cellphones, their cameras and missing features

daily life not existing yet technology

Many Cellphones have cameras. Wether you want it or not. While I had no problem taking 70,000 images with cheap Canon pocket cameras that then became twexus, I never really used the camera in the Motorola flip phone I am using right now.

I find it amazing how there are no phones that make use of the camera for themselves. Phone and camera share the power source, that’s about it. When I want to call somebody that is not in the address book I have to read the number and then type it. Not a big deal. True. But the camera in the phone could do that for me, right? Either trying to OCR a humanly readable number, or -slightly more involved- read a special barcode that could mean all sorts of other things as well.

star trak

daily life internet

sucks to be famous these days.

os x APIs

Apple confessions of a pixel pusher

Learning new stuff. Again. Will it ever end?
When trying to figure out why on earth there is no easy and obvious way to find out why a writeToFile has failed in Objective C the google gods had some mercy and sent me to this page that not furthers my question a single inch. Wil Shipley is the author of Delicious Library and what he had to write let me go further for 48 hours to look into this whole Cocoa thing. And that’s after spending three days to prepend 4 (!) 7 digit phone numbers with 310 since there are now overlay area codes. Cleaning up your address book with Objective C is a rather interesting excersive in patience.

Filesystems

confessions of a pixel pusher technology

Filesystems store what we use on our computers. They are not an act of god, they are man made. They seem to have an impressive resilience if it comes to innovation though. The folder / directory structure was more or less the last break through. Since the the storage capacity did grow: You mom might manage hundred times the storage now than a mid sized team of lab coat wearing engineers did when she was young.

This general rant got inspired by an rather unpleasant observation: Many filesystem become unstable or only slow in the better cases when they become full. Xsan and xfs
have technically not that much in common, but you better keep 10% space available.
Which is tragically exactly the opposite from any real life use I have seen. Now I am talking about professional storage for media. It always is full. Brimful.

wynn vs. picasso

free of any reason

Ah those billionaires

bravia

communication confessions of a pixel pusher marketing Sony

Conceptually it was a well intended follow up: Sony’s Bravia commercial using exploding paint instead of many balls.

Execution wise there certainly are amazing explosions. There are few good camera angles. But most of them are, well, uninspired. The idea of using an abandoned housing project is interesting. Somewhat. I have just seen to many of them being blown up. Somehow you expect them to sink together once they become the object of the camera. But it was not this non delivering on the expectation that broke the spot. It was the unispired music choice together with that I call dismal editing. I can only write this, since I have not looked up yet who did it. It’s easier that way. And I am sure it was the usual clusterfuck of decission making or pure lack therof that pushed this brilliant idea of a follow up into the lower ends of mediocricy. The sport lives from the real Bravia. Not more, not less. A typical sequell that can’t deliver. Too bad they blew it.

this american life

media

The NPR radio show “This american Life” is available as podcast.

Finally. Excellent!

bravia teaser

Sony

After the balls in SF Bravia ad Sony is making another one. The teaser and some stills.

Ives Klein would have loved that. Wait a minute I just had an idea. Sony, can I make a commercial, please. Pretty please?

yikes

Apple free of any reason

“… to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. ”

Yeah, that’s gonna work, Steve! Probably works with him. Reality distortion field of a billionaire on a park bench.

3ware 9550sx DEGRADED und linux

linux

I just positively confirmed that you NEED to run a linux kernel with ‘noapic’ like this:

...
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.17-1.2142_FC4smp ro root=LABEL=/ noapic
...

Omitting noapic resulted in an array that would loose a harddrive for a split second in the very same midplane position after 12 – 14 hours of heavy use. The array state would switch to DEGRADED and it would rebuild for a couple of hours. Never lost any data. Just allot of time in trying to fix hardware that was not broken in the first place.