I just read this over at Slashdot, and was funny, as I was thinking just yesterday that the future of computing won’t be a free utopia but a fully controlled environment.

There is no doubt in my mind that NSA/CIA/FBI already have “super” credentials (supplied by Microsoft) that can login to any Windows machine in the world. While this might sound like a conspiracy theory to you, it sounds like normal business to me. If I was working for them, that’s the first thing I would push towards. Apple is as vulnerable as Microsoft in my opinion.

Regarding Linux, they can always offer “patches” or whole frameworks that look strong at first sight (e.g. SELinux), even uploaded by a Joe Hacker, only that the guy might be working for them instead. Look at the recent Debian blunder. For many years now, no one knew that the SSH keys were weak. I don’t give enough credit to the OSS community to fix bugs or even ruthlessly test random patches that make it in. It’s so easy to slip in rootkits on OSS that’s not even funny.

And besides, there is always the chicken and the egg problem. Instead of trying to put rootkits on pieces of software, you do it once, in the compiler. Good luck trying to keep clean the compiler itself, because you always need a compiler to compile your compiler (and very old compilers don’t have all the features you need to compile a newer compiler).

In other words, these agencies use computers to do their job, the same way some do to hack them. So if you ever see a global rootkit unveiled, don’t get surprised. I expect nothing less from them. I would do the same thing if I was in their position.

Post 9/11, there is no such thing as “privacy”. Forget it. Or fight for it.

1.5 years ago I went on record saying that OLPC rewriting the whole UI of the OLPC from scratch was stupid (1, 2). By saying the obvious truth, somehow I became the “bitch” again for all the Linux weenies who happened to read my blog at the time.

Now, the team realizes their mistake and they regret it, as instead of creating education applications, they were spending time and money re-inventing the wheel.

I told you so.

The current situation is far from ideal regarding free tools and AVCHD .mts/.m2ts files. FFmpeg has bugs with these files (it creates files that have double the frame rate), while Mencoder’s official release crashes (SVN version is somewhat fixed though).

Vimeo user Aranya linked for me to a Windows-based guide that has all the needed tools to take apart AVCHD and create .avs files out of it. I have modified that original tutorial to include the freeware transcoding utility “SUPER”, which has more exporting abilities than the suggested ones in the original tutorial. Here’s how:

1. Install the stable 2.5.7 version of the AVISynth application. Follow the default options during installation. Once it’s installed, you can safely delete its downloaded installation file.

2. Download Soopafresh’s AVCHD_CONVERT package. Create a folder for it somewhere called “avchd-convert” and unzip all the files in that newly created folder.

3. Using a text editor, e.g. notepad.exe, edit the file “_multi_demux_mts_HQ.bat” if you are using an NTSC camera, or “_multi_demux_mts_HQ__PAL.bat” file if you are using a PAL camera. In it, add a “rem ” word (without the quotes) in front of the line:
for %%a in (“*.dga”) do @echo Lanczos4Resize(…………
This “rem ” word will make that line a comment and won’t be taken into account when executing the .bat file.
If your camera saves files as .m2ts instead of .mts, also change the part that reads like “for %%a in (“*.mts”) do…..” and make it: “for %%a in (“*.m2ts”) do……”
Then click to “save” these .bat files. This step needs to only be done once.

4. Place the .m2ts or .mts file(s) on the same folder as all the above, and run by double-clicking either the _multi_demux_mts_HQ.bat file for NTSC, or the _multi_demux_mts_HQ__PAL.bat file for PAL. This will create five new files for each .mts/.m2ts file: an .avc file, an .ac3, a .dga, a .wav and an .avs file.

5. Download SUPER from here (prefer the RO mirror) and install it. Load it. Right click on the application and set the “Output File Saving Management” to a folder that you would like to save your files to. This step needs to only be done once.

6. Take the .avs file(s) (make sure it’s the .avs ones) that was created on step #4, and drag n drop it to SUPER’s file area. Then, make everything to look like this, and of course use the right frame rate each time (e.g. 29.97 for NTSC, 25.00 for PAL, 23.976 for true 24p). Then, press “encode” and after a while you will be having a 720p MP4 file that is compatible with Vimeo, XBoX360, PS3 (and AppleTV for 24p files). SUPER can also export to many other formats, e.g. DVD formats, XVID AVI, WMV etc, and of course, it can export in full 1080p if desired too (just change the resolution to 1920×1080 and the bitrate to about 12mbps).

