Archive for May, 2007
Joint
In a rare joint appearance, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs appeared together at the All Things Digital conference today, which was interesting to see. Despite people thinking that an appearance like this is going to end up being a cat fight, they were both the consumate professionals, even when given the opportunity by Walt Mossberg (The Wall Street Journal interviewer) to do so. The interview with them both was reasonably interesting, as was the one with Steve Jobs alone which took place earlier in the conference. But I’d love the opportunity to sit down with them and find out what they’re really like. All that money, all that power, and Bill especially, just a geek who made some good choices when he was younger. I want to know how they managed to adapt, whether they can boil an egg, is there a person there behind the businessman. That’s far more interesting than what they think the next big thing in technology is going to be (either they really know, but they’re not going to tell you because they want to be the one to release it, or they have no idea so why bother asking).
Venerable
Chatbear, the venerable old messageboard system, is seven years old today. Who can believe it’s been that long since I decided that the Quake 3 Rally project needed a messageboard and the one I had just wasn’t going to cut the mustard. Not much has changed since then to be honest, the codebase is largely the same and it still doesn’t live up to my expectations. I do however think I deserve my dues for actually bothering to keep it going for this long, especially considering the thousands of pounds it’s taken to actually do so. And because I usually give up far earlier than this.
Animation
We (being Andrea and I) went to see the Pixar Exhibition, 20 Years of Animation at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh today. It was actually the last day it was on, and it was purely by accident that I found out about it, a chain of links across Wikipedia that led me to the Pixar page. At £6 per-person entry fee, it was hardly cheap, and I’ve heard it criticised for not being worth it, but it’s rare that you would get to see original film production artwork so close up, especially ones of such high quality, so I consider it time well spent.
Some of the pieces on display were just incredible works of artistry, with charcoal visualisation drawings for Finding Nemo particularly sticking in mind. I’ve tried to use charcoals and I know what an unforgiving medium they can be, as you get one side of your hand caked in the stuff and then you constantly put smudges all over your paper. The sheer detail and smoothness that they had managed to cram into this set of drawings was nothing short of amazing.
Equally impressive was the 3D Zeotrope, where clay models of some of the main Toy Story 2 characters were placed on a turntable, spaced out and each one in a slightly different position from the last, so that when spun at the right speed and with the right lighting, it looked like they were all moving. It made me feel sick after looking it for too long, but it was still worth it.
The criticism could certainly be made that it wasn’t a very big exhibition, considering the amount of material they must have in vaults somewhere, and although the interactive video stations were entertaining and informative, there simply was no way you were going to be able to sit through all that they had to offer, not when there’s only three machines and other people are waiting for their turn. But despite all that, and the price, if you live near whatever city it’s going to be in next, schedule yourself a visit.
Front
I have a front door. Not much more to say than that.
Wooden
Went to see Pirates of the Caribbean at the Grosvenor Cinema in Glasgow, the only cinema I know of with a bar and the option of couches rather than a normal cinema seat. It was described to me as somewhere where the rest of the seats were armchairs rather than the expected fold down affair, but this was over-exaggerated greatly. Instead it seemed like we were all sitting on hard wooden floors, at least that’s what my ass felt was going on after it was numb after 25 minutes.
The film? A long, overdrawn, boring spectacle. You still have to remind yourself that Davy Jones isn’t real, and the ship battles and overall scale of the thing are a marvel, but the second one has it beat for inventiveness. Depp still isn’t half as much fun as he was in the original and the plot essentially boils down to one double-cross after another, spread out across what seems like five hours of movie. 2 and a half out of 5 would be being kind.
Magicians
Magicians, starring comedians Mitchell and Webb may appear at first to be a rather tame British comedy, despite the fact that it starts with one of them cutting their wife’s head off. But there is more than one moment where you may find yourself shocked at some of the lines that come out of the actors mouths. There is also a particular catch-phrase which may find itself being picked up by playgrounds and workplaces across the country.
It was an entertaining couple of hours, but still only a marginally above average comedy. Especially since neither of the leads could really act. 3 out of 5.
Library
Recently my brother moved from a PC to a Mac and needed to move his sizeable iTunes collection with him, taking all the play counts, ratings and so forth. There are software tools that will make this easy for you and searching online I found a few guides as well, but none of them seemed to be as straightforward as you would think. So instead after a little experimentation I present this, my how to move itunes library between computers guide. This has been tested both from PC to Mac as well as from Mac to PC.
