Monthly Archives: May 2005

My New Toy: Philips DVP 642

On a whim, I decided I needed a new DVD player. It’s not like I don’t have DVD players, but the one I had in my living room had one disadvantage: it was old enough that it wouldn’t play any DVDs that I burned. It’s simply old enough that it wasn’t an issue. Eric Haines had mentioned that he had bought these uber-cheap Cyberhome DVD players for fun ($30 at Circuit City) but I decided that while I was at it, I should get something that could play DivX/MP4 disks (I’m addicted to the new Doctor Who episodes that I’ve been snarfing from isohunt and my usual method of hooking my laptop up was painful and frequently crashes).

A bit of research suggested that the Philips DVP 642 would be a good one. And so far I must admit, it seems great. $70 from Target. Plays everything I have. DVD. VCD. SVCD. NTSC. PAL. And with a simple code from the web, apparently all regions as well.

I plopped in a DVD with four episodes of Doctor Who in it. Worked perfectly. A CD-R with two episodes. Worked fine. My Episode IV CD. Looks beautful.

It could all go to pieces tomorrow, but so far, it seems great and is a good bargain.

Context Free

Example PictureCourtesy of Mark Lentczer, have a gander at Context Free, an implementation of Chris Coyne’s design grammars. This puts me in mind of Alvy Ray Smith’a graftals or L-systems which I first read about 20 years ago.

After a few minutes of playing, I came up with this:

Brainwagon Receding

A few minutes more hacking resulted in the following branching structure (click on it to waste my bandwidth and download the 2000×2000 image):

Braintree

More fun with reflecting balls

After yesterday’s post, I decided that I’d like to try to make some better reflection maps. So I shot this image of my office reflecting in a Christmas tree ball. The image is pretty noisy because my office isn’t brightly lit. (Addendum: I also had the camera set for outdoor white balance, which makes the overall image look pretty crufty. I just shot a different image, and got this better image, which has a magenta hue, but isn’t yellow orange at least.) I then cropped it to a square containing just the ball, and passed it through my unwarping program:

Cylindrical Projection of My Office

I have a different version of my program that produces a cube map, which is perhaps more intelligible (click on it for a bigger version):


Cube Map of My Office

It appears that the quality is pretty much limited by the poor surface of the reflecting ball. You can see a lump in the ball causes the book in the foreground to have a distorted outline.

Still, fun stuff.

Revenge of the Sith

Well, once again, working for Pixar Animation has its perks: yesterday we had company screenings for the prerelease of George Lucas’ sixth installment in the Star Wars saga: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I know you all will go see it anyway, so I won’t give any spoilers here.

It delivers on what you might expect: lots of gorgeous eye candy, and we learn how Anakin completes his slide to the dark side and becomes the evil Darth Vader. It is significantly dark when compared to other episodes, and there is a fair amount of swordplay, violence and treachery. The plotline is one straight out of Shakespeare, being a combination of Othello and Titus Andronicus.

I’d score it an eight out of then, with some caveats. Once again, George delivers on visuals, but leaves some dialogue which was absolutely cringe-worthy. On at least two occasions, actors are called upon to announce their feelings, rather than act their feelings. I mean ouch.

Natalie Portman is once again given very little to work with: almost all of her lines and all of her scenes with Hayden Christensen are just terrible. Amadala cannot accept that Anakin has gone wrong, but she has plenty of reason to believe that he has. Hello! Slaughtered all the Sand People? Doesn’t that count for something? Serial killers often begin by torturing animals? Didn’t any alarm bells go off in your head? The entire Amadala subplot (and to some extent that of Obi Wan) is based upon the absolute denial of these two characters that anything is wrong. I’m willing to buy denial, but you have to at least make it plausible.

Ironically, in the end you are perfectly comfortable accepting droids, The Force, space flight, Jedi’s, giant space fleets, but are let down (slightly) by the emotional subtext of the film.

Still, it is pretty good, and almost certainly better than Episodes I and II. Go out and see it for sure, and may the Force be with you.

Addendum: the security at our showing was considerably greater than any company screening we’ve ever had. They had security wand us all with metal detectors, no phones, no cameras. Pretty amazing.

Bay To Breakers

Well, according to the Bay To Breakers website, I came in 21,753rd. Carmen came in 21,747th. Yesterday it seemed to be different: we saw 2174 and 2175 which didn’t seem right to us (there were lots of people ahead of us) but maybe their website had a glitch. My official time was around 2:42:21, but we didn’t cross the start line for about twenty minutes, so I suspect our time should have been closer to 2:20:00 or so. I should have been able to tell you exactly what my time was, but my super spiffy PolarUSA heart rate monitor has an annoying feature that it only keeps track of the last exercise session, and I managed to bounce a key and accidently start a new session, which deleted all the detailed information for the race.

