The president, the terrorists, the lies
Olbermann delivers a commentary. Watching it you can also ‘test’ the Microsoft video service.
Much like Zefrank does not seem to blink, Olbermann does not need to breath when he talks.
He has a good writer though. And he is not holding back.
Variety quoting George Lucas on the future of movies. Or rather the non existence of that concept. I think he has a point or two and misses on others. But it is worth mentioning since Mr Lucas spend some time on making films.
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
I will miss Youtube. It’s as close I want to get to TV these days. BlogsNow is crawling back into existence. Slowly. It would only find two links worth mentioning right now. Bothsurrounding the Page meme. I wonder what the Republicans will come with. Maybee bomb North Korea?
Meandering through youTube’s suggestions I watched a bit of Daily Show (there is lots) and finally ended up with a video almost dedicated to Maf54.
Went and saw “flyboys”. Bad movie. Boring movie. Aces high I remember more vividly than the flick I endured yesterday. It has been more than twenty years ago since I Jack Gold’s ww1 movie.
The effects where mostly mixed. A couple of interesting yet subtle transitions. Comps were partially horrible. Smoke plumes comic like. The dog fight sequences, and there were lots, were executed alright from the fx side. Just that they did not work as a sequence, story or something that seemed worth following. No sense for dramatic guidance. They should have rented the original Star Wars movie. Or watched a couple of people play a video game for that matter.
Then I thought I transfer 2GB of memory from my glove box into one of my servers. I shut down the machine, put in the memory and turned it back on. Just that mysql decided that it’s tables were corrupted. Those had been growing over time. After 24 hours of constant fix attempts I gave up, and hit the reset button. Twenty million blogs down the drain. Again.
On top of that it turned out that it seems not to have been the disk that failed in the spanking new Nas server. In midst of a three Terrabyte transfer the unit became ‘DEGRADED’ again at the same position. A rebuild takes a couple of hours. Tomorrow morning I know better if it is the sled or the connection.
Summary: too much data, not enough content.
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.
I remember people swearing and cursing getting bonding to work under linux. Things have changed. Following a decent and simple set of instructions for network bonding under linux (yes this is anchor text for google 😉 ) it only takes a few minutes. And even works.
Nice.
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.
I have gone on the record with my skepticism regarding the ‘RED camera’ before. I actually was suprised that Jim Jannards company was able to show moving images a feeks ago at IBC in Amsterdam. This weekend was a busy one for the camera maker: They posted 2K jpegs on their site. And then reported that somebody had broken into their offices. Stealing development resources they said. “Red” has always been an interesting exercise in marketing. Or you could also say “hype generation”. Hence the title of this post. The internet plays an important role in this. It is mostly a couple of internet forums were people have ‘discussions’. Actually quiet heated ones by now. Not a pretty sight I must say.