Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez tore into his U.S. counterpart and his U.N. hosts Wednesday, likening President Bush to the devil and telling the General Assembly that its system is “worthless”: “We have no power, no power to make any impact on the terrible situation in the world,” he said.

He might have been over the top regarding Bush being the devil (he ain’t), but he was spot on regarding the General Assembly. The UN must be given REAL POWER.

Wasn’t myself who said a few months ago that cellphones are becoming very complex and hence bugs are to be expected? Well, it bit me today: I upgraded my E61’s firmware to the latest version (dated from July) and now its included IM application can not “see” wifi connections anymore, only GPRS ones. Come on Nokia, it’s ok to have a few bugs, but not bugs that can be found so easily via smoke testing! And they haven’t added NAT Traversal support yet on their VoIP stack and so SIP registration only works with a few routers only (doesn’t work with my Netgear router for example) or when you go through a PBX instead.

Update: Ooh, goodie, more bugs. Apparently the E61 can not anymore connect via a static IP address on my WiFi router, only DHCP works. This rules out the possibility of trying more Port Forwarding tricks just in case the bloody NAT Traversal thing works.

A lot of people these days don’t buy camcorders because digicams are now able to shoot QVGA and VGA video at 15/30 fps and this seems to make a lot of people think that they don’t need anything more than that. As a result, camcorder sales are down the drain the last 2 years.

I have a very cheap camcorder (a Canon Z-series that costs less than $300) and I only use it once or twice a year at important social events (if you ask me where all its cables and accessories are right now inside my house, I wouldn’t be able to answer you). However, even if I use it so rarely, I still want it around and here’s why.

When we go to places we take with us our digicams, and while I have 4 of them (excluding the 7 cellphone cameras I have laying somewhere around) I mostly use the 6MP Canon A700 I bought last Spring. This camera can shoot VGA video at 30 fps, at a quality almost comparable to my camcorder (my camcorder doesn’t have as good quality but it has higher resolution, so I classify them as equal). Now, here is the catch: There is NO digicam that can compress fast-enough MPEG4 video and so the resulted video recordings are extremely uncompressed and unoptimized. You can barely fit 8 minutes of VGA video on a 1 GB SD card (and you need a high speed SD card for VGA recording).

Take as example this video which is VGA at 30fps from the new Canon A700 IS. For 10 seconds of video it resulted in 18.1 MB of file size. Now, use a utility like the 3GP Converter to convert this to either Microsoft’s AVI or Apple’s h.264 MP4 files (still at VGA, 30 fps, high quality). The resulted file size is just about 2 MBs on each case. In other words, depending on the digicam, you will get 9 to 10 times worse compression rate that you would get by normal and expected compression rate. Hence the huge file sizes.

You see, digicams need to encode in real time and there’s pretty much zero CPU power in those things. They need a custom chip, but custom chips cost a lot in R&D. In Canon’s case, their DigicII CPU can encode JPEGs very fast, but that’s all it does. Custom chip design is really really complex, especially if you want to encode video in any format more complex than MPEG-1. Even worse, most digicams only support Motion JPEG data format recording (with a .mov or .avi container format), which is not suitable as an output format in the first place.

And then there are the cellphones that can encode MPEG4 and 3GPP but even their “best quality” settings is actually pretty low. And most cellphones can only record either 3GP or just QCIF or QVGA resolutions. The Nokia N93 has the best encoding atm at high quality VGA, but as in the case of digicams, compression rate at these settings goes out of the window too in order for the Symbian OS to keep up with recording.

So, if you have the cash and you must attend your brother’s wedding, buy or rent a camcorder. Don’t take the easy way out of using your digicam or even worse, a cellphone, to record video. At least until Canon comes up with Digic III that is able to compress MPEG4 in real time at acceptable compression rates (and without running out of battery so easily on video recording), camcorders must have a place in your… closet.

* I just spent 7 hours under intensive pain in my stomach due to indigestion. This (spicy) lamb biryani I ate (one of my favorite foods) really crapped up my stomach tonight. I was in such pain that I was seriously thinking of going to ER. I even called the Lord twice to stop the pain (and you know that I am an agnostic…). Thankfully, I feel better in the last couple of hours (time is 3 AM right now I am writing this).

