/. 0 – mac mini 1

Apple internet

Being slashdotted used to be every webmasters dream and nightmare: That one popular website linking to your obscure site would bring you those fifteen thousand clicks of fame and mostly take your webserver with it.

Things have changed:

This page runs on Apples cheapest computer that they offer. It got the ‘link love’ a couple of hours ago, yet it seems unharmed. There are a couple of reasons for this: The page is static html. The connection is able to cope with the load. A mac mini is actually quiet able to handle lots of web traffic. I don’t think that it has anything to do with the fact that slashdot has lost it’s bite.

canon service sucks

daily life technology

Canon makes the cameras that I do like the most right now. As much as they products are great their US service is sucks. A little SD20 of mine failed: The lens is not able to open anymore and i get the dreadful E14 error. Canon says that this is due to sand. One could argue if putting a small camera into your pocket is considered use or abuse. But I did not want to argue. I just wanted to pay the 109 US for the repair. They have in theory a web interface for paying repairs. In reality this is a waste of time. Actually I feel not so good to have given this piece of web-junk my CC info. Despite 5 attempts with two different (and working) CC cards the site was unable to process my request.

The usual problem: Canon makes great products in Japan. Their US service part can be broken around the fringes: Will not put them out of business. Just a shame to see a world clas maker of amazing equipement having a website that works less than that of the muffler shop around the corner.

quick links

misc

ping get’s it’s pong

the pope get’s a pod

Brown bites back

A looser is loosing it

And the AC 130’s are going back to Iraq.
They, of course, have only one purpose: to spread democracy in the middle east. That’s how you spread democracy, right?

LTO labels

confessions of a pixel pusher marketing

A tape robot is kinda nice. Sometimes. In order to operate on several tapes you need to have labels.
In the case of the Exabyte Magnum 1×7 LTO robot it turned out that one sheet with 20 labels did cost 29 US$.

That is highly ridicolous. The fact that such a 10,000% markup scheme can exist is almost depressing: I don’t even want to know how many corporate drones order sheet after sheet from these people. And then it get’s hidden in some IT budget.

Don’t do that: LTO barcodes are simple. They are the ‘Code 39’ kind. I had to print them out with a scale of 122% (not
sure why and or if that was needed). It ended with L2, so I did that and the robot was very happy eating those selfmade labels.

Hummer Money

confessions of a pixel pusher marketing media

bands rejecting hummer money

Modernista made some of the best car commercials for the ‘Hummer’ brand. I am lucky enough to have worked on and around some of them. I think that the Hummer is a really really stupid car. But I did not reject the ‘Hummer Money’. Well it would be kind of weird if I would turn the servers off because the images on them contain a gas guzzling SUV.

I respect those bands for making this decission. But I rather would work on a decent Hummer commerical than on a shitty one for a product that would make more sense. That’s just me. Everybody has to find his/her standards here.

As these incoherent ramblings show it is a matter of that is still bouncing around in my head allot: Where does the responsibility end. How much influence do you have. Not an easy question to solve. Except for when you stand at the sidelines and never get asked in the first place. Then of course it’s easy and conveinient to say “I would never do that”.

that’s odd

Apple internet

Trying to dowload a 3.6 MB big .dmg file from Apple. It stalls. Four times at different points in the download. In safari, firefox and wget.

Logging in to a different machine. File downloads without any problem.
Downloading it then file via scp or httpd from the new location to my compueter works.

Something between my machine and apple get’s in the way. It is only level3.net
and the ISP and then akadns.net

Is this a bug or the beginning of ‘traffic shapping’ ?

job offering

confessions of a pixel pusher

Los Angeles based high end commercial editorial/VFX boutique seeks
passionate, experienced engineer. Must be forwarded thinking with a love
for technology and sharing that it with the creative staff and producers.
Experience with networking, unix and OS X would be required, some working
knowledge of video systems helpful. Must work well with others and be able
to clearly define goals and implement them. We have a great team and looking
to build a stronger one. If you care to push pixels better than anyone,
then we can offer you some of the prettiest pixels in town to do so.

Please send resumes to:
techjob0603@andreaswacker.com

making of for a fake jpeg

Apple internet media

this video
is the ‘making of’ for the video ipod pictures that where roaming the internets.

No comments on the Microsoft Origami d-kitchen video. Not clear if intended or not.

Democracy

internet media

I will not say anything about the fact that a viewer for internet based clip content is called “democracy”.

I tried it anyway. The site looks rather ‘pro’.

Impossible to google for, that’s what you get when you call your software ‘democracy’.

The things looks interesting. It has quickly put 2GB into ~/Movies/DTV.
The mix of python,VLC, bittorrent and quicktime is definitely a good recipe. We will see many ‘media meals’ based on these ingredients.

spring spring spring

Sony

Sony’s stock price tanks. Merrill Lynch issues a pdf where they claim that the PS3 cost 900 US$ to make. Only problem is, that if you add their numbers up it makes 800, not 900. Sure, those people should really have my 401K money. If you look a google news you still find the 900 US$ price ‘news’ flying around that is merely based on one flawed pdf.
That’s only 100 US$. Oh, Sony said earliert they are determined to sell 100 Million PS3. Of course they will become cheaper over time. If they would not than this little pdf error would sum up to 10 Billion US$. I wonder if Merrill Lynch starts caring about that kind of money.

Back to Sony. They have a new
story. Now it’s the industry specs they are waiting for. They are hinting in direction of HDMI. DRM of video IO. I was under the impression these things were all set.

Nvidia says it does not expect any royalty payments from Sony until the end of April. They make the graphics card for the PS3.

Other ‘stories’ roam the net that mention 2007 in relationship to the PS3 launch. Sony has really a good chance to mess this up royally. Right now they have a decent trajectory to do so.

Instead of loosing more creditibility on launch dates, they should have discredited the ML paper on the simple grounds that it offered.

Ken Kutaragi told the Cell Chip developers in 2001 that he wanted the chip to be 1,000 times more powerful than the one out of the PS2 . Sonys speaks about 35 – 40 times right now.