And the whining begins. Barack Obama chose Rahm Emanuel to be his chief of staff in the new administration. I read about him, and to me his life choices sound ultra-biased about Israel (who in his right mind volunteers to serve in the army of a country he never extensively lived in?) to be in the White House at a time where everyone is so fed up with the Israel-Palestinian problems and wants a solution that works well for everybody. I don’t know the man personally of course, so I might be wrong, but I usually can read into people’s faces, and this guy spells trouble to me. I don’t believe him to be a neutral force, and I expect him to lobby hard for Israel. That’s good for Israel actually, but the question really is: who will lobby for Palestine?

A year ago the Internets were littered by Ron Paul news stories, it was painful to read Digg with all the gaming his advocates were doing to get Paul’s word out to the population. But as I knew he wasn’t going to get the Republican chrism to run for President, I avoided reading more about him.

Since last night’s charge of the presidential election, I gave him a chance though. I never read the biographies of politicians, as I am not interested in their past, marriage, religion, or their lives in general. I am interested only in their political positions and the day forward. And so I sat down and read Ron Paul’s.

Reading about his foreign policy, it became very clear to me that the guy is a xenophobe. Sure, as a non-US citizen it’s nice to hear that he wanted to withdraw troops from around the world, bring them home and stop messing around with third world countries, but when reading that he also wanted to withdraw USA from the UN/NATO/etc, and instead secure the borders adamantly and create harsh laws for immigrants, it became very clear to me that the reason for his non-imperialistic position was not pacifism, but xenophobia. He seems to be the kind of guy who longs for the idealistic, growing America of the late ’40s, early ’50s. Problem is, this is 2008.

Some of his internal policies were ok (smaller government, no surveillance), some were very Republican-ish and unfair (e.g. gay, capital punishment, abortion issues). But it’s that xenophobia vibe I get that would make me to never have rooted for him. In fact, McCain and all his shortcomings, seems 10 times better to me that Ron Paul as a candidate.

Ultimately, apart from my favorite Mike Gravel (read the link for his liberal positions) who opted out early in the race, the best guy won, and that’s Obama.

I have a b43-based broadcom BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01) chipset for wifi on my 1.5 years old DELL laptop (almost the same model as the one DELL originally sold Ubuntu with), but the b43 module is very unstable: it drops the connection after a few minutes. So I have to use ndiswrapper. I installed the firmware just fine, and blacklisted ssb, and b43 in order to force ndiswrapper to load.

Unfortunately, even after having blacklisted ssb, it still loads and takes control of the wireless chipset and simply does not let ndiswrapper to do its thing. It loads the “b43-pic-bridge” driver instead of letting ndiswrapper to use its “wl” one.

The reason for ssb loading EVEN if it’s blacklisted, it’s because of the b44 ethernet driver which is loaded automatically, that also needs ssb. You see, this DELL laptop has both a b43 and a b44 chipset in there, and so even if I have b43 and ssb blacklisted, b44 keeps loading ssb back before ndiswrapper is. And so ssb takes control of the wifi chipset (with the b43 driver blacklisted, so it doesn’t load any driver, it just keeps the control tight), and poor ndiswrapper fails.

This is a chicken and the egg problem btw, but I didn’t have these problems with the older Ubuntu, because it didn’t use the b44/b43/ssb modules back then for these chipsets. Now that it does, this needs to be fixed somehow. Either they need to fix the b43 module to be rock solid so I don’t need to use ndiswrapper, or fix the ssb problem to allow ndiswrapper take control over the wifi chipset.

I filed a bug report. The way to go around it is to also blacklist b44, and then manually load it on startup after the ndiswrapper line on the /etc/modules file (so it loads ssb after ndiswrapper has already taken control of the chipset). But obviously this needs fixing.

I am not an American citizen, so I couldn’t vote yesterday. But I am very happy that Obama won the presidency, as I believe that this president is destined to change America, and the world. This was the first time in my life that I cried for a political reason. Obama’s speech was inspirational, as it wasn’t a triumphed speech, but a “this is when the work starts” one. He even mentioned “the world” in several occasions in his speech, while McCain only mentioned “America”. Obama even mentioned how the world would be in 100 years from now, which is a big thing for an American president to say, given that in the past most wouldn’t mention things passed 4 or 5 years. That’s the big difference between the two candidates, and why Obama is important.

However, I can’t say that when I look at the election’s results from a 10,000 ft view I am happy with them. When taking the popular vote into account, there was only 5% of overall difference between the two candidates (5.7 million votes of difference out of 130 million votes). To my liberal mind, Obama just made sense and McCain didn’t. So having only 52% of the US agreeing with common sense, is still troublesome to me.

