10 Nov 2005
Ah, would you look at that date? Yes, indeed, this fabled “Other Side” is indeed real. Or maybe I’m now a figment of my own imagination and I still have exams to go. Whoa, recursive.
Business was good, but for one question, the details of which I don’t exactly recall (23 c), which was so poorly written only BS teachers could manage it. It depresses me to think there are people that can spend that much of their life professionally applying buzzwords and doing absolutely nothing. Your mother was a hampster and your father smelt of elderberries! Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!
And they did. The wonders of Monty Python!
So, today, I plan to spend some time doing stuff with Tori because she’s about to fly away for… a long time… and then when I get home/before I go out play with Cinelerra, which, miraculously, I finally have working well. The secret is to ignore the stupid DEB and go straight for the RPMs with alien, which makes the experience remarkably painless. Err… in a totally non-abducted-by-aliens kind of way.
ANYWAY! My biggest qualm with it is its render/batch render thing, not because it’s slow (it is, kind of, but that’s mostly just the way I’ve got this computer setup), but because it seems impossible to export in a format that everything likes (aside from straight raw DV, which I haven’t tried because I need to put another hard disk in this computer. I would have, but I’m out of IDE channels and really need to think about how to store things properly.)
At the minute, I’m generally rendering in MPEG-4 (ffmpeg) and then effectively transcoding back to MPEG-4 using mplayer to make it more player-friendly. I take it the codec is exactly the same, it’s just that Cinelerra seems to have some quirk that means only mplayer can read the rendered file, whilst xine and VLC fall over and promptly die.
Shrug. I’ve just been editing video sequences, though, so at least I haven’t had to deal with audio as well. One would presume that would be rather less painless — it’s not, at least not in terms of setting up Cinelerra for audio playback/NLE stuff. Despite having both ALSA and esound output options, ALSA would just make it crash (this seems widely documented with no fix available), and esound wouldn’t work because… well… I don’t think my local esound server has a port open, and Cinelerra, being some broadcast-quality high-and-mighty piece of crap, decides that talking to a local sound server is beneath it. Ironically, the simplest of the lot, OSS, worked without any difficulties… but that of course means I can only have one sound stream going simultaneously. Which, admittedly, isn’t a huge problem when you’re trying to work in Cinelerra (it’s hardly as though you want other sounds going on whilst you’re trying to edit audio), but disabling the server, etc, can be a little bit of a pain.
09 Nov 2005
If you’re reading this (e.g. the world didn’t end before it was posted or whatever…), I’m probably on the Other Side of the HSC. For various reasons, this might be the last post before I go to New Zealand, in which case don’t expect another post for three weeks. I’m going to delete everything in my moderation queue when I get back, because I don’t have enough time to go through all the spam that will probably accumulate (or, am not planning on having enough time… I might, if the spammers are nice for three weeks.) — this won’t impact most regulars, though, whose posts should get through just fine. Ah, I love software that just works. I can see it’s not likely to, though!
Tori is leaving for Europe tomorrow (tomorrow when this post goes live), and she’s not getting back til January :-( Hence the improbabilty of my posting at least in the next 48 hours, and possibly before I leave if it takes me longer than expected to pack/get organised.
I also may or may not have a heap of photos to post when I get back. We leave in… a handful of days now, and I still haven’t decided which/how many cameras I’m taking, nor have I bought film. Bleh!
08 Nov 2005
I note with some interest that WSG regular Sydney and Melbourne meetings are being recorded and will, at some time in the near future (i.e. after the meetings have happened), be available for download somewhere. Earlier, WSG event Web Essentials ’05 was made available for podcast download. On Sunday, my church announced they were making sermons available for download (and, just for the record, their site is getting re-done :P So ugly-factor will soon disappear, and I’m hoping to figure out a way to make the podcasts more accessible when that happens!)
Last time I checked (and I keep a fairly close eye on these things in a web context), bandwidth and disc space didn’t get dramatically cheaper. Nor, I hazard, did recording equipment. So what gives? Suddenly we all decide we can be bothered? Is this just buzzword-compliance 101?
