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October 30 Yahoo Messenger 9.0 and Vaporware
Yahoo has a new version of their Messenger client, as described here and here. Great, but whatever happened to that really cool Vista version they announced, oh, like a year ago?? The demo/announcement is still live on Yahoo's site (http://messenger.yahoo.com/windowsvista.php). "Coming soon!" the site proclaims, just as it has proclaimed since day one. Yeah, right. At this point its almost as laughably pathetic as Vista's Ultimate Extras.
Let's not hold our collective breaths, shall we?
Vaporware. Maybe Yahoo should learn something from Apple here - you rarely hear them announce a product before it's almost ready to ship. I'm disappointed that neither article took Yahoo to task for failing to deliver on their Vista promise, they lost a golden opportunity there. October 28 Sox Sweep Series
Since I came to live in Seattle, the Mariners have been my adopted favorite baseball team, but I have a place in my heart for the Red Sox.
Starting from way way back in 1986, when my home town in Ireland had just gotten cable TV, and the UK's Channel 4 TV station was showing the World Series between the Red Sox and the Mets. It was the first time in my life to see baseball, and to make it more interesting for myself, I had to pick a team to root for, and I chose the Sox. Of course as we all know, the Sox lost, but I stuck with my team. A few years later, in 1988 or 1989, I forget now, I got a chance to visit the USA for the first time, and was staying with a family in Boston. Of course, I saw a game - Red Sox vs White Sox - at Fenway Park and the Sox won. I was hooked at that point - I got one of those shiny team jackets in navy with a big Sox logo over the heart, and wore it with pride for several years back home in Ireland, where it was certainly an unique item.
So even though I've been cheering on Seattle since I arrived in '98, there has been and always will be a soft place in my heart for the Sox. So here's to you, you kids of '04 and '07, your once-long drought is truly a distant memory now.
[photo by David J. Phillip/Associated Press] October 26 US Presidential Election - Top IssueSince we have just over a year to go now, it's probably time for me to dip my toes into the US elections for the next president - the poor sap who is going to have the well-nigh impossible job of undoing 8 years of Bush's damages. But I digress - this video neatly sums up the really important issues of the presidential election campaign.
October 25 $240m for ~1.6% of Facebook$240m for 1.6% equity? That sure seems like a lot of money for a really tiny equity investment in Facebook... Rupert Murdoch's company, News Corp, bought all of MySpace.com for $580m, just over 2 years ago in July 2005. According to a July 2007 report I found on mashable.com, a site that tracks social networking news, MySpace is ahead of Facebook in most statistics:
So, is this investment in Facebook a good move for Microsoft, or did we pay a lot for nothing? I honestly don't know. Facebook is the darling of the Silicon Valley crowd, no doubt, aI have a profile there and so do many of my colleagues, and there's no way most of us would touch MySpace as it's pretty much for kids only, and the pages these kids create are a complete mess. But it seems difficult to argue with the numbers - Murdoch paid a little more than double of Microsoft's investment today, but he got 100% of the market leader for his money, compared to Microsoft's approx 1.6% of the second-place company. October 24 My most popular topicI'm addicted recently to watching my Space's viewing statistics. So far today I've had a whopping 8 views, wow, I'm so popular (not). But looking at those referring URLs, an awful lot of them are from Google, which means that people are searching for something and my missives are showing up in Google's results, and even better, people are then clicking through to see my blog postings. Incidentially, I can't remember EVER seeing a referring URL from any other search engine. It's 100% Google...
By looking at the Google referring address to my Space, I can see what query the user typed into Google in the first place. So, I know what they typed into Google's search box, and I know what blog posting in my Space that they looked at. Anyway, the most frequent topic is ... Windows Live ID (AKA Passport), it's unique ID (called a PUID), and Xbox Live Gamertags and their association with Windows Live IDs. Fascinating huh?
Since I've seen a few queries coming in where people are looking for their PUID, and I know I haven't directly spoken to that point before, I'll talk about it now. It's really simple, except for branding confusions, trust me.
So, you go get a Hotmail account, or by some other means get a Passport account or a Windows Live ID. There's no difference at all between a Passport account and a Windows Live ID, it's simply a brand name that has changed as Microsoft's goals have changed over time.
You might be forgiven for thinking that in the Passport/Windows Live ID system, your email address is your unique ID but it's not. In many cases the email address acts as if it was your unique ID, because you may not be allowed to change it to a different email address, but that is more a problem of implementation where sites started using email address as a the unique ID rather than the PUID. The word foobar comes to mind. But I digress.
What is a PUID? It stands for "Passport Unique ID". Now that the brand is called Windows Live ID, they appear to have dropped the Passport part so it's now just called a Unique ID in the UI, but I'll bet anything that at an API layer it's still referred to as a PUID. Anyway, I digress again...