The only major city-counties that came close to my ideal election result (ideal as in, how it makes sense to my mind) are the cities I always loved: San Francisco and Boston. Both cities, voted ~80% for Obama each! These are progressive cities, liberal, and full of techies. My own kind of people. I feel blessed to be living in the Silicon Valley, near SF.

Washington DC also voted for Obama: an astonishing 93%. While there is a big african american population living there, it also has some of the youngest population, and people who work in the White House and see how things are running there on a daily basis. The fact that DC voted so highly for “change” it just shows how much change is needed! It’s a testament that something was wrong in the White House in the first place!

The rest of the US (with the exception of Hawaii, and the younger voters) was less impressive. Evidence to this are all the gay-related propositions (I think there were 5 throughout the US). All 5 results were against the gay rights. Even in California, which is considered progressive, the rural Christian fundamentalists voted for Prop8 (at least at 62% of the precincts as I write this, “yes on prop8″ is ahead by 4.5%). Most of the Silicon Valley residents voted against, but they were not enough. Heck, even most of LA voted for Prop8, LA for Christ’s sake.

So there’s more time that America needs to be as progressive and modern as SF and Boston are today. At least 20-25 years. The next generation that is.

Thanks to Billy for the funny video link!

Another DVXUser competition, Twilightfest, opened its doors for viewing and voting (free registration required). Because Comcast now has bandwidth consumption restrictions I will not be able to watch all films, so I limited my viewing to films shot with the HV20 (4), RED (3), AVCHD HF100 (1), and HPX-170 (1) cameras.

From these four HV20 films I watched, the “Calls From The Führerbunker” was probably the best. It had good direction and cinematography, beating out the rest of the HV20 films that actually used 35mm adapters. The also HV20-based “Mr. I” film was not too bad either, but it was strangely under exposed (it felt underexposed rather than “dark”, which I am sure it was the intention of the cinematographer). I was indifferent about the third HV20 film, dubbed “The Box“, while the fourth one, “Pain Container“, I didn’t like.

The HF100 film “Benjamin Merrymeadows and the Curse of the Four-Holed Button” was amateurish and silly, while “Broadcast“, shot with a RED One camera, was the best of the three RED-based films in the competition. Finally, I watched the “Cold Calls by John Whalen” (shot with the HPX-170) because it had so many comments in the forum. And indeed, it was amazingly good. This film was the only one that I wanted to have more of, and wasn’t feeling ready in clicking “fast forward” on the media player. That was amazingly well done and clever. Most of the films in the competition used the Panasonic DVX and HVX cameras, as usual, but as I said, I didn’t watch any of these, so some gems might be among them.

One of the most successful consumer video editors out there is Adobe’s Premiere Elements. The new version, version 7, adds some interesting new features that help take editing time away from the user.

Installation on my Vista laptop was smooth like a butter, although it was somewhat long. Loading the application takes only 2-3 seconds which is pretty good for a full-featured video editor. The interface is largely the same as in the previous version (v4, there were no version 5 & 6). In my tests, performance was acceptable, especially for .m2t HDV files. I rate stability as so-so, as I had it crashing twice during some longer edits.

The most important new feature of Premiere Elements 7 (PE7) is its support for AVCHD. This feature was probably the driving force behind having a new Elements version in less than a year from the previous release. The vast majority of new camcorders are AVCHD-based and so far no Adobe product supported it, leaving a huge number of users disgrantled on forums everywhere online. AVCHD worked ok my PC with PE7, performance was acceptable on my CoreDuo laptop.

The second biggest feature is good chroma key support, that lets the editor make use of a “green” or “blue” screen. And of course, now there’s Blu-Ray burning. The rest of the exporting/rendering options haven’t changed since the previous version, with h.264/AAC being the prefered exporting way.

Other interesting new features include the usage of “templates” that lets the editor decide on special effects on videos rather than having the user edit each scene and add plugins manually. This feature is of course a recipe for disaster for advanced users, but it might prove useful and “acceptable” for complete newbies.

An interesting new usability feature is the SmartTag feature, that asks the user to tag clips based on certain technical elements: e.g. in focus, high quality, shaky etc. This way, the user can categorize clips via several ways in order to find clips faster if he/she has over 40-50 clips in the library.

Premiere Elements now supports SmartSound Quicktracks out of the box, a loop-based royalty-free soundtrack creation system. It comes with 14 music libraries. Speaking about audio though, there is no surround 5.1 support, only stereo.