Basically the key to this is simply the iTunes Music Library.xml file, which you can find by simply searching your computer (I could try and describe where it is, but it’s going to depend on your setup). Alternatively you can create a new XML file by choosing the File/Export Library option from within iTunes. This XML file contains details on every track within your library, including it’s location on your computer. Open it up in a text editor to take a look and you’ll easily be able to spot the detail about each track, including the path to the file. Without doubt the simplest way to move your library between computers is simply to copy all your music from one machine to another and then search and replace this file to replace the old path to your music with your new one.
For example, I had to replace /Users/richard/Music/ with d:/music/. This can be done easily from within a text editor on either platform, although be warned that this is can be a big file depending on the size of your library and something like Notepad may choke a bit. Once you’ve done this, simply goto the File/Import option within iTunes on your new machine and select the file to import, and watch how all your song information fills back in again. And since the file contained all the correct path information, they’ll all be ready to play.
Dancing
The other part of Andrea’s birthday present was DVD copies of Footloose, Flashdance and Dirty Dancing, all of which we watched today, in that order, until 2am. I hadn’t seen any of them before.
Of the three, I preferred Footloose, although I wouldn’t call any of them something to be proud of. Each had their own ridiculousness, from Kevin Bacon’s warehouse dance scene in Footloose, the entire concept of a female welder who wants to be a ballet dancer in Flashdance, to the cradle snatching ways of Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing - these were three films to be ridiculed. But that’s what made it an entertaining evening, as even though the films were bad, they were bad in a silly way, the way you can just sit and laugh at them for a few hours.
Inclination
All of my sites, Chatbear, Blogbear and the rest, have all been moved to new, faster than ever servers. As is always the case with these things, problems have a habit of occurring. If you find any such things, then by all means let me know.
There are still plans rattling around in my head for things I’d like to do with all the sites I have, so I would hardly call them abandoned, but it just seems at the moment that I don’t have the time nor inclination to actually sit down and do any of them.
Entrance
There’s an old Odeon cinema in Glasgow which closed last January, unable to compete with the Cineworld at the top of the hill. The sign above the entrance simply says “Thankyou and Goodnight, 31 Dec 34 - 7 Jan 06″. Every time I see it, even though I’ve never even been in the cinema, I find it to be quite sad. There just seems to be an incredible amount of film history all wrapped up in that one sign. Think of all the changes in the movie world that place saw in 71 years.
One thing that does puzzle me though, who opens a cinema on the last day of the year? It seems like people would be preparing for new year celebrations, not heading out to the grand opening of a new picture house.
There’s a page about the cinema here. Apparently the Beatles played there.
Age
Today was Andrea’s birthday, happy birthday to her. Once again I tried to make a birthday feast, including having two kitchens on the go as I made the cake down at my mum’s house and drove back and forth between the two.
The occasion has brought up discussions of whether or not you ever feel grown up, as well as whether or not you let the passing of time effect you. I don’t think I’ve ever been bothered by birthdays or the idea of getting older, I don’t believe anything really changes whether I’m 27, 28 or 30. Nor do I believe that you wake up one morning and suddenly feel grown up, I think that’s a gradual process as your needs and tastes change. What does change as you get older is the expectations of the people around you. Depending on the society you’re a part of, the chances are by 30 you’re expected to be married, have a job, a mortgage, and certainly not living at home with your parents any more. And as society changes, so do those expectations, which is why more and more people aren’t retiring at 65 any more, they still have plenty of good years in them yet.
I’d say that the old adage, "you’re only as old as you feel" is just as true now as it always was. You should never let yourself feel as old as society wants you to be.
Fountains
I’ve been to Ayr plenty of times, but always to the beach, it never occurred to me before to actually go shopping there. But that’s exactly what me and Andrea did today and I’m surprised to say that it actually has a fairly large retail presence. What is it with people though and their fascination with throwing money into water features? Whether they be fountains, decorative waterfalls or merely static ponds, somebody somewhere is throwing money into it, both young and old. We wondered whether or not the money thrown into the bottom of the waterfall in the new Ayr shopping area would be enough to satisfy the needs of a tramp, and if the canny tramp simply works his way from one water feature to another, collecting his bounty.
Do the wishes still come true if the money you threw into the fountain is used by a tramp to buy booze?
Users
I bought Andrea a camera for her birthday (she got it early, if you’re wondering why this post seems to before her birthday), so it seemed like a nice addition to that would be a subscription to one of the photo-sharing services.
I’ve written before about my hatred for Flickr, how slow it is, how difficult they make it to actually browse through images, the idiotic UI decisions. So I’m not exactly what you would call a fan.
The alternative is Smugmug, which I think is far faster, has a much better idea of how to lay images out so that they’re easy to flick through and matches Flickr feature for feature, as well as a few of it’s own.