Sigh. Piece of crap. I was looking forward to seeing my pulse rate spike on the Hayes Street Hill.

I was carrying a GPS during the race, so I should have a Google Map track of the route sometime later this week. We should be able to derive all the timing info from the saved route.

Perhaps it is just my aching knees…

But I feel a full on rant coming on, brought on by my favorite corporate shill, Robert Scoble. I know, I know, he’s an easy target, but he really brings it on himself with absurd nonsense in defense of Microsoft.

My rant today is response to this bit of absurdity which Scoble posted in response to Dan Gilmor’s criticism of Microsoft’s position on security:

In winning and sustaining its monopoly in the operating system and browser markets, Microsoft has exposed countless millions of people to woes from security holes that have become conduits for viruses, worms and spyware. Now the software giant is planning to charge its captive customers to clean up the mess it created.

Robert Scoble goes on to describe how Microsoft are really good guys, after all, they released Windows XP Service Pack 2 for free, they released their (beta) Anti Spyware product for free, how more altrusitic can you get?

I suppose in Scoble’s world, he thinks that when he buys a car which is later found to have serious defects, that the manufacturer’s are being altruistic when they fix those shortcomings for free. But he’s mistaken. Recalls are forced upon manufacturers because consumers need to be protected against systematic defects in automotive design and manufacturing which can cause loss of property or life. While consumers don’t pay for these repairs when they are fixed, consumers do pay for them in the form of higher sticker prices on automobiles when they purchase them.

Software of course, is shipped without any warranty of any kind. Script kiddies break into your business’ computer and deletes all your files? Not Microsoft’s fault. Lose all your personal data to an identity theif? Not Microsoft’s problem. Oh, and that will be $180 for XP, thank you very much.

Last I heard, Microsoft was still making stacks of money. They aren’t doing anything for free, they are doing the bare minimum necessary to try to keep their business alive and growing. Often, this is more about creating the appearance of doing something about security than actually doing something about security.

The other thing to note is that part of the reason that IE7 and Longhorn have such substantial security updates is because Microsoft wasn’t really ever focussed on security. Many of their systems are virtual construction sets for virus writers, and always were. Now they are playing catch-up, and asking to be praised for doing the work that they could have done years ago.

Sorry Robert, no free rides for Microsoft from this blogger.

Cool video experiment

Video Thing has a cool experiment in shooting panoramic video using a Christmas tree ball mounted on a boom in front of a DV cam. An After Effects plugin turns the resulting reflection into a cylindrical environment video. Very cool.

I did some experiments a while ago using this setup, only with still images instead of video. My old Kodak 210+ wouldn’t focus close enough to get a good image of the ball, so I turned out this:

cylindrical map

The code was pretty simple to write: just convert from reflected rayspace into a cylindrical map. Cool stuff.

Bizarre Camera Phone Picture

Exercise Causes Genetic MutationWell, after I crossed the finish line of the Bay To Breakers yesterday, I snapped the picture on the right. It seems that exercise can cause hideous genetic mutations.

Well, no. Actually, it shows that my camera phone is a line transfer rather than a frame transfer ccd device: it scans the image out as it is taking it, rather than taking it all at once and then clocking the stored frame out line by line. This means that camera motion can cause bizarre distortions of the resulting image, resulting in the kind of cool picture on the right.

I think I’ll use it in my sidebar, and link it back to this posting just for fun.

Bay To Breakers

Well, I’m back from the Bay to Breakers. Carmen and I mostly walked the course at a fairly brisk pace, we completed in about 2h 15m. I snapped some pictures, and got a GPS track of the parade route. Expect an update after I’ve rested up a bit.

Childish Rant of the Day

For some reason, Dave Winer’s Scripting News hasn’t fallen off my blogslines blogroll. It must be for the “reality TV” factor, where people who should know better act out their personal issues for the shock and amusement of all.

Witness today’s rant:

Scripting News: 5/14/2005

Thing is — Adam’s star is fading, again. At some point he’s going to need some friends, and then I’m going to kick him in the ass, and then look him in the eye and say “Shouldn’t have lied so much, dickhead.”

You see Dave, it’s like this. You may like to lay claim to being the inventor of Podcasting. There may even be some legitimacy to that claim. But the fact is that, well, people didn’t like you very much, and mostly ignored your efforts. It took the involvement of somebody with some (albeit minor) celebrity and personality to make it take off.

