in the meantime in vapor land

misc

there are people connecting their red camera to Sony PS3s running Windows Vista

Red the camera
it’s internals would perform a couple of miracles if they would deliver on their specifications.
But the redesign is about the case. Great. Keep updating the case. The eletronics are the easy bit. Sure.

Sony PS3
If you make a 1000 chips maybe only 100 work. That’s called yield. In the end it comes down to cost. If you have a very complex chip this can be very tricky to manage. The Cell chips in the PS3 were announced to run at 3.5 Ghz. Rumors see them at 2.8Ghz right now. Which also would help with the heat problems the console will have.

Vista
Some kids have to help Microsoft distributing the OS via Bittorrent. Innovation from the outside.

Robert Scoble used to be ‘the Microsoft Blogger’ and got allot of attention. Technorati ranks him at #22. That probably will fade fast. How long till his tag as the ‘ex Microsoft Blogger’ fades? Much of his attraction was, that he was this voice from within the dark star. Now he is out here with us. In the dust of the milky way. And there are -by god- enough voices out there.

is it the kocevski brothers now?

internet misc

an interesting mashup that will rise to internet fame without a doubt.

the credits mention Dan and Dale Kocevski. No idea if they are indeed brothers.

one lone screen saver

free of any reason

somewhere in America

some IT workers in Sheffield, UK
Aeron chairs are everywhere, it seems.

so easy to waste a Saturday

Apple internet technology

I would need to find out how long it would take to code a couple of things. They happen to be running on a Mac and they would be dealing with moving images. Quicktime comes to mind. It is an OK player. Sure VLC is more flexible for some formats, but everybody has a Quicktime player on a Mac. SideNote: Why is apple so stupid to charge money for they pro Version of Quicktime? Can’t make revenue that would make up for the general annoyance that comes with it. And you don’t become a standard for charging for features like copy paste. Anyhow.

Quicktime development is a whole different nightmare. There are around 2,500 functions. Countless API options. Countless related technologies, and not a single introduction that would make any sense, or compile for that matter. Of course, it’s all there. And ‘all’ is quet literally. Examples that crash XCode. Examples that only run on OS9. Introductions of codes with code snippets where it takes allot of guessing, which era this was valid in.

Most open software projects have much better online documentation than Apple’s Quicktime. It’s a mess. A mess with a messy history. Once things work they might be great. It also probably great if you work for Apple have access at the internal communication paths. But for a 3rd party developer it’s hard to get into this. Specially if the API would be a smart part of you have actually to do.

I will NOT make a living by coding around the Quicktime API in the next years. It’s just a small part of what I have to do.

OpenGL for instance is also just a small part of what I do. But I have no problems there: I get the code, the documentation, and can drag this knowledge along in the projects that I do. Same with databases. But Quicktime is a horrible beast to get started with.

Almost as bad as ‘AppleScript’. But I rather not start writing about that.

color perception

art

nice optical illusion

zodiac on showreel and the conform

confessions of a pixel pusher misc

This article in Showreel describes the technical workflow of the movie I worked on in the last months.
Since it was written a couple of months ago it is missing the online part: The movie actually gets assembled via a perlscript and a database: It reads the Final Cut XML. Asks the operator to load the camera negative LTO3 tapes into the tape robots that it needs. Loads those via all available tape drives and assembles the frames to one stream of dpx files. It takes about 20 hours to assemble a reel for the first time. But it can do unsupervised once the tape robot has the tapes it needs. Changes are faster of course. Only the missing material will be loaded. Doing the actual conform from the disk takes less than 2 minutes. For the last weeks I was watching split screens of on- and offline. Seing all cut’s line up was a very very pleasant thing. I handled terrabytes of data before. Those are worth something as well. But a 85 million dollar movie is a different story. Finding all frames where they should be was a big relief: I never trust anything or anybody. Especially my own code is highly suspioius to me. This paranoia got me my first gray har on this movie. But maybe it was also the reason why the ghost of the digital-movie-disaster landed on another movie, not “Zodiac”. Whatever it was, it worked, and that makes me very happy. Having finished on schedule: Priceless.

merkelcast

misc

Germany had elections the other day. In Germany you actually make a cross on a piece of paper with a pen. That is really helpful, since everybody can vote. It’s easy, non confusing and impossible to rig. Anyway. They got rid of the social democratic / green government, and elected the conservatives. The new chancelor is a woman called “Angela Merkel”. Before the last chancelor Schroeder, the conversative CDU had been in power for a very long time. They had such a huge corruption scandal that not many people were left on their side once the dust settled. Mrs. Merkel got the nomination that way. But most people in all parties did not take her serious. In a way nobody saw her coming: After having won a very tight election she pretty much cleaned up: All established politicians that seems to be power figured for years are gone or on different jobs. Which, actually is a really good thing. Not that I am a Merkel fan, but at least she is an ex scientist. What did the US Prez actually do before he was a politician?

Anyway, she seems to be video casting right now. will be probably in german and, well, we will see how appealing …

Well, and then I tried it, and of course there is no real URL with media enclosures. Just some lame RSS feed.
IT people are such a pain.
If I can not subscribe to something then I kind a think that 90% of all people can not. That does not stop
people from commenting about this in their blogs though. Like me they all mumble around the meme, but don’t actually try the thing that they are writing about. Write first than read (Derived from shoot first then ask questions) .

fxphd

confessions of a pixel pusher

Finally I had some time to check out fxphd and it looks pretty decent.

painting by numbers

internet

ponzi internet art scam

of course this is how the art market works anyway. Nice to see it condensed to the essentials.

and the winner is …

Sony

Only four month ago the run for the domination of the console market seemed to be
wide open

After E3 and the 600 US$ price tag of the PS3 the market has shifted

Granted these are simple online polls. But there is certainly a trend. One that should make Sony feel very very uneasy.

If the HD-DVD camp is smart enough to ship two sided HD-DVD / DVD versions of movies for the same price than the DVD version then this format war might be over within a year. Nobody will be betting on the loosing horse this time. If the HD-DVD companies would control their greed just for a couple of months then they could really win this in a landslide. Good for everybody. Having a double sided Blueray/DVD combo is simply not possible, unless you actually sandwich two discs together. Actually they should start selling a movie and just give you two discs. One in the current format, and one in the next one. Making those disks is not that expensive. People would start building their HD library as they continue to buy movies. If you already have 10 movies that you can play on a HD player then you are much more likely to buy one. With the double disc approach you can avoid a sales drop for the current DVD format: People feel odd right now, that they have to spend money on something that will be obsolete soon.