There’s this new popular blog, the “Linux hater“. I have to say that I agree with most of what the guy writes. He ain’t no fool, in fact, the guy is a developer and had enough experience with the platform to criticize it in this fashion (it is obvious that he is knowledgeable when it comes to Linux-related happenings going back to 10 years and he is/was at least a power Linux user if not a developer). Neither I believe that he works for MS as some people accused him. I truly believe that he just writes his opinion, an opinion that most of the time is not far from the truth.

Reading him a bit more reveals EXACTLY how most developers feel and behave and think about consumers in the Silicon Valley (and elsewhere). Reading this is not too different than hearing our (engineer) friends talk at barbecue parties:

“Take a software product from some commercial company. If you ever get a chance to get through the marketing folks and talk to their devs, chances are that they know exactly all the ways concerning how their products suck. They’ll have a huge list of reasons of why they can’t implement some feature that you, non-paying, ass-hat, non-customer, wants. And then they’ll tell you what they should, “Show me the money, or bugger off. We’re working here.” And then they’ll talk shit behind your back about how you have no idea what it takes to ship reliable working complex software.”

His blurb about GNOME was 100% on the mark. Most of his other ones find me in agreement as well as to what’s wrong with Linux as a user-friendly desktop platform. His LSB post was on the mark too. The guy ain’t a troll, don’t try to downplay him. The guy tells it like it fucking is. That’s the kind of people I like.

Havoc and Jono made some good blog posts about the future of Gnome. The problem is two fold: the older Gnome 2.x “celebrity” devs are not involved in coding anymore, and the newer ones can’t get past the celebrities. Havoc also correctly speaks of the fact that breaking compatibility with Gnome 2.x is not what most users would want.

If the community needs revolution instead of evolution stop looking at the pretty graphics and how to improve this or that. A revolution requires radical thinking. For example, artificial intelligence. If you don’t have the guts or knowledge to bring such big changes (that can take years to complete), then don’t. Simply improve what we already have little by little and don’t do changes that would upset users rather than completely change the way they work.

“Only 5 percent of consumer electronics products returned to retailers are malfunctioning–yet many people who return working products think they are broken, a new study indicates,” says PCWorld.

This just shows how important usability is and how bad the industry is providing good usability on their products. Usually, that’s because the engineers and designers who design these products never use them in their personal life and therefore they never use the devices properly. Every time I happen to review a bad product the first thing that comes to mind is “I don’t understand. Don’t these people actually use their products?“.

It’s just sad that companies don’t realize that the money they must spend on usability is a good investment as the fewer returned devices would mean more money for them. I am going to bet that the iPhone is among the lowest returned devices, because it rocks when it comes to usability and user expectations.

Here’s how to export from CyberLink PowerDirector 7 for Vimeo’s 720p HD service. The produced files are also compatible with the PS3 and XBoX360.

It’s ridiculous how much CPU speed you need to edit full 1080p AVCHD clips with Vegas. I got my hands on a 1920×1080/60i 14mbps AVCHD clip today and it plays back on the Vegas Pro timeline at ~2 fps on my P4 3Ghz (in “preview/auto” quality). Vegas only supports basic DirectDraw functions, so a faster GPU won’t help either.

Now think that the fastest affordable PC on the market is a Quad-Core Intel at 3Ghz, which is about 5 to 6 times faster than my PC (including bus/RAM speed). Now, multiply that: 6*2fps=12 fps. This means that even the fastest PC on the market today won’t give me full preview speed while editing AVCHD. I would need double that speed. And that’s before adding any plugins or transitions that slow-down preview even more.

Someone might suggest the way Apple does things: all imported footage gets re-encoded to AIC or ProRes codec before editing which are faster to edit/playback. You will have to wait for the transcoding to take place of course, and that will take quite some time for ProRes (it’s faster with AIC, but AIC is not lossless so I can’t recommend it).

So in essense, you have the choice: do you want to wait while importing in the beginning, or wanna wait while editing? In both cases, there’s gonna be stalling. This means only one thing: I will have to wait for a few more years before I decide to get an AVCHD camera and a new PC. For now, the HV20 with its faster-edited M2T format will suffice.

Update: Some people are telling me that AVCHD editing is plenty smooth on newer computers. Good to hear.

One feature that I am missing from iTunes (in addition to this one, of course) is “music collections”. We have 5 iPods in our household, and I am using 3 of them (16 GB iPod Touch, 8 GB iPhone, and 4 GB iPod Mini). I would like to use different iPods for each kind of music. For example, one iPod for commercially bought pop/rock music, one for freeware indie rock music, and one for electronic/dance. As I am a bit of a control freak, I just don’t like them mixed up because they don’t sound the same. Plus, not all my music+videos fit on my iPod Touch or the iPhone, so I am using all 3 devices.

Each time that I purchase, or rip, or add a new song in my iTunes library, I would like to be able to have the option to drop them into a specific collection of music. I know that there are smart playlists that you can possibly sort via “genre”, but thing is, each ripped CD or download features a different name for a genre. For example, for what I perceive overall as “indie rock”, it might be tagged as alternative, grudge, garage, alt.rock, rock, hard rock etc etc. So I can’t possibly go and change the tags of 5,000+ songs one by one. Instead, I need an easier drag-n-drop solution (while I am building the library) that keeps things separately: music collections. And each iPod would sync to one of these.

I understand that when iTunes first came out this feature didn’t make much sense, but 7 years into the iPod times, some people tend to have a whole collection of them. So I am pretty sure I am not alone in this request.

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 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.