One of the reasons I have for being wary of podcasting is not so much bandwidth (which can be paid for if exceeded and so forth without too much difficulty), but storage space! Storage space, unless you’re buying a server, is generally rather scant. Especially next to bandwidth: most hosts assume that your entire site will attract enough traffic to have it downloaded in its entirety several times over. To be fair, so does base10solutions — but our storage is geared to the size site that, relative to its bandwidth, could conceivably attract enough traffic to go over without difficulty. What I’m talking about is people with blogs on 6GB accounts with 100GB of transfers — it’s utterly disproprtionate.
The web doesn’t have much respect for permanence. Which is probably one reason why low-storage accounts have lasted so long. With podcasting, if I put something online I want it to stay there permanently, because it’s content! A certain image gallery won’t stay there forever, but to me that’s okay as it’s acting in a ‘closed community’ context — the only door is my website (to the best of my knowledge, few, if any, other people have linked to it).
So I have some burning questions about where all these resources are coming from, and if they’re sustainable. It could just be that people have decided they’re prepared to spend money on hosting now, and more money in the future if storage/bandwidth costs don’t scale as quickly as anticipated. Or — and this is what I think is most likely happening, though not necessarily with the examples cited — people are hosting things without thinking what they’ll do when they come to “that” — “that” being, of course, the inevitable wall at which point they need to expand/upgrade/reach further/… or delete content.
The other question, of course, is why now? We haven’t seen any quantum leap, so it must be that people are only now realising the potential of the medium. You could argue for broadband uptake, but I’d argue back that as podcasting is mostly spoken-word content, its bandwidth requirements are no greater than that of talkback shows that have had 28.8kb streams since 1997. Maybe it’s just awareness. That’s where I’m leaning. I think it’s people seeing a buzzword that’s been given some degree of credence — though little recognition outside of web circles, according to a handful of surveys (I’d meant to find links for that but haven’t got time… there was something on CNet News.com a few months back) — and attempting to catch the wave as it rises.
On the note of waves rising, it should be noted that, yes, I am one of the nay-sayers that believe this “Web 2.0″ thing is a farce and will see some setback. We might emerge more semantic or application-oriented or whatever because of it — just like Web 1.0 left us with a bunch of empty stores and Flash websites that we’re still trying to get rid of/turn into a more appropriate use of the platform –, but money is going to be lost. So there are my thoughts on that, whilst trying to clear my mind of various “I know nothing” stress before going to bed and sitting my last exam tomorrow. Hence “procrastination” in this posts’ title.
07 Nov 2005
It’s live!
If you’re seeing a boring directory listing, wait another hour or five til the DNS change has propagated… we changed nameservers last night, Sydney time, so it should be through soon.
Be the first to comment on it over at the cat-scan blog!
N.B. If you haven’t got working DNS yet, try http://209.59.176.82/~catscan/blog/ and http://209.59.176.82/~catscan/. Links will be broken using this method.
06 Nov 2005
About to launch a new site. Exciting. This is the first site I’ve fully designed in a graphics app (namely Inkscape — yes, a vector graphics app! Worked really well!) before introducing CSS: I dropped the idea of “CSS-based design” for a while and think it turned out quite nicely. The project was gratis for an open-source project mentioned before on this site, encompassing logo and site design. This is the “more visually complex” design I alluded to two days ago. It mightn’t seem particularly dark if you have a large screen, but the content area is certainly less bright. It doesn’t have a ‘dark’ feel, though — quite the opposite.
The design is about primary colours, which represent the purpose of the project itself. From that you might have guessed what I’m talking about, but I’ll continue to be dramatic until I’m ready to say “hey, it’s launched, go look.” Well, actually, it won’t be “launched” until early December in a marketing sense, but the site will be ‘live’ sometime in the next 48 hours, albeit with some content missing.
I hope my usual standards of markup propriety have been upheld — I even bothered to validate this one before launch, catching two potentially embarrassing unencoded ampersands (because I completely forgot we’re meant to do that. I haven’t used them for so long, but the typeface has nice ampersands so I wanted to!) — but most of all, at least for me, this design is about design. I say without hesitation it’s the best I’ve ever come up with.
I’m hoping to enjoy working with Inkscape as a design tool more in the future, because it really is excellent! Expect an announcement about the site’s launch in the next 24 hours — until then, feel free to try and guess what it is! ;-)