When it comes to camcorders, Samsung is one of these companies that really piss me off. Just like Sanyo and Aiptek. You see, these are camcorder companies that don’t follow video standards. They just go their own ways to use their own versions of the well understood formats creating a mess. This is because they are not really into the video industry, they don’t care about it. They just want to make a product to sell. They care not about details.

Samsung recently released a full 1080/30p HD camcorder, which records in AVC. But instead of using the actual official AVCHD format, it’s using the MP4 container instead, stereo audio instead of 5.1 surround, and its own internal AVC format. The MP4 container is simply not optimized for editing. If people are cursing 10 times for AVCHD’s .mts not being easy to edit, think that we should be cursing 50 times for Samsung’s MP4.

I did a few tests too, in “draft (auto)” quality, which is the lowest preview quality on Vegas Pro that speeds up the video preview. Here are my findings on my P4 3Ghz DELL PC:

Samsung AVCHD-bastardation 1920×1080/30p: 1 frame per second
Canon & JVC AVCHD 1920×1080/60i: 5 frames per second
HDV 1440×1080/60i: 30 frames (full speed)

I don’t dispute the fact that faster PCs will be able to edit AVCHD faster. But no matter how to put it, Samsung’s MP4 is still 4 times slower than AVCHD. And AVCHD is about 6 times slower than HDV. And HDV is about 10 times slower than plain DV.

So buy cameras wisely if you want to edit, depending on your PC’s speed. But even on the fastest machine available today I don’t think that Samsung’s stream will edit full speed. Maybe in 3 years time or so.

Currently, there are three main camps regarding the future of Gnome 3.0:
- Continue evolutionary small releases
- Break compatibility and try to make it a modern desktop
- Go to a completely different direction than the PC desktop

On a previous blog post of mine I noted that I preferred either seismic additions (e.g. artificial intelligence), or just evolutionary releases that don’t break ABI and API compatibility with apps. Here’s another way that Gnome should go in my opinion:

Remove GTK+ and X11 requirement. Write both a brand new API using the Java language (by using Classpath, not J2SE), and a brand new, modern, windowing system that doesn’t have an ’80s architecture. In other words, pull a Google Android trick (and Apple Mac OS X too, in a way). You can still run older applications via a rootless or windowed X server, the way Mac OS X does it. And you only support modern ATi, nVidia and Intel (and maybe VIA) graphics cards after having few of your devs signing NDAs to get the 3D specs. Maybe you even rewrite the sound part too (adding support initially for only the 3 most common sound chipsets). In other words, you take over the “user visible” part of the operating system and you integrate with the rest of the system properly rather than legacy layers upon layers.

To truly liberate your platform and enable new powerful and modern applications to be written, that’s what it has to be done. Not beating the old dog. And yes, this is a 5+ year plan. Not something that gets done in a blink of an eye.

Red Hat has the most developers working on X.org, GTK+, Classpath, and Gnome, so they have to be the ones to be either convinced or initiate such a thing. Problem is, Red Hat doesn’t care about the home desktop anymore, they only care about getting corporate. Novell trying to go with Mono, would fail because it wouldn’t get enough tract from the community.

So this will never happen. It was a good 10 minutes of dreaming while writing about it.

I mean, really. Do you have to wonder why traditionally big companies are going the way of the dodo? It’s because their god damn R&D departments getting the go-ahead for products that make no market sense — not for that price range anyway.

Here’s the latest one from HP: the HP MediaSmart Connect. It’s a streamer device for media. It also supports an optional hard drive. It costs $349. Read the link for more tech specs info.

Ok, now let me ask you. Why in the love of God, would ANYONE, buy THAT product over a Sony PS3. The Sony PS3 costs $399, it can pretty much do everything that this HP device can, but it also comes with a 40 GB (and easily upgradeable) hard drive, you can play games with it, have Internet access through it if desired, and most importantly, you can playback Blu-Ray movies too. Additionally, the PS3 can playback m2t & m2ts/mts HD files directly from a consumer HD camcorder, and it even supports AVCHD HD video written on plain DVD disks (poor man’s home Blu-Ray disks).