7. After the conversion is done, you can keep your original .mts/.m2ts file(s) and the newly created MP4 file(s), but you can safely delete the five kinds of files that were created in step #4.

There was this live Madonna show I wanted to see, a early peek on her new tour. MSN was broadcasting it live, online.

So I go to the main page, which had a big Madonna picture in there, and a countdown counter to the show. So I go there 5 minutes before the show starts, just in case there was a limit of how many people can watch at the same time.

So the countdown goes to 0, and it resets to the NEXT show. But on the big Flash placeholder there is no show showing. Apparently, I have to press “watch now” (bad usability). So I press “watch now”, and I gets me to another page that resizes my browser. God how I hate that.

So, I watch the 32 second ad, but then nothing loads. It says that the broadcast is not available to watch. I thought, I was too late, too many people are logged in for that shit. However, the ads were keep loading one after the other, but the concsert was a no-show.

Then it hit me. I should try to watch that with IE instead of Firefox. And then it worked! But I already lost 5 minutes of it.

Excuse me, but if you are not going to support Firefox, at least give an error message that makes sense and instructs us what to do instead of saying that the “broadcast is not available”. Besides, all ads worked perfectly with Firefox! So why not the show?

And to top all of that, there is a 1 second delay between video and audio, making it unwatchable. IE or not.

NYTimes say that they don’t use these dreaded WYSIWYG HTML editors for their site. Good for them. A good text editor is all what anyone needs for HTML. You might need a helping auto-complete tool for CSS, but it stops there. I am personally more interested in hand-optimized HTML markup than “validating” HTML. You see, these WYSIWYG editors can create validated markup, but that doesn’t make that code more compatible or faster.

Looking at my XP installation over the years it shows how software bloats, how new developers don’t know how to optimize anymore. My first XP installation in 2003 was usable with 256 MBs of RAM. When I got my current DELL machine in 2005, I needed just 180 MBs of RAM to boot it up and about 260 MBs of RAM with Firefox/IE, OE and Trillian loaded. Today, with Firefox, WMailLive and Trillian I need 650 MBs of RAM — just to load them.

I checked my services, and whatever is in there is indeed needed, or I am forced to need them because new versions of apps need them. E.g. the Windows Desktop Search had to be added, otherwise WMailLive wouldn’t search within my emails! And then there’s iTunes, which consumes 20 MBs of RAM even when it’s loaded, just because the people who wrote its services don’t know how to write Windows software.

And speaking of WMailLive, it’s a piece of shit. Every time it loads it kills my hard drive reading God knows what for at least 5-6 minutes, its search ability is nowhere as good as OE, it crashes (I’ve already seen 3 bugs in 1 week while I found only 1 in OE bug all these years), and it has some usability problems compared to how OE used to work (e.g. there was an instance that I could not delete some text, or a URL I typed in an email wouldn’t be clickable but rendered as plain text). It’s a lot of small things like these that piss me off.

And don’t tell me to move to Linux or OSX, because the story there is EQUALLY shitty. Linux needs at least 512 MBs of RAM to work these days too, while OSX with Leopard needs 2 GBs of RAM to be usable. My Powerbook with Tiger runs out of RAM with its 640 MBs all too frequently for my taste. Besides, I need Vegas for my video work, so I can’t leave XP behind, not even for Vista.

The real problem is not XP or Vista, or OSX or Linux themselves. It’s the developers. They don’t write software as they used to anymore. They don’t care if the CPU spends more cycles here or there or if memory is over-consumed. PCs are fast enough today — they think– that they can afford to ship their application faster, rather than spend time and do the tedious work of optimizing. And this of course is true for compiler writers too, and so new languages and the apps they produce are by nature more bloated and heavy — but easier to develop, they say.

I don’t know, but I am getting older, and I just don’t like all this inconvenience. I want things that work, and work fast and as I expect them to work. I don’t want changes. I don’t want, as it happened a few days ago, to be FORCED to stopped using OE because some douchebag at Microsoft decided that OE won’t have Hotmail access anymore so we all had to upgrade to WMailLive. I was a paying customer for Hotmail (I asked for a refund after all this), and simply put, WMailLive sucks. It’s not ready for prime time and doesn’t have the usability, speed, memory optimization, stability, and all other features as found in OE.

