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July 02 The world's best places to live 2008
MSN and BusinessWeek recently published the results of a survey on the best places to live in the world. Switzerland took the #1 and #3 spots with Zurich and Geneva respectively. Vienna, Austria took the #2 spot. Quite an endorsement! I have to agree, Zurich made a great impression on me both times I visited there. Closer to (my) home, Vancouver, Canada took 4th place! It's a really nice city - very liveable and wonderful Chinese food! Anyway, worth a look if you're considering relocating or need a change in your life! Follow this link for the entire list! June 17 Who designs this stuff?!? On Sunday morning before heading out to the Mariners game, I had to do a little video editing and dvd creation on my PC. During my wife's graduation ceremony on Saturday, I took my video camera along. In total I recorded 12 short scenes to the video camera's hard disc. Fine. So on Sunday morning I had to copy those files to my PC, using Sony's software that came with the video camera. My video camera is high-definition, using the AVCHD codec, and it can record audio in dolby digital 5.1 (surround sound). Fine. Or so you might think. By the time I had finished copying the video files from my video camera to my PC, a process which involves not just copying but also analyzing the files, my 12 scenes had been saved to disc as 36 files. For each scene, I had a foo.m2ts file, which was the actual AVCHD video file. The filename was a user-friendly year-month-day-hour-minute-second.m2ts. Each of those 12 *.m2ts files came with an accompanying *.modd file and a *.moff file. Who knows what they are for, possibly the result of the "analysis" the Sony software had performed. Anyway, it's pretty annoying to have all these files cluttering up my filesystem instead of just having the actual video files. But wait, there's more. I was doing this video editing to make a DVD containing the scenes I'd taken, to give to two friends of ours who had also graduated with my wife. Of course, I couldn't just give them the video "as-is". The AVCHD video codec can be used for blu-ray discs, which is logical since they are both Sony creations. I don't have a blu-ray disc burner in my PC, and I don't even know if they have a blu-ray player or not. So I had to convert the video to the DVD-Video standard codec, MPEG-2. Naturally, I made a copy rather than replacing the HD versions. The re-coding process took forever even on my dual-core machine, both cores pretty much maxed out. When it had finally finished, I was astonished to find my 12-scene, 36-file HD folder had a new 12-scene, 60-file SD folder alongside it. 60 files! The *.m2ts files had been replaced by *.mpg files, which I expected. But even the SD video files each had their *.modd and *.moff files, and now I also had a *.mpg.stk01 and *.mpg.stk02 file for each video file. Whatever. That's 5 files on disc for every time I pushed my thumb on the "record" button of my video camera! Taking the high- and standard-definition files together, I was now up to 96 files. And I hadn't even started to make a DVD yet! This is just total BS! And the frustrations with video editing on the PC just continued from there. By the time I was done - miraculously done just in time to make it to the Mariners game on time - I was pretty fed up with the PC experience and ready to go use a Mac. Next time I'll talk about my adventures with some video and dvd creation software that left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. Word to the wise, never try doing home movie editing against the clock  June 14 MBA graduation Today was Paew's MBA graduation ceremony at Key Arena. Of course, photos are online. Plenty of Paew and the rest of the Thai CityU gang! Click on through our blog posting to the gallery here. May 26 For the parents of baby AvaIn honor of our friends who just had a baby girl on Saturday, this video should be just what the doctor ordered!
May 25 World's most peaceful country?What's the world's 'most peaceful' country? Iceland. The least peaceful? Iraq.
The USA came in at 97th place out of 140.
This is all according to the "Global Peace Index" report from the Economic Intelligence Unit, which I found on Reuters. But it's not just about living in the country - it also factors in that country's activities around the world - U.N. deployments overseas and levels of violent crime, respect for human rights, the number of soldiers killed overseas and arms sales.
The G8 came in all over the place: Japan was fifth most peaceful. Canada 11th, Germany 14th, Italy 28th, France 36th and Britain 49th. Russia was in 131st place!