And don’t get me started about the marketing games of the HP press release. They talk about HDMI and how you can connect the device to an HDTV, but they say NOTHING about being able to decode full 1080p video rather than just upconverting (the PS3 can). Also, they don’t mention anything about being able to playback h.264 video (they only mention MPEG4, but MPEG4 doesn’t always mean AVC h.264). No h.264 mentioning, no dice.

So honestly, there are zero reasons for someone to buy this fugly HP thing. Whoever bends and buys it without doing some research first, is as high as HP itself for bringing it to the market in the first place. This is epic failure.

Sure I’d buy this device. But not for a dollar over $150 (if it has 1080p decoding support), or just $100 if it only decodes 480p video (and then just upconverts to HD). But at the current price it must be a joke.

The one and only Linux Hater, ladies and gentlemen.

I wrote Gnomefiles.org back in 2004. It still is the only GTK-only software repository out there that’s still maintained. It works pretty well, and it’s full-featured-enough to get it going. Originally, Gnomefiles would do an average of 25,000 pageviews per day. Then, sometime in 2006 things got slowed down and today it doesn’t average more than 12,000 pageviews per day (June stats). It’s on the track for a slow death.

Sure, you could blame the fact that package managers work better these days, or that Ubuntu is the clear winner, or that GTK+ app development is pretty sterile these days, or that the site hasn’t changed visually or whatever. But honestly, none of these reasons is strong enough to bring the site to its knees rather than flourish it through the years.

The real problem is with the GNOME project not embracing Gnomefiles. Their web team promised me back in 2006 that if I do some changes to Gnomefiles they will add the feed to most pages of Gnome.org (a special feed that I made just for them that doesn’t contain non-Free apps). I did all the changes they asked that were logical to implement without spending months of redesigning and breaking stuff, but after 2+ years, no cake. Quim Gill has emailed me since then to say that he doesn’t know anymore what’s going on with that new version of Gnome.org site and why Gnomefiles is still not better promoted. The only link Gnomefiles gets from Gnome.org is hidden away. We are lucky if we get 20 referrals from there daily. Not only that, but the blurb when they link to us wrongly says for 3 years now that “we do not clearly identify free and non-free apps”, which is wrong, because that’s one of the things I changed when asked to by the Gnome guys in that mailing list 2 years go (e.g. in this example, it is well-described that’s not Free).

The GTK+ community is small, and if the big guy doesn’t embrace you, you’re eventually dead. This is not a community that’s as big as Apple’s, neither we are VersionTracker. Gnomefiles is grass roots, it’s small, but it works and it needs the support of Gnome.org. There is nothing more I can do to make Gnomefiles more popular with the users (no Mr developer, there won’t be any DOAP support but that’s hardly the problem here because the problem is more regular users, not necessarily more developers).

I have put a feed at OSNews, I maintain over 260 apps all by myself (out of 2010 apps listed there), but all this is not enough without the main project site also helping out with more prominent links to the site. And no, I don’t collect money from the ads, Gnomefiles belongs to David Adams’ OSNews LLC which pays for the server costs, I always did Gnomefiles for the love of it.

I believe that Gnomefiles offers a unique service to the Gnome/GTK+ community, but I need support from Gnome.org too. I am not willing to see the site die a slow death; that’s not why I wrote it. I prefer to completely pull the plug, or at least never update it ever again and become irrelevant even faster, rather than to see it towards such a fate.

* There’s a chance that we might move back to Europe for a year. It’s going to suck if this is going to happen. Moving between continents is not that easy.