* So some rioters put a TV station on fire in Hungary. Talk about shooting the mailman…

* Lots of new TV series this season. I like “Vanished” cause it is really fast paced. I can’t wait for “Heroes” to start next week. “Prison Break” continues to be “ok”, but in my opinion it is not as cool as last year. And apparently “Standoff” is really boring while CSI:Miami is cheezy (amazing, colorful HDTV shots on tonight’s episode though, shot in Rio de Janeiro: I was like “wow… ouch my stomach… whoa, great shot… ouch…”).

* O2 is preparing to launch their Stealth PocketPC phone. I am kinda bammed that the screen is only 2.4″ wide and carries a UI that was originally created for 3.5″ screens. The phone market brought down that size to 2.7″, which proved to be the smallest screen size that an average human can use comfortably for that specific UI. But at 2.4″, this is going to be a huge problem for most people. It doesn’t help that its headphone port is completely non-standard either (why do the do that? previous models used standard ports).

* I have an idea about DRM and piracy. I will write about this later this week. Going to sleep now.

Holly crap! I can totally identify with some of the stuff Weird Al is singing about…

Update: Sorry guys, RIAA had the video removed from YouTube just minutes after it was originally linked by Gizmodo. The video was Weird Al Yancovic’s “Too white and nerdy”.

Fanatic muslims make such a big bruhaha over Pope’s statements these days. Who the hell cares what the Pope says or what did he really meant? In fact, their reaction only empowers these 14th Century quotes that Pope spoke of in the first place. The muslim spiritual leaders should have sent a letter to Pope to express any dissatisfaction about his speech and then try and contain their faithful to just stay put. That’s what true religious leaders should do, not to have them in the frontline and push their faithful to ridiculous accusations and even more reactionary actions. Right now, I blame these muslim spiritual leaders for not containing violence rather than the Pope who started it all.

You know, that’s why I don’t give a f*ck about any religion. Religion (any religion as an institution) is sickness. It creates fanatism, divides and blinds people in order the “institution” around them gets richer and more powerful.

No religion can give me a real, rational, understandable answer to these questions: what is soul? What is God and what is He made of? What is a spirit and what is spirituality? Why isn’t God talking to us more often if He is all powerful?

There are no real answers to these questions. Instead, most religions have Dogmas that you have to accept without hesitation or second thought, and under some religions that practice mysticism you might get yourself in trance and then tell you “you just experienced God”. My ass.

As a human being of the 21st Century, I do not accept Dogmas. Everything must have a scientific (or at least, rational) explanation. If not, then it’s just superstition in my book and a way to lock-in “customers” (see: faithful).

How do I know that there is no God? Easy. If there was a God(s), ALL humans on the planet would worship the SAME God(s). From the moment we have forks on the same religion or completely different religions, it is obvious that nothing like an all-powerful entity exists and that it’s all politics and made-up by humans. Christians say that God gave “freedom” to humans to believe whatever they want, but that’s just bullsh*t. If there was clear-cut evidence that there is a God, there would not be any religion forks, from fear alone.

For me, “religion” should just be a guidance to a righteous way of life. No Gods, no angels, no demons, no dogmas. Just a guidance on how to become better people and help others and help our society evolve and grow the right way. And that’s the only reason why I still classify myself as an agnostic and not as an atheist. I believe that humans “need” a kind of religion (it’s part of our… ROM to believe in something). Just make this “something” a behavior code rather than supernatural crap. If you ask me “how do you feel about Jesus Christ” I would reply that “I love him”. But I love him just because he gives me moral guidance in my life and his teachings made sense (well, most of it), not because I accept him as the Son of God, or as a Prophet or anything like that.

