Category: technology

Time before the movie starts

media technology

This page compares the user experience of a legit DVD with that of a pirated movie. I would add to this to get the packaging open: There are often the shrink wrap + 3 ugly white stickers on each open side saying “Security Device enclosed”.

I remember that early DVDs would start into the movie right away. and then, when done would go to the menu. When you insert a DVD you do it, since you want to see the movie. Not because you want to watch all the other crud, like a menu opening that contains key elements of the movie to come, often oddly animated.

The problem with this is, that probably not enough people care. They don’t care about spam, viruses on their computer, their diet either. In turn the quality of the offerings for ‘the general public’ get worse. To the point that they are plain junk in some cases. I read that ’30 rock’ would be a good show. When I watched some of the first season the other day I was a bit shocked how little I was able to enjoy it. Probably a unique aversion since I don’t watch TV. So my tolerance for mental junk might be a bit different compared to people who spend hours in front of the TV screen.

youtube videos in gmail

daily life google internet technology

Naturally my son wanted his own computer. He is 11 so isn’t it a birth right to have one? I only pointed to a stack of parts, being left overs from some upgrades and told that he could have one if we can put it together himself. He looked and me with this “Dad, I love you, but wtf is wrong with you + and what on earth have I done to deserve to be treated like this” look. He actually said “But I am eleven years old”. My reply was “yes, you are eleven years old”.

After a couple of days he realized that that I was serious about what I had said. Funny, since the previous 11 years might have given him a hint about that one. So he got the parts out. Had a good look at them, connected them in a way that made sense, connected them wrong, cursed, cried (of course not), asked questions and he ended up with:

I gave him a hand to put things in a case and everybody was happy.

But wait, there is the Internet, there is an eleven year old boy. An awesome one. But still!
I have not seen any software that would be able to protect my child from all the rotten stuff that is a couple clicks away on the internet.
The solution that we came up with works better I think. I explained my worries to him. He understood. I asked him if it would be
OK if I would look at where he goes at the net. He had no issues with that. Since Firefox stores visited URLs in sqlite and he
naturally runs an ubuntu machine this was easy to do. Each day that he used his computer I get an email from it that shows me
what he has been up to. He is totally aware of that and does not mind at all. And I never had anything to worry about.

Today was the first time that I saw in the end of such an email:

Which helps me quiet a great deal in what I have to do. Nice to see gmail getting better. With Buzz and Wave being what they are it became en vogue to bash google. It is nice to see that they continue to add nice features as well.

getting shells in the same path

Command Line linux technology

Often I work with a couple of shells simultaneously in the same directory. One may be the editor with a program in it, and the other one running it.
When I add the following lines to .bashrc


alias sd='pwd > /tmp/ddd'
alias d='cd `cat /tmp/ddd`; pwd'

I just need to type ‘sd’ (for Set Directory) in a shell that is already in the right directory. When I then log in with the other shell a simple ‘d’ gets me where the other shell already is. Extra benefit: When I want to continue where I was last I just type ‘d’ again. Just a little thing. But the world is made out of little things. Lots and lots of them.

thank you sqlite

technology

Since more than 25 years I write computer programs. Writing some information to a file for later use is a very common thing. It worked (most of the time). But it never felt right. Common up with a format, creating a writer and a parser. All that can be done. Rather mundane. Finally I switched to using sqlite for this kind of thing. And this feel right. It works. And will just cover 99% of all cases were I have used “fopen” in the past. One of the things that I like about coding for a living is that it keeps getting better. Not me, that’s for sure, but the tools. And that almost makes up for the natural decline in raw brain power.

corporate video

internet technology

Remember the look of corporate Videos?

Well, things change.

I found this video for Cooper Union on The C47.

In the right hands you can make some very compelling images with a camera body that retails around 2.700 $US.

I had hopes that miniDV would spawn new content, due to the leap in quality of the recording technology. It didn’t work out that way.
I am hoping again that the 5D Mark II and similar devices do that.

At least wedding videos will look better than they used to.

QRCodes, Boards, the future and the others

interdubs internet technology

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.

going back to 24 frames

history interdubs internet technology

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.

replylater.com sliced bread has nothing on it

internet technology

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.

ten years later

history technology

I would guess this clip is about ten years old :

cfx-machines

The compute power you see here can be replaced by one or two racks today. For maybe a tenth of the price. I used to know my way around SGI hardware, Irix, OpenGL a little bit. I think it was patch number 1508 that brought me over to the US. Or was it 1805?

None of that matters in the slightest bit any longer. The 7 billion Dollars that SGI had in market cap at one point completely evaporated. The glorious campus they built is still in use today: Google picked it up.

re using disks formerly used in a 3ware array

technology

In some areas technology moves forward so fast, that the outdated components still far away from the their own end of life.This can be good and bad. Some people have warehouses full of Onyx2s. Not so good. I happen to have lots of disk drives. Pretty good. I would not rely on those drives for anything critical, but having more drives to rotate the personal Backups for instance is never a bad thing.

A batch of those drives was connected via a 3ware card before. It turns out that both Ubuntu’s installer as well as OS X disk utility have troubles with those drives. They will recognize them, but partitioning will stall with OS X. At least ubuntu will display an error message. It displays an I/O error during the creation of the swap partition.

I would think that this is a feature: Getting drives accidentally confused will not lead to you loosing your array, since -as a civillian- your attempts to harm the 3ware drives will fail. The fix was straight forward: I just connected the drives to the 3ware card and ‘deleted’ the array that was supposed be on them.