* I just watched this. 20 whole minutes for an eye and lip job. What a freaking waste of time. If make-up takes you more than 3 minutes per day (e.g. a lip gloss, a quick shadow and eyeliner spread just to tone a bit your natural characteristics), then you are a living as a slave of mother nature: you slut out to get more guys — even if you don’t realize it. No, stupid, it’s not just about “looking pretty”. You want to look pretty in order to get more guys. You know it deep inside. Honestly, I never, ever, understood the point behind spending hours in front of a mirror, or spreading brown paste onto your face. That’s some stupid shit, right there. Same goes for expensive jewelry.

* Last Friday’s ‘Battlestar Galactica’ episode was the first episode I enjoyed since season 2. So far, like season 3, season 4 has been really sucky, slow, and full of spiritual gibberish that made no sense whatsoever.

Maybe I am old. Maybe I just don’t get it. But I really don’t need “location based” apps and “social networking” apps on my phones. And I definitely don’t need “social networking location based” apps either.

I am talking about the apps currently available or soon-to-be-available on Google’s Android and iPhone’s Installer.app. Take a look (.pdf) at Android’s top-50 third party apps. I personally need zero of them. And while my iPhone is jailbroken, out of the 150+ binary apps currently available for it (no AppStore yet), I have only installed Terminal.app just in case in the future something shitty happens and I need to fix it manually. In other words, I see nothing that changes the way I do things in my life with these apps. Maybe because I don’t want to change my life. But I definitely need features that I take for granted on the desktop.

What I need is the kind of functionality that can’t be brought by third parties but require strong integration with the system and the hardware. I am not interested for example in a non-integrated random third party IM application, because that lack of integration would be more glaring in the mobile environment than an equivalent third party IM app on a desktop OS. Namely, on my phones I always need these:
* Multi-IM (ICQ/AIM/Jabber/Y!/MSN/GTalk) with full A/V support.
* VoIP SIP with A/V support (not Skype, preferably GizmoProject).
* A2DP/AVRCP/PAN/LAP/Obex Bluetooth support.
* Video recording and more still camera settings.
* Cut/Copy/Paste support and Text Select support.
* Adobe’s Flash Lite 3.0 browser plugin with video support.
* File manager/picker that system apps support automatically, e.g. Mail.
* T6 support like this one.
* UPnP server/client support and internet radio integration.
* Sound recorder (this can be done by third parties without integration repercussions).

The only third party app I am interested in seeing, and use only a few times a year, is possibly Skype. Nothing else. Ok, and a few games. But the BULK of what I need, they HAVE to be fully integrated with the system so they don’t behave like poor cousins, and therefore, it has to be Apple’s (or Google’s) job to implement and not the developer’s community.

The only phones that do a lot of what I need are Nokia’s Symbian S60 v3.1 phones and some of the newer Windows Mobile ones. Problem is, I am not willing to go back to a non-touchscreen phone environment (and the new touchscreen Nokia phones don’t inspire me at all), while Windows Mobile’s interface is The Suck.

So I am on “the waiting”.

Shot with an HV20, without a 35mm adapter from what I can tell. The director surely uses a lot of other tripod accessories though to pull through such moves with the camera. HD version here.

Sure, the Bay Area produced bands like the successful Metallica and Green Day, but there are some real gems in the unsigned harsh world of the music scene. These are my favorite bands in my local scene, at least so far, as I have listened to only about 70 of them. 300+ more to go (as you can see, I went as far as the letter “D”). Thankfully they all have mySpace pages to make it easy to preview their music.

#5. Dangermaker
I love their song “Need”. Review soon up at the OWL magazine.

#4. Dolorata
All-female hard rock band. Best song “The Keys”. I’d love to direct an R rated music video for that song.

#3. BellaVista
These are the most well known guys in the list. Good music, they sell well too.

#2. Cold Hot Crash
Great band, easy listening. Funny thing is that my favorite song of theirs is their rock cover for the Christmas song “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”.

#1. Drist
Second most well known band in the list. Each one of their songs are amazing. Very talented, if only they could put it together to release their third album…

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.