Category: Uncategorized

The use of ‘mike’ instead of ‘mic.’ It’s a shortening of ‘microphone.’ Tsk.

(example in this article, which I’m reading because it was linked from Robert Sharl’s post here, on which I can’t comment because I don’t have a Google account, or something. Robert: you’ve seen the video from TED of the Microsoft SeaMonkey/Photosynth demo, right? If CoreAnimation makes that sort of thing easier to implement, I’m all for it. Yes, we’ll get pointless crap too, but we have that now, it’s just uglier than it will be.)

I’m wading through piles of paper trying to find a specific document that I must have mis-filed/incorporated in a pile of ‘not worth filing’ stuff/generally misplaced/etc. Instead, I’ve found a bunch of documents pertaining to the 2005 Christmas Lectures. Specifically, early drafts of the scripts, with scribbled notes from rehearsals and run-throughs.

Captured in the margins are moments of insight. Such as: when the opening line of Lecture 3 changed from ‘Look at your arm!’ (no, really – and no, I didn’t write that) into ‘You’re all turkeys!’. Which I think ended up as ‘You’re all vegetables! And some of you are turkeys!’, but you get the point.

Then there’s the musing where James asked, of an entire lecture, ‘What’s the question we’re addressing here?’, and I recall sitting bolt upright and saying ‘Not quite the right question. It should be: what’s the perspective shift we’ve inspired?’, that led to refocussing the entire lecture around the rôle evolution has played in shaping our diets (even later drafts defocussed the lecture again, but that’s another issue).

There are the parenthetical comments that note the first appearances of The Goat, and The Squad of TA Soldiers (both eventually dropped again), and the moment I first dreamed up having a mad machine serve Krebs ‘the pill on a plate’ so beloved of 60s Sci-Fi, that ended up as the opening of lecture 5.

This is how I like to remember the creative process. Rewrites are painful, but the moments of inspiration, of throwing out cruft and fixing something, of refactoring entire trains of thought – those are magical events.

Writing at that sort of level, with that sort of care – agonising over both individual words and the shape of sentences, about how paragraphs flow, and about driving driving ever onwards whilst simultaneously coaxing contrasts of intense grandeur and amicable ease – it’s hard.

And I like it.

I should do it more.

One of the problems we’re facing with SciCast is that just as video is becoming fairly universally accessible, the manufacturers are retiring the only type of low-end camcorders that really make any sense – mini DV. Sony, JVC and Canon each have remarkably few consumer DV cameras on the market, as they push towards supposedly more modern formats like recordable DVD-video and, particularly, hard drive recorders.

They’re all perfectly reasonable acquisition formats, but if you want to make films rather than force people to suffer through every second you shoot, you need to be able to edit the result. And this is where the non-DV formats rather fall down.

DVD-video is a lousy post-production format but still arguably better – at least for now – than the format used by Sony and Panasonic hard disc recorders, the snappily-named AVCHD. (just to be really confusing, there are also AVCHD camcorders that use data DVDs as the storage medium, or even flash memory cards)

The trouble with AVCHD is, ironically, how fantastic it is. It’s an MPEG4/H264 variant with an extremely large frame size. Which is, in short, crippling for current PCs to decode. Anecdotally, systems that can handle four streams of the MPEG2-based, DV-derived HDV format can just about handle one of AVCHD.

Playing back the video on your PC isn’t where your problems end, however – edit system support is sadly lacking. Sony’s Vegas editing package is supposed to handle it, and I hear rumours that Ulead Videostudio can too. What we really want, however, is support in iMovie, Final Cut Pro, and Adobe Premier. None of which is in place at the moment.

Right now, the best option is to – I kid you not – pull in full uncompressed HD via an HDMI capture card, but that’s hardly realistic for a supposedly domestic format. There’s an interesting thread here about forthcoming AVCHD support in Final Cut Studio, but it’s equally clear that the strain of cutting AVCHD material is going to drive demand for übermulticore desktop computers well into the end of the decade. Right now, the only viable option is to re-render captured footage into some intermediate codec for editing. Which isn’t something you want to talk your granny through. There’s no word of support in the likes of iMovie, either.

So we’re left in the faintly ridiculous situation that editing video is today harder than it was a couple of years ago. We’ve a plethora of mutually-incompatible formats, excessive render times even on the beefiest of desktop PCs, and still not many cameras with proper microphone inputs.

Personally, I’ll take cheap, reliable, and decent-quality DV over any format that’s theoretically HD but practically unplayable except in unedited form, direct off the camera. Harrumph.

(though I wouldn’t mind me some HDV…)

My hate/hate relationship with my N95 continues. I was showing it to Matt tonight, and it crashed within about 30 seconds of my starting to demo it. He was actually quite impressed; from the way I’d been talking, he’d expected more like 15 seconds.

Anyway, catching up on feeds tonight (via the wonderful new NetNewsWire 3.0), I find that Scoble has blagged himself an N95. One of the problems I’ve been having is finding sensible software repositories for Series 60 apps to try out; one of Scoble’s comment threads helps there.

Incidentally, I’d agree with Scoble that the phone’s camera quality is excellent – noticeably better than the not-at-all-sniffy K750, and Nokia have toned down the somewhat crude over-sharpening their previous high-end Zeiss-lensed überphones applied. However, there are two problems with the N95 camera; shutter lag is pretty bad, but more of an issue is startup time. I count it at about five seconds, which is extreme. I’ve started flicking the lens cover open while the thing’s still in my pocket, as I’m walking up to where I think there might be a shot. Once I’m in place, I still have to count to three before the screen’s up and stabilised. Ugh.

Just so those of you who haven’t been paying attention know: comments here are down. Disabled for (shared) server performance reasons; I was getting hit by so many spam-bots, the comment script was nailing the server. Not that the spam was getting through – the filters were taking care of that – but it was still driving 100+ threads to reject everything.

I haven’t had chance to work out a solution yet. Sorry.

I like things like this: a bull (called ‘Derek’), in a field, wearing a GPS receiver and location transmitter. Guess where in the field he’s going to be at 3pm daily, and win tickets to Glastonbury, care of sponsors Orange.

Nice. Whimsical. Not even the bad puns annoy me.

(via Iain Tate’s crack unit)

I just woke up my venerable workhorse Power Mac from its overnight slumbers, and it made extremely worrying graunching sounds. A few minutes’ warming-up and it seems to have settled down, but still… eek?

Please don’t die please don’t die please don’t die.

I bought it on 18^th September 2002, and it’s been rock-solid since then. True, I have swapped out the hard drive for a larger one, fitted more RAM, and… actually, that’s about it. The video card took a beating when an old LCD monitor blew, taking out the card’s VGA output, so I’m down to the one (ADC) screen now. But it’s a real trooper, this thing. Still runs everything I need like a champ.

Wibble.

The votes are in (sorry about that, David…), and the winner is announced. Apparently no two judges voted for the same first choice, so it all came down to ranked lists and single transferrable vote. Which is pretty darned cool, actually.

Great work from David Colarusso on all this, and congratulations to the winner. Fun!

Great critique of the London 2012 logo, from Coudal Partners. I’m particularly fond of:

It’s simple. When we hear “my kid could have done that!” we think “success.” Some of the greatest logos of all time involve two lines (the Christian cross) or three lines and a circle (Mercedes). Your kid COULD have done that, but she didn’t. Nor did she design the graphics standards manual that goes with it. So give it a rest. Or send us her resume.

The beta of Movable Type 4 is out. Damn, and I was so close to moving The Daily Grind to WordPress, too.