I do not make fun of people who see ghosts, angels or demons though. While in most cases there is a better explanation than the one they give, I don’t rule out the (scientific) possibility that lifeforms from another dimension might be able to get through to ours sometimes. The String Theory has shown us that there are 11 dimensions and there is no reason why one (or more) of them might contain other kinds of lifeforms and some of them might be “good” and some might be “violent”. But I definitely won’t explain these experiences via 2,000+ year old superstitions. They are cheesy, at best.

And I do not make fun of people who say that they have experienced a miracle. When the human brain truly believes in something, it can become so fixated that can heal wounds, or heal others or even not feel pain under torture. This is the only thing that I envy from the faithful people: their ability through “faith” to overcome natural laws. But again, I don’t give any supernatural explanation to these happenings, science will eventually crack those too. The last few years scientists have made good progress on proving that telepathy is possible, for example. The human brain has lots of scientific surprises for us still.

Refer to this previous post of mine on more about how I choose to satisfy the part of my… firmware that needs to believe in something.

I was fooling around at iTunes and found this “Greek folk songs and dances” album. The album contains traditional music mostly from the mainland.

There is only a single review by a customer who wrote that: “This album is terrible and does not contain any of the folk songs that I imagined it to have.” Obviously this person expected to find bouzouki music, because this is what non-Greeks think that “traditional Greek songs” are about. While I have written about it once more in my old blog, I will have to rewrite it: the answer is that ‘bouzouki music’ is NOT traditional to main Greece. It arrived to Greece just in 1922 after the East Minor (ethnic Greek) inhabitants were forced to move to Greece in the exchange of population agreement between Greece and Turkey. Some of these exiled people decided to move to Europe and USA instead of settling in the very poor Greece. And when they were asked what they are, they said “Greek”. And so when they made their music known to Europeans and Americans, they passed it as “Greek”, although bouzouki music was never traditional to the mainland and island side of Greece. In the meantime, bouzouki music was starting to become popular in Greece as well, but only amongst most youngsters, in the cities. Eventually, bouzouki music became the “popular/pop” music of Greece, but never replaced real traditional music.

Of course, I can’t say that bouzouki music is not entirely traditional to Greece, because these East Minor inhabitants were Greek, but it was only a local kind of music at only one part of Turkey and it definitely didn’t represent the whole. In fact, bouzouki music was forbidden in Greece in the ’30s (dictatorship times — crazy laws, but it gives you an idea of how “alien” that music was to mainland Greece at the time).

The traditional Greek music, depending on the region, uses the clarinet, violin, lute, oblong folk drum, lyra etc. It sounds a lot like the rest of the traditional Slav music in the region. The most well-known song from my own region is Karagouna, which is included in that iTunes album. The song is about a woman so beautiful that a poor shepherd is willing to sell off his livestock in order to buy her jewelry. Personally, I am not a fan of Greek traditional music, but I prefer it over bouzouki music.

I am one of these people who can’t wear earphones, they fall off the ear extremely easily. They just don’t fit in my ear. It is a mystery to me how people can use those and go jogging without falling off their ears all the time. I know I am not the only one with this problem, I have read about many others too.

So I decided to buy some good earbuds from Panasonic instead. Earbuds are more secure in my ear than earphones, but they are uncomfortable in terms of pushing sound forcibly inside the ear and they fall off too quite easily (just not as easily). Moreover, the specific Panasonic model does not have sound isolation so when the actual earbud cable happens to move against another surface, or even when you move your head around and the cable touches your hair, you hear that “gritch gritch” sound inside your ears. Yuck!

Then, there is the other kind: over-the-ear headphones (I got these from Sony and many others too of that style). The problem with these is that they make the upper part of your ear hurt after about 15-20 minutes because that’s the part of your head that supports the weight of the headphones.

And then there are the over-the-head headphones, which is the classic style. In terms of comfortability they are the best and they are big enough so they can offer better sound quality for less money. Problem with these is that they are too big to go to places with them. Plus, you would look like a dork from the ’80s if you go out with them. Anyways, I am seriously getting this model if worse comes to worst.