So congratulaions to Iceland. I've never been there, and this news still doesn't make me want to go there, to be honest. Probably something to do with the word 'ice' in its name... On the other hand, now I know I really don't want to go to Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Sudan and Somalia - the bottom 5 on the list. May 24 DogsittingA friend of ours is in the hospital today, giving birth. So, we're dogsitting a little chihuahua (AKA alien rat dog). It's actually kind of fun having a dog around the house and he doesn't seem to be too lonely or worried about his temporary home. Mind you, we've been planning for this for quite a while, with plenty of visits in advance so he could get used to us and to our home.
Let's see if the dog will let us sleep tonight...
We're still waiting to hear the news from the hospital. Everything is going to plan so far, so I'm not worried, however, having visited the delivery room this morning, I can only imagine how freaked out I would be if I was the daddy-to-be. I was nervous enough just being there. May 12 Worldwide TelescopeYes, the project that can bring Robert Scoble to tears, has now been released by Microsoft Research.
Update: Long has posted an article on his blog on how to get great screenshots from the Worldwide Telescope software.
 May 11 Unicode on the Web
Mark Davis posts on the official Google blog - based on analysis of the pages that Google's search engine indexes, the use of Unicode on the web just surpassed that of ASCII and Western European encodings for the first time.
Having ~25% of the world's web pages using a Unicode encoding should not be confused with the actual content on the pages - don't assume that the % of non-Western language content has increased at this rate. A large number of English websites now use UTF-8 encoding only because it's the default encoding for many development tools and data types (XML, JSON, etc) and doesn't cost them anything in terms of bytes used. But at least all those sites now have the ability to support non-Western scripts - a big step in the right direction :-) Tulip Pics - Photoshop ExpressSimultaneously showing off some of my tulip photos I took a few weeks ago at the annual Tulip Festival an hour or so north of Seattle, and testing Photoshop Express's embeddable slideshow :-)
The default size of the object, 322 x 300 pixels, was really tiny and not useful, so I hacked the parameters to 644 x 600 pixels. Seems to be ok!
May 09 Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook = my life in 2008These days, Facebook is the 'hub' of my online life. Some people don't get into it, but more than any other mechanism, Facebook is now THE way I find out what is going on in the lives of people in my social and professional circles all around the world. I check it about as often as I check my personalized homepage on my.live.com. If there's a birthday party in Singapore, I know about it. If one of my coworkers is a part-time actor and jazz musician, I know about it. But I was thinking about how I could most effectively project what's going on in my life or what I'm thinking about at any given moment.
I used to update my Facebook "status" message quite often, sometimes twice a day or so. And I often update this blog, depending on when I have something longer than a status message to say. In order to surface my blogging on Facebook, I installed an app which let me list my recent blog entries. But this is somewhat inefficient. So now I use Twitter, FriendFeed's excellent Facebook application, and another Facebook application called Twittersync to pretty much automate everything.
So what's happening here? In the screenshot above of my Facebook Mini-Feed on my profile page, you can see FriendFeed activity and Facebook status message updates. But I didn't need to touch anything in Facebook to make this happen. Every time I "twitter" - write a status update on twitter.com, the Twittersync application automatically updates my Facebook status message. In addition, FriendFeed picks up my twitter and lists this activity, which create a duplicate entry in my Mini-Feed. This is somewhat annoying but not FriendFeed's fault. The bonus is that it also picks up my replies to other people's twitters and publishes them as well. Also, if I had updated my blog or posted pictures on Flickr or elsewhere, or recommended an article on Digg, or a myriad of other activities I might have done on the web, those would also be recorded by FriendFeed and published on Facebook for all of my friends to see.
Of course, I can choose what to twitter, and I can choose what activities I want to share on my FriendFeed - right now it's just Twitter and this blog - but there are a couple of things which make this almost-40-year-old curious. You need to give some thought to what you want to share, both for reasons of privacy and just general annoyance level for others.