If you want to know what your unique ID/PUID is, go to http://account.live.com, sign in with your email address and password as usual. Look for the link to "registered information". It's right at the top of the page, in the section with your name, email address, profile photo, country/region, date of birth and registered since information. Click the link to "registered information and on the page that loads, scroll down to the very bottom, below 'home', 'work' and 'other' location information. Right there you should see your unique ID - a 16-character hexadecimal string. Ta Da! Now you know.
The site helpfully links to a help page with a "what is this?" link right next to the unique ID. Here's what it says:
October 22 Wedding pix now onlineOctober 21 Making DVD slideshowsI'd never tried before, but making DVD slideshows is an interesting thing to do. It's surprisingly a lot of work, and I reckon I spent about 6 hours on it in total between Friday night and Saturday. Essentially, it involves compiling a bunch of photographs into a movie, adding a soundtrack, making decisions such as what transitions to use between each photograph, any 'effects' such as pans or zooms, building a DVD menu, adding photos and music and animations to the menu screen, and finally burning it all onto a DVD in DVD-Video format so that it can be played back on almost any hardware - DVD player connected to your TV, or on your computer, etc.
The thing which really takes the longest, however, is not the technical side of things - it's choosing which photos to include, in which order to display them, and then picking just the right music to go along with the images. The soundtrack must be just right to match the 'feeling' of the images, and it's important to balance the tempo of the music with the speed of the photo transitions - an up-tempo beat would require faster transitions, for example - and of course the lyrics need to be appropriate to the subect of the video too.
I also investigated the tools that come with Windows Vista - Windows Movie Maker - and Mac OS X - iPhoto. Movie Maker is a relatively simple program which I found intuitive to learn (I'd never run the program before yesterday), whereas I found iPhoto to be oddly frustrating. It's hard to blame iPhoto too much for tihs - I'm just not used to how things are done on the Mac platform. It's hard to put a finger on WHY, exactly, but the slideshow I created using iPhoto and iDVD on the Mac platform just look better than what I could produce using Movie Maker. Since quality of the end result was of paramount importance, I went with the Mac software to create our DVD, even though dealing with the interface was frustrating me, and it took a little time to figure out how to do everything.
The DVD makes judicious use of the 'Ken Burns Effect' option. I just love this. Unfortunately there didn't seem to be any option to individually control each photo's effect, but it did an almost perfect job automatically with just one or two photos which needed adjusting.
Ken Burns has made a lot of excellent documentaries for PBS, mostly on historical topics. Since historical topics necessarily limit the amount of film available, his documentaries feature a lot of photographs. Since the subject can't move, Ken pioneered the technique of making the camera move instead - panning and/or zooming around within a photo, leading the eye of the viewer to appreciate the photo far more than just keeping a camera stationary over the entire photograph.
Anyway, I'm now left with Sunday to get the website done. Since it's already after 2am, I'd better get some sleep :-) October 20 Howto: add youtube videos to your Space blog postsA friend asked me how, so here goes:
1. Go to youtube, find the video you want. Next to the video, you'll find the EMBED code. Copy it.
 2. Start writing your Space blog entry. On the editing toolbar, click the HTML button (on the right, next to the smiley emoticon).
3. Paste the EMBED code into the HTML - try to put it into an appropriate place. You'll probably want to paste it into its own area between lines of text. Between <DIV> and </DIV> is good. For example, it'll look something like this:
4. Click the HTML button on the toolbar again to return to normal editing mode, and you should now see your youtube video in place!
5. That's it, you're done. I like to center it but that's up to you. OR, of course instead of all of the above you could use Windows Live Writer beta, the greatest blog-writing tool out there - it'll make your life easier for all sorts of things, including video embedding, photo watermarking, maps and more. Hope it helps... Let me know if it works for you (or not!) Note: if you want to have a video on your space in its own module, rather than embedded within a blog post, you need to forget what I just wrote, and instead add a video player gadget to your Space. Go to Customize, Add Module, and find the player. wedding pics almost here!The wedding pics will be online by the end of this weekend, so stay tuned. First we're focused on getting thank you cards and photos/dvd slideshows out to wedding guests, relatives and gift-givers - Paew and I did a lot of work on that this evening and tonight. We've already been married a month, which is hard to believe, time goes so fast.
When two different cultures get married, it is interesting what kinds of things you have to deal with. We have to create two separate versions of everything - one for western and "modern/younger" Thai people, and one for Thai parents, grandparents, aunts and so on. The difference? we're taking out all photos where we were kissing. The photographer had us do a lot of kissing during the photo session, so that's a lot of pics to edit out. I guess that means that we can never show them the wedding video (which we are still waiting for...)