Other things missing from the editor is 24p support editing (exporting in 24p is supported), a frame rate which is now found on many consumer cameras (although there was a hack for the previous version that added the feature), and proper visual effect customization. The current customization of these plugins is minimal and don’t allow for much flexibility.

Finally, Adobe recently unveiled their web service Photoshop Plus which allows users to upload photos and videos and share them with family. This sounds like a neat service, but with YouTube & FlickR around, I personally see little value there.

Premiere Elements is probably the second best consumer editor, with Sony Vegas Platinum 9 being the best with a somewhat large margin. However, while Vegas Platinum is very flexible and powerful, it comes with a steep learning curve. All this power doesn’t come for free. Premiere Elements is definitely easier to start with but sooner than later you might bump into (sometimes artificial) limitations, should you want to use your editing imagination in its full potential.

Rating: 7/10

* If you are a filmmaker and videographer interested in finding royalty-free music, please read my explanation of Creative Commons here. Most of your questions about CC music should be answered in that post. Reply there, or email me if you have more.

* I watched Coldplay on SNL the other night. Chris Martin, their singer, simply can’t sing. The guy just can’t hit the high notes, it was laughable watching him running around like a lunatic on the stage and not being able to actually sing. Note that I am a huge fan of Coldplay, I love their music. But seeing their singer performing live, it was an exercise in patience. Later, Dave Cook, the American Idol winner, was performing on SNL too, and while I hate his music (Bryan Adams-y kind of music), the guy can actually sing.

* I watched “Akira” last night. I really don’t know why it is rated so highly on IMDb. It’s probably the best anime out there, but overall it wasn’t amazing. Maybe I just don’t get anime, who knows.

* I am a pacifist, so Proposition H 2005 (applicable only to San Franciscans) is an interesting one to me. This local ordinance was meant to test the Supreme Court and the Constitution about the “right to keep and bear arms”. Now, here’s the thing. Depending on HOW you read that line of text in the Constitution, you either understand that every citizen should have the right to bear arms for whatever reason, or that this right is for militia purposes in case the people need to restore a fallen democracy. I am not against personal protection with a gun when and if required (e.g. in this recent rape case), but the militia argument is irrelevant in this day and age. If citizens need to revolt against a gone-bad government, then having some handguns in their closet won’t do jack. The wars today are fought with biological weapons, tanks, fighter planes. Unless citizens are allowed to buy an F-22 at an affordable price, the “right to bear arms” is just pointless. And so all we end up with, are just some crazies who buy guns and then they kill on a whim. In other words, the rest of us must endure the residue of a law that’s not applicable anymore. Some say that banning guns will make it easier for thugs and rapists to do harm. Well, citizens who want to protect themselves should get a taser gun (it’s not considered a “firearm” in the US), or even better, create special low-power non-lethal taser-like guns that can fire only up to three electrified blobs. I think that this would be a good middle ground for both camps: completely non-lethal, minimized functionality guns, used for protection only. Maybe what this law needs is such a provision to make sense to most traditionalists. I won’t even go into discussion about “guns used in hunting”, because I am against hunting altogether. Isn’t Safeway enough for you?

* A nice video against Proposition 8 from Larry Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, and Stanford law professor:

I tried to emulate the look of Metallica’s new music video. Most red colors stay viewable, but everything else pretty much crushes to yellow (except the sky which is more or less blue depending on the shot). These videos are very low contrast, so it’s very difficult to get them right with digital camcorders. You would need a RED or a film camera to get this look right.

Before

After

I’ve used Magic Bullet’s ‘Curahee’ template but with lowered contrast, color corrector had a gamma of 1500 with the midtones and high tones leaning towards yellow. Finally, an unsharpen mask of 0.200 with a radius of 0.100.

How convenient.

A previously unknown singer, Lady GaGa, is now on the front page of Youtube’s most popular, with her music video “Poker Face”. It’s her third single. But very conveniently, that music video got up on the front page the day her album came out. If that’s not Universal gaming Youtube’s algorithms when it’s required to, I don’t know what it is. At least they don’t seem to abuse it constantly, so they are clear from Youtube’s radars.

Same goes for Intel btw. They released their new Atom dual core processors, and the accompanied chipset can only support up to 1 GB of RAM (for market segmentation reasons, obviously). This makes DELL’s new 12″ netbook completely and utterly useless. This 12″ netbook would have been my No1 choice to replace my 12″ Powerbook (which is pretty much unusable browsing the web these days even with Flash/JS turned OFF). Therefore, both Intel and DELL can eat my shit now. Here’s a hot one.

Bah.