In the end though, as much as it pains me to say it, I bought her a Flickr subscription. It has one feature that Smugmug just doesn’t have, sheer number of users. Flickr has become such the standard place to share your photographs that there’s a good chance a fair number of people you know already have accounts there. And when you’re not forcing your friends into signing up for something new, they’re far more likely to come look at your pictures and comment on them. It’s a real shame that the crowd has ended up choosing such an inferior service, but there’s not much we can do about that now. People have invested themselves in it by this stage.
More than anything, this is the best reason why a system like OpenID should succeed.
Difficult
I bought an HD television recently, and although I knew enough already to be able to buy the right thing, it became clear that the whole process of high-definition for your average consumer is far too complicated.
To begin with, the phrase "high-definition" is not a single thing, as there are three distinct types currently available, but all categorised with the HD-Ready sticker. Firstly there is 720p, meaning that the television is capable of displaying images which are 720 lines (or pixels) tall. Then there is 1080i, which means it’s capable of displaying 1080 pixel high images, but does so by first drawing 540 even lines, then the other 540 lines, and doing it so fast you probably can’t tell. And finally there’s 1080p, which is the same resolution, except it’s capable of drawing all the lines of the picture at once. Sky HD is 1080i (all broadcast HD is), so if you only have a 720p capable set, you’re not seeing all you can. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are 1080p, so it’s the same problem, you’re not really getting full HD if you’re only using 720p. But if you walked into a shop and were just looking for the HD-Ready sticker, how are you meant to know?
Then there’s standard broadcast television, what the BBC and ITV are pumping out on a daily basis, it runs at 480p (or thereabouts). It’s roughly a 640×480 image (well, NTSC is, PAL has more lines - but that’s a whole different conversation). If you’re buying a full 1080p HDTV, then that has a resolution of 1920×1080. That’s almost seven times the number of pixels on screen, you could get six full size standard definition streams on the screen at once, and still have space left over. But nobody wants to watch television as a tiny square in the corner of a larger screen so the set has to be capable of scaling up the standard content to fit the screen. That can be quite a process, and some sets manage it far better than others. And since the chances are you’re still going to be watching a fair amount of non-HD content, it can be a pretty important consideration.
There’s also the fact that blu-ray and HD-DVD’s only appear in their full 1080p resolution if you’re using an HDMI cable, which means you’ll probably have to learn something about the differences between each cable type, such as component or VGA, and how the SCART cables you’re used to are now fit for the bin. Or LCD versus Plasma technology, how Plasma can be better at blacks and fast moving images, but that LCD is lighter, less power-hungry and comes in higher resolutions. Even setting it up once you’ve got it, working your way through the 100 different options for colour and brightness and MPEG artefact compensation - you can be there for hours before you finally get it to perform as well as it possibly can.
There’s no doubt that HDTV is the future, but no product is ever really going to hit the mainstream when you have to be an AV-nerd just to make sure you don’t end up with an inferior setup.
Funny
An excellent article from the excellent John Gruber regarding the cost of the iPhone.
I don’t understand the people who criticise the high cost either, for years Pocket PC devices and similar high-end phones have been selling for prices in a similar range.
Consumer
I should probably have written about this earlier, back when it was actually announced by Apple, but since it’s only due to start happening in May, it seems just as relevant now.
Sometime this month EMI will start offering their entire catalogue DRM-free on the iTunes Store, the first major label to do so. This of course comes not long after Steve Jobs open letter to the industry, where he spelled out exactly why this was the best thing for them all to do. We should be glad somebody at EMI was listening.
DRM exists because the music labels want it to, because they don’t trust you, the consumer. The difference between iTunes and the Windows DRM systems (which we’ll compare because they are the two biggest) is like two competing music formats, like blu-ray versus HD-DVD, each only playing on a certain type of player. This situation is obviously bad for consumers, which is why various consumer groups have been trying to get Apple to do something about it (as the most successful seller of digital music). But these groups are just attacking the wrong people, calling for Apple to open up their DRM so other people can use it, or for them to license the Microsoft DRM, does nothing to help the consumer. It still locks them into a particular system, they’re just locked into one that more people use. Whether you chain up a thousand people or a million people, nothing gets you away from the fact that they’re still chained up.
So let’s see those consumer groups go after the labels for stipulating the need for DRM in the first place. Not only is it harming to consumers, but it’s also a broken system anyway, there’s not a single one of these DRM systems that can’t be cracked. It’s making it harder for the casual user to actually do what they want to do with the music that they paid for, while not stopping the professional criminal that wants to pirate as much music as they can.
I predict that EMI’s sales will increase dramatically in the short-term, as all those that know about DRM go and snap up all the music they want. We’ve not quite reached the peak of general-user DRM knowledge yet, but once your average user knows exactly what it is the record companies are doing to them, I’d expect to see a serious consumer backlash to begin.