I am not sure yet which version - edited or unedited - will make it up onto the website for you guys to see. The executive producer has absolute control of the content, I'm just the technical guy FTPing files up to the server, so don't blame me ;-) October 17 India's population to pass China?According to this chart of United Nations population projections, India's population will pass China by around 2030. Interesting too is the marked shift in China's population from rural to urban. You think cities like Shanghai and Beijing are too crowded now? Just wait...
The numbers are mind-boggling. I grew up [in Ireland] with just 4 million people in the entire country. That's less than some cities.
 Censorship in China - Reporters Without Borders reportReporters Without Borders released a very interesting investigative report on internet censorship in China, titled “Journey to the heart of Internet censorship”. It’s recent, released last week.
There is a 17-page PDF containing the full report. October 15 Hawaii trip pics postedNo, not wedding pics - just general photos in and around Maui and Kauai.
If you're interested, take a look. The slideshow will start automatically. (Warning: possibly NSFW - sound!)
Of interest to some might be the album software I'm using - JAlbum 7.3 software, a freeware Java app, with the Fotoplayer v3 skin. October 14 Modify recording settings on your Comcast DVRI'm sitting here watching the Patriots vs Cowboys game (great game, btw) and setting the DVR to record the Seahawks vs Saints game which starts in about an hour. It often happens with sports that the games don't finish in time, but the recording quits because it thinks the show should be over, according to the TV guide's schedule. Why can't they figure out a method to know that the program hasn't actually finished? I suppose that might require the cooperation of the TV networks, who don't exactly love the idea of DVRs...
Anyway, I digress. I want to blog about how to change the recording settings on your Comcast DVR when you are selecting a program to record from the tv guide UI. They might be rolling out Tivo Comcast boxes in New England, finally, but here in Seattle they just recently upgraded the software to a new Comcast interface. Compared to the old Microsoft-developed interface that Comcast's DVR's had been using, I MUCH prefer this new one (sorry to my Microsoft colleagues, but it wasn't all that good). This new UI is still not up to Tivo's level of user-friendliness, of course, but pretty good nevertheless. For example, it's been driving me crazy trying to figure out how to change the recording settings for programs I have scheduled. You know, settings like starting or finishing recording on time or n minutes early or late. From within the DVR UI, I couldn't find anywhere to do this. Today I found how, and it is easy, but talk about unintuitive! Here's how:
OK, if you're setting a recording a few days out, you're going to go to the DVR UI and search for the program. When you do it like this, and select it to record it, the UI pops up a box with 4 options, one of which is to view the recording settings. FINE. But if the show you want to record is just an hour away, you're just going to go to the guide and hit record, which is way faster. So you fire up your TV guide by hitting the "guide" button on your remote, then navigate to the program you want to record, and hit the little red circle button to set the recording. Great, you're done. But how to change the settings? No box popped up with an option to view settings in this case.
Your first instinct, if you are anything like me, will be to go to the DVR menu to find the scheduled recording in order to change its settings. Nope. Forget the DVR UI. Instead, go back to the tv guide and navigate over to the program you're recording. See it has that little red circle indicating that it's set to record? Well, your next thought might be to select that program by hitting the "ok/select" button. Nope. Doing that pops up a box with various options, but none of them allow you to change settings. So what should you do? HIT RECORD AGAIN. Bingo. Now you've got the same box that pops up when you set recordings by searching for programs.
From Tivo and that old Microsoft DVR UI, I'm used to hitting record once for a single recording and twice for setting a series recording. Not so in this case - hit record once to record, then hit it again to get some choices, one of which is to set a series recording, and one to modify recording settings.
OK, problem solved and hopefully useful to someone out there. Now I think I'll go back to watching football. October 13 new new themeYeah, so that "Fall" theme didn't last long - less than 24 hours. Here's a new one - circuit board, it's called. Maybe it was a mistake to go from a dark theme to a really colorful one so fast, so I'm back once more to a dark theme. I'm sure you give a damn... October 12 new themeWell, Halo 3 has been out for about 3 weeks now, so I think it's time to get rid of my Halo 3 UI theme and move onto something else. The trees are wonderful shades of red and yellow in Seattle these days, and Fall/Autumn is in full force, so I'm going with a theme that echoes the colours outside my window :-) October 11 The experience of buyingIf you could buy something for the same price from more than one seller, how would you base your decision on which seller to purchase from? For me, if cost is equal, it comes down to the buying experience - the quality of the environment, the expertise and professionalism of the seller.
Most places I go to shop for electronics, I feel like I know a lot more than the sales personnel. Fry's, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc - they generally make up the bottom layer of the pyramid of the Seattle electronic-buying experience. But let's face it, the people - mostly kids or in their early 20s - working in stores like this are paid a relatively basic wage and it's not really expected to find a quality buying experience at stores like this. They have their uses and for a lot of things I do go and buy from these stores, and many people are quite content to buy average products from average sellers. But stores like this don't even stock the better-quality brands, and I personally would set my limit at around $500 for buying experiences from such stores. Anything more expensive, and I'd look for a better quality of store and service.
