisp seventeen years ago and switched to Unix/C. I have to correct this, since I wrote my first code for legal money in AutoLisp under AutoCAD Version 2.18. Lisp was not my choice, C was. Very much so.

Of course now we can read things like

Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.

or


The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++.

with a historical perspective. 1995 and it turned out that Mr Gabriel thought to be worse would be pushed from 90% of all CPUs by something that is even worse than worse: Windows 95. Ironically Windows 95 could also be seen as Version 1.0 of a virus (real ones here) API disguised as an ‘operating system’.

… and then a fast forward to the world of software development in 2006. “totally”

this will fold fast

M$ technology

The cocoon called Origami contained only a UMPC. Microsoft tried some hyping. They have to learn allot before they are able to launch products like Apple: This one folded. During those three weeks between Scoble’s plug of some hollow flash teaser and the actual release at Cebit lots of people saw an Origami concept video at the digital-kitchen website. The ill fated hipster assemblage sat prominently for one year next to a similar piece about the “SPOT Watch”. It should be in the interest of the company in Redmond not to mention this device in the context of Origami. It is not only the wireless component that the digital dud from 2003 shares with the latest greatest: In both cases Microsoft tries to innovate. Actually the leap for the SPOT device seemed even further: Microsoft started it’s own content distribution network based on FM for it. Big deal, specially since it tanked.

Is the UMPC doomed? Is there really an uncanny valley between cellphone and laptop? Will the bones of the UMPC get bleached next to the one of the PDA in the unforgiving sun of tech history?

Microsoft, Intel, Samsung and a couple of mid sized electronic makers are behind the UMPC. 100 Million UMPC devices till 2008 is the number that they floated. A 50 billlion US market. That is nice. Would be nice. The Microsoft Origami team is made up of eleven people. Not including Mr. Scoble.

Microsoft tried to push the tablet PC. And it did not work as hoped. Outside of the corporate Cool Aid sprinklers it is hard to find a person using such a device. The UMPC is featuring the same operating system: Windows XP in it’s tablet Version.
That is great, since there is so much software for it. That is not so great since there is so much malware for it. Those 100 Million networked UMPC’s could make lots of evil guys in Russia happy. An army of mobile nodes in your bot net, what could you ask for more?

The bigger problem is, is that XP is an ok desktop operating system and interface. Not great, not terrible. The tablet edition I don’t know anything about. Now the poor thing has to serve in yet another iteration on the UMPC. Which is where there is a problem: Usability. In the marketing videos people interact magically with the thing: They barely look at the thing and it jumps into action. Does exactly what they want it do it. Which would be great for a desktop system, but it is critical for a mobile device: All these ‘wouldn’t it be great’ scenarios that these clips dream up only work along our busy lives if they can be used effortless. I never saw anybody use a XP install effortless. Not having a keyboard and using a touch screen with 800×480 does not make things easier. To say the least. Things need to move very very smooth in this field of dreamed up application. And that’s where the UMPC falls into the void. It does not deliver on the promises that it makes. The core technologies are interesting: A touch screen, 2 pounds, Wifi and bluetooth. That oughta work. Some of them even have cameras and microphones and smart cart readers.
It’s not the hardware that’s broken. It’s the idea that you want to deal with Windows XP while you are standing on an intersection. Yes, that is a scary thought. XP is not compatible with real life. Period.

It is true that there is a gap between Laptop and Cellphone / ipod. The form factor will make for a very sucessful and nice media player, if managing media is as easy as it can be. Don’t think that XP is particularly great at that. Media Center is made for that. Is it good? I have no idea.

Vista? It will run, so they say. They have to. Would be funny to launch this cat right away into a dead end. The minimal specs for vista are pretty far away from what these little guys have to offer. We will see. Maybe there will be a 7th edition for UMPCs.

The average UMPC might do rather well under Linux. Imagine Samsung hiring a decent designer (and one for the hardware while they are at it, please!!) and a couple of geeks that boil down a nice distro that auto updates etc, etc. Then they would be up to something. OK, Mr. Scoble would not hype them anymore, but apart from that that side of the road is only pretty: Media center features under an UI that is made for the device.

People have high standards these days: Something does interact less than google does with search for instance and they walk away. UMPCs are priced between 500-1000. You expect it to be useful for something if you spend that kind of money on it. The hardware is certainly capable. The problem is to make it all work smooth enough to make it worth while. Running XP you can use the biggest software library there is. Just that you have limited resolution and battery life compared to a laptop at home. And on the road you need to figure out how to get EVDO or similar to work. And you need to cary it around. I used to develop software for the Newton. The thing was interesting, but in the end just way to heavy.

So, final word: two thumbs down

Not gonna work. Come back here in a year and see if I was wrong.
Try that with the rest of my blog 😉