This trend in social networking where almost everything is public. how dangerous is it? Do people know that things are being shared? To give one example, a good friend of mine recently discovered that I'd put a photo up on Facebook which included her. I even tagger her. The photo is several years old (6 to 8 years I think). She commented on this photo, not entirely happy that I'd put a photo of her up on Facebook without her permission. However, in doing so, her comment and the photo itself was broadcast to every friend as part of the news feed. So now every friend on Facebook knew about the photo and knew she wasn't entirely happy with it. I could weakly argue that she should have noticed the fact that I'd posted pictures and that I'd tagged her had been broadcast in her news feed, but obviously she wasn't paying attention :-)
The other thing I wonder is just general annoyance level that constant updating of profile causes others. Yesterday I embarked on a Father Ted twitter-spree. Father Ted is an old British-produced, Irish-made TV show about three Catholic priests living on a small island off the west coast of Ireland. It's probably the single most hilarious TV show ever made, but that's just my opinion. However, my constant twittering of arcane quotes from this TV series were broadcast mostly to American and Asian friends. I was fully aware that most of them would have absolutely NO idea what the hell I was talking about in my status messages on Facebook. I may well have filled their news feeds with a bunch of mostly garbage. Hopefully a few friends who saw the TV series would have at least got a chuckle out of it - I myself was absolutely in stitches while finding quotes to use! But my point is, how much are services like Twitter and FriendFeed useful, or how much do they just increase the noise level of things you really just don't care about? I suspect it's mostly noise. Another friend of mine just commented on a bunch of photos on Facebook, and now my news feed is full of photos of people I don't know and comments that are not relevant to me in any way.
However, I do plan to continue my adventures with Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and so on. This is all "cutting-edge" web 2.0 stuff, even though I know most of my friends outside the high-tech industry - and probably several within the high-tech industry - have never even heard of Twitter :-)
What do you think? Is this all just annoying? Am I spamming you all to death? Is it something only teenagers will "grok"? Let me know in the comments. May 06 Mildred and Richard Loving - thank you
Today it seems inconceivable that I could be arrested for being married to my wife. Yet Mildred and Richard Loving were arrested for just that.
In 1967, just one year before I was born, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that states could not prohibit mixed-race marriages. At that time, approximately 17 states banned mixed-race marriages. Mildren and Richard were arrested and sent to jail by the state of Virginia, only to be released on condition that they leave the state. They did leave, and finally brought the case against racial discrimination to the federal courts.
As I am in a mixed-race marriage myself, I owe a debt of gratitude to Mildred, who died on Friday aged 68. Rest in peace. A lot can change in 40 years. May 04 How low will YHOO go?Now that MSFT has pulled it's offer to take over YHOO, I wonder just how low YHOO stock will go on Monday morning... it will be fun to watch.
 I hope you sold all your YHOO stock on Friday! ;-) April 28 Tulip Festival Photos Hi all, I've posted a new collection of photos from this year's Skagit Valley Tulip Festival - no people pics, just arty pictures of flowers! I think some of them are pretty nice.I'm trying out SmugMug as a photo storage/gallery site. So far I do like it - I found a 50% off discount too, which certainly might help me decide to keep using SmugMug once the trial period expires. Meshify!I keep talking about the Mesh being a platform, not just a user experience.
If you’re having trouble understanding what Mesh can do, and you have a spare 53 minutes, I strongly recommend this video up on Channel 9. (Silverlight runtime required.)
