shared
March 7th, 2010
Google Hilarity
March 5th, 2010Google, you have gone and threw us for a loop. Though you’ve always been incredibly straight-laced and conservative in terms of your approach to design, I did not see your foray into novel forms of comedy.
Just yesterday, you announced that all videos on YouTube will have the ability to be auto-captioned using your voice recognition technology. The results, truly, are outstanding: not for their accuracy, but for their value as pure comic gold.
Observe, for example, the following video:
In order to get started, with the embedded view above you must start playing; then choose the upward facing arrow in the bottom right corner; from the popup that results, select CC, and then “Transcribe Audio (BETA)”. From there, rotten underbelly of what seems to be a benign product announcement comes clear:
The video starts off cryptic, meaning illusive: “before” .. “no month” .. “wolf” .. “the boe’s abortion” (0:20). A divorce then ensues: “yes your honor that’s for sure they can that’s divorce worth it if that’s the case it would be fun” (4:34). The FBI is then involved in constant beatings: “quarter of these the FBI .. many many years trying to stop the beating” (6:19).
Google also adds social networking and the dangers of online harassment to the product held in review, a fact that would otherwise not be apparent by the actual words they used: “the youtube facebook that his son is what concerns the first harassment” (6:57), then instantly turning to matters of national security: “the the meantime terrorist cells that such and this one has .. so what is the President refuses to think that these the same diagnosed with some useful” (7:03).
Google then finds evidence of cultural history: “no and early eighty’s people here in a lab would be the fourth pretend to have the years the postal service reversals” (7:35) Politics then comes back at the forefront: “Clinton the other side’s truce so” (8:21). Obama, too, was certainly mentioned, though I’m not finding the reference in scrubbing through again.
Maybe this will get old and I’ll stop laughing; but for the time being I’m looking forward to seeing what other gems Google will derive from the bounty of the YouTubes. It’s a Dadaist’s dreamland, created by some fussy algorithms which might make YouTube worth watching for the first time in its history.
cement beard in the afternoon sun
March 5th, 2010
cement beard in the afternoon sun, originally uploaded by rlaskey.
Netflix Friends: more, not less!
March 5th, 2010I don’t actually have any inside information; I may be talking out of my ass here. Also, before I continue I would like to point out that I have been a Netflix member for years now, and I find the service to be immeasurably good and valuable.
What I’m seeing, however, is that the service is quietly eking out of its Community features. It used to be, not so long ago, that there was a tab or two at the top of the page for “Community,” or “Friends” — this is now no longer, instead requiring users to look at the bottom navigation. In the past few days, too, Netflix has rolled out some changes to their movie pages. Now, there is not even any tabs or any way whatsoever to access your friends ratings of a particular movie.
It’s rather clear that Netflix faces some stiff competition. Walmart has recently bought out Vudu, a streaming service which delivers high definition movie rentals; Apple is now attempting to lower the cost of TV shows via iTunes; and Hulu is supposed to go towards a pay model in the near future.
Moreover, the number of Netflix users has been growing rather considerably, as you can tell from their reports. I can’t imagine that’s having anything but a negative impact on their server load. With more than 12 million users each with a number of ratings (I’ve personally rated more than 800 movies in my Netflix account), that’s potentially a Shit-Ton of information. Indeed, ratings hold a central part to the health of the Netflix ecosystem, providing the basis for recommendations, and, thereby, customer retention.
My intuition is that in order to keep the friends features afloat at Netflix, they’re going to have to change the way that they store these user ratings in some way or another, or else general site performance will plummet. It would be interesting to know what exactly they’re using on the back end, and how it’s all structured.
Personally, I feel that while the recommendations are important, there is so much emphasis in the market right now on the social web that taking the Friends features out of their ecosystem could hurt them in the long run. I also really like to find what my friends think about a particular movie, much moreso than the random comments which are now on the updated movie page. A third-party system may be feasible, though I also feel that they need to incorporate these features in their own servers and systems; perhaps a Netflix-owned and operated community.netflix.com sub-site which is otherwise independent of ratings, and which takes community data ordered in a more application-optimized way. It’s their move at this point, and I hope they find some solid solutions which move in this more social direction.
rusty denty pipey
March 4th, 2010
rusty denty pipey, originally uploaded by rlaskey.
Asus O!Play HDP-R1 firmware 1.21: progress
March 4th, 2010The Asus O!Play HDP-R1 is a funky little device. It doesn’t do all that much, yet it’s also not that expensive. It’s a media player and streamer which I picked up months ago for $100; it supports HDMI with multi-channel audio output, USB and eSATA drives, as well as network connectivity via a 100MB LAN network port.
Asus has been pushing out rather tame firmware updates along the way, most of which haven’t added all that much to the table. However, in the past week or so, they have released version 1.21 of their firmware which seems to make it a tad more attractive and usable.
ID3 tags still do not come up properly; instead of the proper English contents, seemingly random Chinese and other special characters fill the fields. Any sort of auto-indexing is thereby crushed in terms of practical use; though it does index your collection anyway.
Codec support in 1.21 is still strong. It is probably in the act of saying that a bug is squashed that I will start to see it come up again: though it seems some odd playback problem whereby MP3s would start to stutter is now under control.