Result: We need to buy a house and use our big speakers and our HiFi system to listen to music. We have some huge speakers here that we have never used on their full potential just because we live in an appartment. Sometimes I do wish we were living in Greece, preferably in the mountains…

I have been a fan of Madonna since I was 12 years old, around the time of “Like a Virgin” which was the first song that made her known in Greece in early 1985. I remember watching her on the ERT-1 “Mousikorama” TV show for the first time on a Friday night and I was still talking about it all day at school on Monday…

Back then Madonna was getting lots of sh*t, way more than what she gets now. Many conservatives (e.g. my father for starters) despised her and were saying that she’s just a shooting star and that soon no one would remember her name because she is not a real artist. Madonna back then was attacked by the media regarding her artistic abilities the same way (truly untalented) boy bands are attacked today. Madonna has made it through though even after truly questionable business choices like her “SEX” book in 1992. She has proved to be the real queen of pop and re-invent herself to “fit” in each music era.

Especially her recent albums, after her spiritual re-awaking through Kabbalah and the birth of her first child, are extremely artistic and some of the songs are pure gold. Personally, I divide Madonna’s career in three phases:
1977-1985: The “old” Madonna, up to the “Like a Virgin” tour. The dance-pop icon that teenage girls loved.
1986-1997: “True Blue” up to “Evita”: the arrogant but always professional Madonna lives to shock.
1998-now: “Evita/Ray of Light” up to now: new religion, two kids & a good marriage, more mature.

Today I stumbled upon a great video of hers on youtube from a live TV show in 2003. She plays the guitar & sings and looks nothing the Madonna most people know of. Even if she is not the greatest singer in the world, she is way better than some pop-idols that can’t even read english, let alone music notes. Madonna can play the piano, drums and guitar — all mediocre, but good-enough to get her through on what she needs to do. Have a look at the video, it’s really amazing.

And one last thing, regarding Madonna’s most unappreciated song, “Sky Fits Heaven“. Amazing song and melody, too bad it was never released as a single so relatively few people know about it. Click on the link above to listen a 30 second sample of it on iTunes. That song was recorded around the time that Madonna had to endure vocal training (it was part of her contract for the Evita movie) and so her singing abilities on that whole “Ray of Light” album is a notch above than any other of her albums. Even on her subsequent albums she can’t sing as high, because as you know, vocal chords are muscles and if you don’t do vocal training all the time, you lose the ability. She still trains her other muscles though…

“…Isn’t everyone just
Traveling down their own road
Watching the signs as they go
I think I’ll follow my heart
It’s a very good place to start…”

If something happens to her before her time (e.g. Soyuz blows up on her way to the Space Station in 2009 ) and her record label decides to release a new single, tribute to her, I am sure “Sky Fits Heaven” would be the perfect song for that job, not because it is “very listenable” but also because the lyrics are very representative of her life. Not that I want anything bad to happen to her, mind you, I hope she has a long and happy life. I am just thinking too much of Elvis and Freddy Mercury here, in terms of legendary figures in the world music scene that unfortunately died too early…

For months now I have been trying to get Nathan’s blog higher on Google’s ranks, but it keeps being at the bottom of the list (14th page out of 17). I have tried the best practices regarding ranking but now I see that my own blog has been dragged down in the ranks too, even if it originally was ranking high (and even if now I have many more hits than in the past). Searching for my name is very popular on Google ranks and my old Slashdot blog was ranking high, but now, no cake. I assure you I have taken the right steps code-wise and link-wise, but Google keeps snobbing our blogs. Same goes for Thom’s blog too. Google will offer search results on third party pages that link to our blogs, or even link our old blogs, or even link our MOBILE blogs (which are hosted outside of Blogsome) that they don’t get not even 10 hits per day, but the actual link to our current blogs is much lower in the rank.

There is only one explanation for this: Google has moved all Blogsome subdomains down the drain for some reason. I don’t know if this is on purpose in order to promote their Blogspot or if it’s just a bug on their ranking algorithm. I have filed a bug report on the problem months ago (through a friend of mine Google engineer, as there is no public bugzilla), but nothing has been fixed… It starts to get annoying because Google is supposed to be accurate. Robots.txt on Blogsome seems to be correct anyway.