“The US House of Representatives was expected to vote Wednesday on a Senate-approved budget bill for 2008 that includes 70 billion dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a boost to President George W. Bush, the Senate voted late Tuesday to approve the catch-all 555 billion dollar budget bill, adding extra war funds without any of the restrictions that Democrats hoped to pin on their release, such as linking them to a withdrawal date for US troops” writes AFP.

Ok, let me get this straight. Last year we celebrated the fact that Democrats were taking over the Senate/Congress. A year later, and Bush still has it his way, and nothing has changed. Anyone care to explain how is this possible?

BTW, I retook the presidential candidate test. I had a match to Mike Gravel again, but this time it was an 100% match. Too bad that no one knows about Gravel. It seems that the media never gave him a chance and also it seems that the voters don’t look hard enough for their best candidate. Take the test too, and read what Gravel believes about democracy, Iraq, global warming etc, here. It’s very disturbing that there is such a person out there that wants to run for president, and no one gives a shit about it.

Nokia wrote on their feature-list of their Tablet OS2008 for the N800/N810 devices:

Supported video formats: 3GP, AVI, H.263, H.264, MP4, ASF, WMV, MPEG-1, MPEG-4, RV 7/8/9 (RealVideo)

I was shocked to find out that absolutely none of my h.264 files worked (.mov or .mp4), none of my DivX files worked, and none of my ASF & WMV8 files worked. I later tested mpeg2 (QVGA, always) and that didn’t work either. The only files that I managed to playback was 3GP, XViD, WMV9, Mpeg1 and *some* Mpeg4-SP files (not all). Given the fact that XViD and DivX are very similar, their decoder should have (or should have been made to) work with both MPEG4-ASP formats.

Last night, Sony had a firmware upgrade for their PS3 too. They promised DivX and WMV support. They both worked perfectly, and we also got XViD support and partial MPEG4-SP support for free too. If Sony was to add .mov container support for h.264, their solution is perfect for video viewing, beating even the AppleTV which was created for that reason alone.

I like the OS2008 upgrade for the rest of its features, but for video support, it sucks. It sucks less than OS2007, but it still sucks hard. Nokia needs to get their shit together. As a video person, that’s all I have to say.