The mid-layer of the home theater/hi-fi buying experience is represented by Magnolia Hi-Fi, a brand owned by Best Buy, and while they are a stand-alone brand in Washington State, in several other states the Magnolia Hi-Fi stores are located inside Best Buy stores. The buying experience is better, but now instead of having to talk with a kid who thinks he's smarter than you, now you're faced with middle aged men who come off as something akin to car salesmen. They are better trained, but in my personal opinion they are salesmen first and audio/vidiophiles second, if at all. I would still feel ok to spend several thousand dollars in this store - and I have - because at the end of the day the equipment they sell is pretty good and that fact isn't changed by the quality of the sales staff. But the buying experience is less than optimal because if you're not sure what you want and looking for someone to bounce ideas off of, or honest comparisons of the products, you still come away feeling a little less than clean. If you know exactly what you want and just need to hand over your money, then you have a better chance of satisfaction.
And so we come to the top of the pyramid. I really need to stop using this 'shiznit' word, but what the hell, if you're looking for an experience that is somewhere between "above average" and "superlative" in your hifi or home theater shopping experience, Definitive Audio is truly the shiznit. Despite the name, they do sell video/home theater equipment, not only audio/hifi equipment. That probably has a lot more to do with their need to keep up with current consumer trends away from hifi and towards home theater than losing their audiophile blood.
Anyway, it's true that a lot of what Definitive Audio sells have prices well into the stratosphere, and well beyond what an average Microsoft employee can afford. One can dream. But they also have some relatively reasonably-priced items. The key is they don't sell based on sticker price, they sell based on quality, regardless of price, and they will treat you the same however much money you are spending.
I've visited Definitive Audio a couple of times now, without buying anything, and my experience has been superb. No spotty-faced kids or car salesman types here. I feel like I am talking to someone just like me in terms of socio-economic class, clearly knowledgeable, and I have thoroughly enjoyed my visits.
It's all too easy for stores like this to be run over by the big box chains. If they sell something you want, buy it there. I might even buy something there one of these days. And when I do, I'll blog about my buying experience here :-) October 10 Animoto is the shiznitCheck out Animoto, you can make amazingly cool videos from your photos and music. No more dullsville slideshows! October 08 The good books - Lego Bible, Lolcat BibleToday, I bring you tales from the Bible, but with a twist.
LOLcat Bible - a wiki seeking to translate Teh Holiez Bibul into Lolcat. Don't know what Lolcat is? Wikipedia describes it, and for maximum funnies, it goes best when combined with a photo of a cat. For example:
 The Lolcat Bible is attempting to translate the entire bible into this purposely mis-spelled, bad grammar version of English - you know, if cats could really speak, you can kind of imagine that they might speak this kind of broken English. The Lolcat bible contains no pictures of cute cats, just the "dialect" alone, and to get the most out of it, its good if you have some familiarity with this internet meme. One of the most famous Lolcat examples is "I can has cheezburger", and the Lolcat bible refers to this, for example from Job 1: Teh Ceiling Cat sayd "Has u seen mai servnt Job? He can has cheezburger cuz he laiks me." Referring to God as "Ceiling Cat" cracks me up!
Here's the Cheezburger cat just for giggles:
 Sticking with the Bible, but moving away from cute kitties, I bring you The Brick Testament! I can't imagine how much work went into creating this site, but it has a Lego-people photograph for every verse! Here's an example, from Genesis 34:24 - "All the citizens agreed with Hamor and his son Shechem, and every male was circumcised."
 You can't beat Genesis for excitement!
Anyway, if you can take a litle humor with your bible study, it's worth checking out :-) October 05 social lifeFriday night: bowling and pizza birthday party.
Saturday night: two friends joining us for dinner. I wonder when I'll get to play more Halo 3 ;-) October 04 Opposable thumbs It's common knowledge that opposable thumbs - the ability to hold and manipulate objects between our thumbs and other fingers - is one of the key differentiators between humans and other animals. Think of the seminal moment in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the primitive homo sapiens first grabbed a thigh bone and turned it into the first weapon, and the immediate advangage that gave him.Of course, everyone pretty much takes it for granted. I have a thumb, I use it daily, and I don't give it a second thought. Until that is, something goes wrong with it. Yesterday I managed to pinch a nerve on the side of my thumb knuckle. Now gripping something tightly, or flexing my thumb back, hurts like hell. I'm doing my best to avoid doing things which will cause pain and delay the healing, but I've already tweaked it about 4 times this morning and I've only been awake for about an hour, which doesn't augur well for the rest of the day. Fortunately, it doesn't hurt to type :-)
Anyway, today's moral - appreciate your opposable thumbs, people. They do great work for us every day. |
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