More importantly, my network shares which come up via my Apple Airport Extreme are now finally findable via the built-in network utility. Previously, in order to get the network shares to mount properly, I had to resort to the command line on my laptop and do the following:
telnet <Asus box IP>
# when prompted for a login, enter in just "root" -- no password
mkdir /tmp/ramfs/volumes/<mount_point>
mount -t cifs -o username='guest',password='' //<server ip>/<share> /tmp/ramfs/volumes/<mount_point>
Via the above sequence, the HDP-R1 would gladly show the provided network share as a “local storage” volume. Upon updating to firmware 1.21, however, I now see the same share in the “Network Shortcuts” section of the content browsers. I’m not sure if it was necessary to have first connected the share in the above way in order for it to appear in the list of shortcuts; though if you’re dedicated enough then a single try at this process isn’t so bad.
The only high-definition content I have, currently, is the Nine Inch Nails 1080p, 5.1 MKV file for “THIS ONE IS ON US“. At 9GB for two hours of footage, it’s a rather large file. The Asus box played it perfectly, streaming the raw surround sound to my receiver without error, over the 100MB LAN network. That, to me, is rather impressive, and I have a feeling I’m going to get a lot more great use out of the device before its day is done.
UPDATE: After playing with the network connection as described above, I found that at some point the network connection no longer worked. After snooping around a bit, I found that this was not a problem with the Asus box, exactly: the Airport Extreme file server was not responding via CIFS (Windows file sharing), even though it continued to share files without fault via AFP (how it shares to OS X machines). I restarted the Airport Extreme, and then everything was back to normal.
stage right
March 4th, 2010
stage right, originally uploaded by rlaskey.
Project wha?
March 3rd, 2010It’s been a while since I tried to find out some productivity solutions out there. I spent a few hours trying to find what’s available in terms of open source, web based project management systems. There are certainly a bunch out there, though the majority of them are rather old, with reasonably clunky interfaces. Basecamp still seems to be the king of web offerings, though I’m a sole developer in my projects, and I’ve done well enough without having to pay.
Enough of you who read these pages are probably sick enough of me talking about the Opera browser, though I have herein suckered you into reading yet another post about this system. I’ll keep it short, though.
Opera offers a functionality called Notes, which is built into the browser. There’s not all that much functionality to it; you have notes, which are essentially plain text files. There isn’t any place for a title, etc.; the first line that you type in is shown in the list of notes. More importantly, however, is that the notes can be organized in folders; and folders can contain other folders as well as notes. Ergo, I now have certain main tasks as my primary set of folders, with detailed notes for each sub-part of that system. Most of the time the item is contained in a single line; though for more detailed notes I can just continue typing. Finally, via Opera Link, all changes I make to my notes are automatically synchronized across every Opera instance I open, regardless of the machine. A quick keyboard shortcut (ctrl-6) shows and hides my tasks, regardless of what web page I’m currently viewing. All in all, it’s a very quick yet elegant solution for keeping organized.
What do you use to keep track of your projects?
1984
March 3rd, 2010I’m really not sure how I went to the age of 27 before reading George Orwell’s 1984. In high school, we did read Brave New World by Huxley; though Orwell was until now out of my education.
What I find most surprising about reading this book is how little I gave a shit about Big Brother. Most of the time I’ve heard the book referenced, it has to do largely with Big Brother watching over every aspect of our lives. Since we don’t see the cameras or telescreens around us; and since we aren’t corralled and tortured for thought-crime, it seems that people look on the novel mostly as pure fantasy, some awful prediction about a future which thankfully never has been realized.
I’m sure there are countless lists of analysis of this particular text on the Internet as well as just about anywhere else. Even so, I feel it important to re-inforce that Orwell, while drawing lines to a society which is certainly the epitome of totalitarian control, he much more importantly depicts the structure of politics and power which has played out and continues to thrive in our current society. We do have the right to think freely; though the efforts of double-think and news-speak as it has constrained our culture and discourse is all very real.
I urge anyone who has not yet turned these pages to please do so; and that for those who may have missed the meanings the first time, to try again with closer eye to the theory and to the text.
Opera 10.50b1 for OS X: Yes!
February 26th, 2010It’s pretty hard to think that the Opera browser is somehow going to jump up into first place; it’s taken years for FireFox to get the sort of awareness to compete with Internet Explorer. Google Chrome is now similarly joining the fray by advertising its free browser via TV and all other sorts of advertisements; and even then, it’s going to take a long while before there’s much market movement at truly competitive levels.
Even so, I’ve been using Opera in OS X for a few months now, and it continues to get better and better. Today, I tried out Opera’s 10.50 beta 1, available at opera.com/browser/next/. The difference from this beta and previous stable version, 10.10, is that it is a) much faster, and b) utilizing the native OS X Cocoa system. Ergo, re: #2, it’s a lot more integrated and “Mac like” than it was in previous iterations. Integrated light weight IMAP support is still moving along nicely, too: I’m getting all the features I want, without any of the ones I don’t. It is, of course, a beta, and I’ve had reason to restart the application a bit more often than normal. With that said, though, the future of Opera looks to be bright, in my opinion, and I can only hope that they continue with such a well-designed, quality product.