August 2004 Archives
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August 25, 2004
Visual Representation
This is one of those things that probably means that I haven't gotten enough sleep.
So, I was in an icon view in a window and the icons didn't line up in a perfectly filled rectangle or square. But a quick drag of the corner and they were lined up (in a perfect square, actually). Then I started thinking, "Is there any number of items where no rectangle will fit perfectly? (aside from a straight line, of course)" A moment later I whack myself, "Duh, primes!"
So it's curious, although obvious, that a non-prime will form a nice rectangle where a prime won't. This makes prime vs non-prime very easy to see visually.
Of course, a normal computer algorithm is going to be faster than doing visual refactoring by changing the sides of a rectangle to see if the items fit. However, I got to wondering if this is the sort of thing that would be well suited to a chemical or biological algorithm given the distributed and physical nature of it. (e.g. "Can this clump of x things form itself into a filled rectangle?")
Hrm...
August 20, 2004
Full Sized Flash Disks
These guys make flash disks the size of standard hard drives. They also make them with standard hard drive connections, including ATA, SATA, SCSI, etc. They also charge more for some of them than your new Ferrari, but hey, as a Ferrari owner, you should know that performance matters.
IDE / ATA Electronic Disk Solid State Drive FlashDisk EDisk SSD Solutions of BiTMICRO (Thanks to Gizmodo.)
August 12, 2004
Buddy List Limits and Friends
So, I was reading this post from Joi Ito, as well as all of the responses. I find the entire thing quite amusing. At first, I was thinking, "Sure, why bother with a limit at all. It's just a buddy list, right?" Well, after reading the comments I realized that each "buddy" carries with it presence traffic. And given the well connected nature of presence within a graph of connected people, that can be a lot of traffic. But then, everyone appears to be complaining that 150 is far too few and that they use what essentially amounts to buddy aggregation tools where they can spread their buddy lists out across as many services as possible in attempt to not hit any individual services limit. This means, literally, having hundreds of buddies.
I just don't get it. I understand having business contacts and coworkers on the buddy list along with friends and family. But seriously, just how many people do you really want on the list?
It's strange, though. My sister, who is about 15, probably has well over 100 people on hers. Most, of course, are just class mates or friends of friends from some party or another, I'm sure.
Now there's my buddy list, on the other side. I thought I had a lot with about 30 on it. That tends to cover the majority of my coworkers, most of my friends, and pretty much every family member that has a computer. That also covers a few people that are just business contacts. As it is, I turned off all notifications of when people become present and go away, and whatnot. It was all too much for me already. So I look at the 150 limit and basically consider it to be far more than I'd ever want or even have a need to use.
How very odd...
August 10, 2004
Waysmall PXA-based computer
This little computer has got to be one of the more interesting products I've seen in a while. It's runs on the Intel PXA255 processor. That's the same processor that powers many of the newer Sharp Zaurus products as well as many Windows Mobile devices. You have a choice of a 400MHz version or, for $30 less, you can get a 200MHz version. Each little computer has 64MB of SDRAM, a little bit of StrataFlash (4MB), and an MMC card slot. It also as 2 serial ports and a client-mode USB port -- presumably for loading up software. It comes with a web server ready to run.
And if that's not interesting, it also comes with built-in BlueTooth -- although you have to provide your own antenna (that just means it might have some real range available). For what it is, it's amazingly cheap. I think this really shows just how much of the cost of a PDA these days is screen and OS.
Hmm, but exactly what _would_ it do?
August 6, 2004
Of Video Phones and Anime
First, an update. A week ago, I got my hands on a Motorola v710 (Laurie's company got one and I get to use it). Radio Shack had made them available before they were available at Verizon stores. This was good, as it ws highly anticipated both by me and many, many others. After all, it has bluetooth, a memory card slow, and a nice screen. It was also advertised as being an "mp3 player."
In any case, it has the same video capabilities as the LG VX7000. That is to say, if you convert high quality video directly into 3GPP or 3GPP2 format it looks _really_ good on the handsets.
Now, we have some clips that look excellent on these phones from when Laurie was in South Africa. However, the use of those is far different from, say, putting a movie, TV show, or short clip on the phones.
We have a lot of anime, so I wanted to take some of the episodes, convert them into 3GP, and place them on the phone (which will be easy once the TransFlash card arrives).
I started out with not trying to directly rip the pieces of the DVD because last time I'd tried that with anime I'd inevitably get the wrong tracks of video with the wrong tracks of audio and the result would be a useless file and a couple hour of wasted time. Instead, I started out with DVD player out put to DV camera input to 1394 output on DV cam to 1394 input on computer. Well, this first attempt at that was with Windows Movie Maker and it insisted on starting the tape playing instead of just recording the 1394 video stream.
My second thought was then to directly record onto the DV tape. Easy, I thought. So, I pressed the record button. The DV cam promptly flashed "record inhibit." Doh! It's smart!
My third thought was to go ahead and try my old Archos Multimedia 20 (not even the 100 series). This recorded the video and audio fine. Unfortunately, the resulting file was already of fairly low quality (although fine on the device itself) and it was not in a format that QuickTime Pro would read. This mean using another utility to convert to 3GP and the resulting output had numerous issues including loss of correct contrast and brightness that could be barely corrected by the phone adjustments. The quality was also low because of the double low resolution conversion.
This is when I went back to the idea of ripping it directly from DVD onto the computer. I did this and got a nice output. Unfortunately, the only format of any sort of quality was DIVX and this, sadly, can't be read by QuickTime Pro for conversion. The other utility also could not read it, but the rip was also a single file of 4 episodes and this tool didn't have the cutting ability of QuickTime Pro anyway. Doh!
So then I found a utility that would record the raw DV cam stream onto the computer (a 32K byte utility, no less -- very useful). This is when I learned that the video camera doesn't take input from the mic unless it's recording to tape. Doh!
So then I thought, maybe I'll use my Apex DVD player that de-macrovisions. I got it all hooked up and it started recording to tape fine! Unfortunately, there still wasn't any audio. The audio output levels didn't work with the input on the video camera. Doh!
Finally, an idea came to me when I was looking through some conversion utilities. Why not rip the DVD into DV format? That will keep all possible quality as DV format is higher quality than DVD. That is also very usable by QuickTime Pro; remember our first videos were converted from DV. The only drawback to this method is that a 2 hour movie will take nearly 28 gigabytes of temporary storage. However, after testing a 30 second clip, this method works perfectly well, is fairly fast (on an old machine), and is relatively easy.
Yay!
Now I just have to figure out what audio format works the best. The phone supports MP3, although I don't know if it does within the video files. The video runs at 192 kilobit. The default audio is around 14 kilobit, which is tuned for speech. It sounds quite good, although it artifacts with music and such. MP3, even at 64 kilobit, will take up a substantial amount of storage.
Hmm.. have to run some tests. I'm ripping the audio at 192 kilobit PCM, so there is virtually no loss there. It does get dropped down to stereo, but the phone is essentially a mono device, so that doesn't matter. Perhaps mono MP3 at 32kilobit would be good enough?
Ah, the fun of it all... ;)
August 3, 2004
In the ongoing saga against spam...
Although I can't seem to post comments on my own blog anymore, some spammers still are getting comments through. I'm not sure how, since it requires registration and none have come up as "registered."
I think that the use of cached pages may work. The other possibility is that they've written scripts that directly interact with movabletype CGIs. If either is the case, then I could easily rename them for a little obscurity.
Dam Spamn, go away! ;)