I don’t want Windows Mail Live. I want a semi-updated Outlook Express.

This is an exporting procedure where the output format is supported by most TV stations in US & Canada. On Vegas, the first thing you need to do is setup your “Project Properties” to match your source footage (use a template if available, or the “match footage” icon).

1. If they ask for HD footage, just export in HDV .m2t format, which is an exporting format most NLEs support. If you shot in AVCHD or any other full-HD format instead, you will still have to export in HDV (short of sending them uncompressed AVI footage in full HD resolution that is). It might be an idea to rename the .m2t file as .mpg — in case they use older equipment.

2. If they ask for SD NTSC widescreen footage then export like this (Vegas Pro required). Make a note to them that your footage is widescreen, just in case their software can’t read aspect ratios correctly. DV AVI is the second best way to deal with this, but it takes much more space.

I meant to do that years ago, but hey, it’s never too late. My little baby, the browser detection kit for usage with mobile sites. More info at OSNews.

That’s the kind of people I like. People who say it like it is. Who are not afraid of getting hammered for saying the truth.

When TheRegister asked Ubuntu’s boss, Mark Shuttleworth, about the mess of the new audio system, he remarked: “I am glad you are not into video editing because the story there is worse.”

Exactly. And it ain’t gonna change, unless someone who has millions to spend invests in it.

Hint: Blender is forkable and a good base for a new video editor.

On April 5th Microsoft charged my credit card the amount of $20 in order to receive the subscription for “Hotmail Plus”. This services allows you to get Hotmail mail on your Outlook Express (OE). Today, April 21st, I receive an email from MS saying that OE will be discontinued from Hotmail access in June 30th! So why the hell did they charged my credit card if that was the case? Needless to say that I have requested a refund.

Anyways, it seems that the time has arrived, after failing attempts to use Thunderbird, to move to Windows Live Mail. That was when the adventure started, after downloading the Windows Live Mail installer:

1. It wouldn’t install. Apparently I needed to go manually to the MS Update site with IE7, manually find a non-mandatory SingIn application, install that, and then Mail Live would install.
2. After it got installed, it tried to import Outlook Express’ mail automatically. After waiting for it for 1 hour, it would be completely stuck at 5%. I had to kill Mail Live on its virgin load.
3. After reloading Mail, I tried to import OE’s mail in manually (1.6 GBs). Apparently this time it has imported everything the right way, but it put everything in a special storage folder.
4. I exported my accounts from OE, but my eugenia.co.uk account would NOT import to Mail Live, while all the other accounts imported fine. It just said that it couldn’t read the .iaf file! I had to recreate it manually.
5. I exported my OE contacts to .csv and the Mail Live Contacts application choked at around 20%. It stopped importing. I had to kill the application and my contacts are still not imported.
6. All my accounts have a separate entry in the compartment on the left. I don’t want that because I have to click each one of them to see my mails from several accounts. I want a SINGLE unified entry for ALL my POP accounts like OE did it. And I want to be able to have my imported email from OE under that unified account too!
7. Mail Live uses between 120 and 350 MBs of RAM. It’s a fucking dog. OE never used more than 25 MBs of RAM.
8. Mail does shit with my machine on the background. My drive goes gzzz gzzz gzzz every second. I hate it, I fucking hate it. This will kill my hard drive if it continues like this. (Update: Apparently it was writing on the log every second saying that I was out of contacts quota: 6500 contacts. No normal user would have ever found that out).

The only feature that I would want that Mail Live has and OE doesn’t is automatic spell checking. But honestly, I am not interested in sacrificing the speed, stability and straight-forwardness of OE for spell checking. So what was the point of killing the application and re-writing it from scratch? OE has been the most stable app I have ever used in my life. It is rock solid. So why not just refactoring that instead of re-writing it?

I am seriously thinking of uploading all my email to Gmail via IMAP and use that and never use a desktop mail client again. I would only use Live Mail every few weeks to migrate my Hotmail mails to my Gmail account.

Update: I tried to move all my mail to Gmail today via IMAP. It seems that Live Mail can’t even work properly as an IMAP server. It farted after having moved only 63 emails over from the 39,000 requested.

New problems: When I click now a link on a message, it opens on Firefox a whole minute later. It didn’t seem to have this problem yesterday. Update: And this is fixed by disabling the “use DDE” on the Explorer’s URL filetype advanced menu. What a mess.