The fact is, you didn’t capture the imagination of the public: Adam mostly did. And what’s completely unsurprising is that public’s vision about the future of podcasting is considerably larger, more diverse and beautiful than Adam or you could possibly imagine.

I was a big fan of both of you until Bloggercon 3. It was then that I realized just how vain Adam is , and just how much of a self-important blowhard you are. The fact is that you were entirely happy with calling yourself Adam’s friend as long as you thought there was some personal advantage you were going to get in terms of fame and recognition, and when that wagon appeared to pass you by, you reacted like above, as a petulant, snotty nosed child.

To any podcasters: think long and hard about whether either of these two people is the person you want to use as models for your podcasts, or your life in general.

I’m left wondering: why the hell does anyone hang out with Dave Winer at all?

Heart Rate Monitor Output

My Heart RateWell, my new Polar S410 heart rate monitor seems to work: I wore it for the first time at the gym last night when I did my combination of interval training on the recumbent bicycles and 15 minutes of elliptical training. On the right you can see my resulting pulse rates, edited slightly to remove the several data dropouts that occurred.

During the elliptical portion (the last third or so) I was probably pushing too hard. My max pulse rate should be around 174, and I hit a max of 167. I’ll have to cut it back a bit.

It’s a cute gadget, but I’m not overly fond of the software, which doesn’t seem to guide you into designing an appropriate exercise regimen. I’m working on some software to decode the information transferred via SonicLink, their sound based transfer system. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Worst Product Intro Ever!

Sweet Zombie Jesus, does Microsoft need some lessons on introducing products?

It’s a rhetorical question: the answer is yes, yes, they do.

Yesterday was the unveiling of the Xbox 360, the new generation of Xbox which should be available before the end of the year (unless of course the Longhorn team is in charge, in which case it will ship with 1/2 the features in time for St. Smithin’s Day, 2008). Elijah Wood “starred” in this extravaganza, which told us literally nothing about the Xbox 360.

If you haven’t seen this monstrosity, let me set the scene for you:

Begin with Elijah Wood’s intro claiming that the Xbox 360 is so revolutionary, so earth-shattering, so absolutely mindblowing that if you don’t buy one you’ll be a virtual pariah because everyone who is cool and doesn’t have acne is going to have one and you’ll be left out and never be able to get a date and then you’ll have to spend all your time alone playing video games by yourself, uh. Well, never mind.

Launch then into a cheesy retrospective about Pong and Space Invaders. Hey, Elijah. I knew Pong and Space Invaders. Pong and Space Invaders were my friends. You don’t get to talk about Pong and Space Invaders, you 24 year old furry toed bastard…

Then, pan to a bunch of teen and early twenty skate punks and halter top wearing girls (I never saw any of those while playing Pong or Space Invaders, or Halo for that matter) all madly cheering amidst a greenish light. Voice Over: “and now, the future of everything, the only hope for all of humanity, the Xbox 360!!!!” Cue the music, the crowd parts, and….

It’s a girl with an enormous handbag.

Is that the new Xbox?

Oh wait… she’s approaching the podium, and…

Pulls out an absolutely gi-normous white box, and places it on a podium.

Cue Green Flash and Green Laser Effects!

And then, cut to songs by The Killers, whoever the hell they are.

Surely they are going to tell us something about the box though, right?

Uh, no. The remainder of the half hour was spent carefully avoiding showing us anything interesting about the Xbox 360 or why we should want one.

Even Robert Scoble didn’t have any enthusiasm for this launch.

Whoever is in charge of the Xbox at Microsoft could learn a few things from Steve Jobs:

  • Advertising is only really useful when you have a product to ship. Announcing a product six months prior to its availability to the public merely tips your hands to your competitors and keeps people from buying your original machine. Care to guess where sales of the traditional Xbox are gonna go in the next six months?
  • Beautiful people do not sell products. Having good products sells products. That means cool games running on cool hardware. The question that people will ask before buying the Xbox 360 is just this: why should I buy? What will this box let me do that my existing system will not? We saw no answer to this yesterday.
  • The market for video games is not nearly so much about 18-23 year olds. 20% of the gaming market is over 36 for god’s sake, and we are more likely to have the diposable income to actually buy your latest gadgets. Video games are also approaching gender parity, so a more thoughtful approach to the way you portray the sexes might be in order.

I’m going back to sleep until the thing ships.

Need more information/discussion? Slashdot has some links. Favorite quote from that discussion:

Whoa! I actually felt the 30 Minutes of my life pull from my body after watching that.