A quote from on10.net:
Live Mesh Group Program Manager Ori Amiga, with some help from Jeremy Mazner, explains how Mesh works as a platform, and shows a number of demos showing: · native Mesh feeds rendered in XML, in JSON and in RSS · querying the Mesh feeds using Iron Python · a network-unaware WPF client application using Mesh (meshify!) · a Silverlight photo-zoom application running on top of Mesh · a custom Facebook application that syncs Facebook photos with Live Mesh · taking photos on a Mac and on a mobile phone and having them sync with the Mesh · accessing the Mesh over DAV from the DOS prompt and then opening the photo in mspaint.exe and having the edits sync back to all devices · new .Net 3.5 LINQ queries over Mesh objects including code snippets from the Mesh SDK which show up automatically in Visual Studio
Awesome stuff! Live Mesh - invites and more!The blogosphere continues to talk about the Live Mesh and it's potential. Here's another collection of topics that I've come across over the weekend:
Stay tuned for one more post from me about the Live Mesh, after which I might shut up about it for a while, until the PDC excitement hits :-) April 23 Live Mesh - more coverage More coverage of the Live Mesh Tech Preview announcement in this morning's blogs:ars technica:
Liveside.net:
CNet:
Direct from Microsoft, Abolade Gbadegesin is up on Channel 9 talking about the Mesh. Live MeshFinally I can tell everyone what I'm working on at Microsoft these days! Today at the Web 2.0 Conference, we announced the Live Mesh Tech Preview. This is a pre-Beta release limited to 10,000 users. What is Live Mesh? Well, it's a tough thing to explain in one sentence. It's too big in scope to summarize easily. The important thing is to realize that it's a platform which anyone - other Microsoft teams and third-parties - will be able to develop applications upon. We are shipping some applications in today's tech preview, and it would be easy to mistake that experience as the main point of Live Mesh. That would be a mistake. Think of the appications as an experience enabled by the platform.
I'm embedding a Live Mesh demo below, which does a great job of explaining Live Mesh (Silverlight runtime required). I wanted to embed two demos here, but they both start automatically, so both played at the same time. I'm showing you the general introduction here. If you're a developer, you'll want to check out http://www.mesh.com/Welcome/TourDeveloper.aspx.
More Information:
Live Mesh Demo:
For Developers:
The reviews and opinion pieces are rolling in:
Robert Scoble: Mary-Jo Foley: John Markoff (New York Times): Liveside.net: TechCrunch: GigaOM: CNet: ReadWriteWeb: If it’s possible to summarize the general tone of opinion – I’d say they understand it’s the platform that is important, which means we must have done a pretty good job of explaining and driving the point home. Overall some definite interest and cautious optimism, with most people looking forward to hearing a lot more at the PDC in October. The TechCrunch title was unfortunately misleading - Live Mesh's future is most definitely cross-platform and cross-device.
Mesh and the whole cloud-computing space are really interesting and hot these days. It's very cool for me to be a part of that. April 14 The Unfortunate Toilet Laptop Encounter Today will go down in history as the day I encountered the toilet laptop user. There I was in a stall mining my own business, (so to speak), when I heard rapid tapping from the adjacent stall. The tapping was easily identifiable as the sound of someone typing on a laptop computer. And not the surreptitious, hesitant typing of someone who knew he was committing a major faux pas. Oh no. This was loud, agressive typing regardless of how quiet the toilet room was. And just to add insult to injury, he was using the handicapped stall.So, to the man in Microsoft REDWEST E, 2nd floor toilets, on the afternoon of Monday, April 14th 2008. The man using the handicapped toilet as his own personal office. Please know that I, and I am sure several other people who must have heard you using your laptop in there, are HORRIFIED!
Ew. Ew. Ew. April 10 MyMicroHoogleOnlinespace?One of the silliest things AOL ever did was naming itself "America Online", pretty much shooting itself in the foot for any expansion outside America. Of course it tried with AOL UK, AOL Japan and so on, pretending "AOL" was just an innocent combination of three letters. How many Swiss people want to use a product named "America Online Switzerland" or "America Online Australia"? Well, I am too lazy to find out, but come on, the name is hardly appealing to non-Americans.
With all the rumors about Microsoft's attempt to take over Yahoo!, my head is spinning on the possible name changes.
Microhoo!, Yahsoft! or, knowing Microsoft's branding team "Yahoo!™ powered by Microsoft™ Windows Live®".
Of course then there was yesterday's rumor of an AOL Time Warner + Yahoo! + an ad deal with Google, in an attempt to spurn Microsoft:
YahooOL!, Ahoo! Yahoogle!
And then today, the possible tie in of News Corp with its MySpace site possibly joining Microsoft to jointly take over Yahoo!
MicrohooSpace! MyYahSoft! ...
The possibilities are endless, and my head is spinning. I'm going to go lie down now - wake me up when the acquisition's over! |
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