I think this pretty much sums it all up. I’m having a bad day. No posts today I’m afraid!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4a1z7NLnNk&rel=1&border=0]
Nov 17
Being somewhat involved in the financial markets myself I find this video brilliant and particularly realistic. Especially the joke about emotions-induced volatility.
This is particularly true for who like me trades in Chinese equities which have been made even more volatile but the strong belief everyone involved in the market holds that China is a bloated time bomb about to explode.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ_qK4g6ntM&rel=1&border=0]
Nov 16
The Register reports that Tim Burton has signed a deal with Disney to direct and produce two 3D animated films.
I’m not a big fan of the technology (3d for cartoons), especially when it clashes with old classics such as Alice in Wonderland. Nevertheless I am a giant fan of Mr Burton and will certainly be the first in line to watch his version of the film.
Anybody remembers American McGee’s Alice. I bet it’s going to be something dark like that.
Reuters coverage here
Nov 16
NorgMedia has just opened a few sites aggregating local news reported by the random passerby. Or, as they like to put it, local people-powered news sites.
A norg is about people powered news. Anyone can join and contribute to the news as a Cit J (citizen journalist). Add your comments, share your stories, post your pics, submit links to interesting stories, upload your YouTube clips and vote for the stories you feel are important.
So far NorgMedia has launched a “Norg” for Perth, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne – NorgMedia plans to expand its network of Norgs to the US and UK within the next year.
I think it’s a smashing idea, well, at least it could rid us of all the local newspapers (ie TheLondonPaper and Metro for London) which litter our streets just to give us some junk news about prince Harry.
I have only one doubt. Blogs are great fun and quick to read. We, bloggers, don’t expect to have much credibility and everybody who reads blogs is well aware that their getting a piece of mind from a most likely very opinionated writer.
Is a Norg going to try and compete with professional newspapers on the “official news” level? I personally don’t think it can. Every Friday I walk to my local news agent and buy The Economist. Does The Economist require any introduction, I didn’t think so. This is exactly my point, can Sydney Norg reach the same level of credibility? The same status?
That I see as the big hurdle NorgMedia is going to have to jump.
Nov 14
The online video market is something I have tried to follow closely ever since I became involved with pedanticfilms and the production of the entrepreneurs.
I have now found on TechCrunch news about ONnetworks raising 12 million $ in series B funding led by Accel Partners with the seed investors (Austin Ventures, AT&T). This big an investment definitely marks an important step in the distribution of video content over the internet. Furthermore it also counterpoints exactly how quickly and radically the way we access TV/Old media related content over the internet has changed, and keeps changing.
In the beginning… there was YouTube. User generated content spreading virally over the internet through widgets embedded in blogs all over the place. The old TV/Media industry understood, and made the wrong decision, go against them and send cease and desist for each tidbit of copyrighted material available.
Then along came Joost, completely different, I agree. Nevertheless exactly what people wanted. Their favorite shows detached from the Telly and available for free any time. I’ll gladly put up with some Ads to watch My Name is Earl whenever I want without having to consult the damn TV guide every day.
With digital cameras/camcorders prices constantly dropping and more and more sophisticated home-computer-aimed video editing software producing professional looking content is becoming increasingly easier for everyday users.
ONnetworks has decided to focus on this category of users giving them a “professional-looking” front-end to put them in direct competition with shows realized by professional for commercial television.
ON Networks is a new digital media company that is built around the shifts in how TV shows are created, distributed, viewed and monetized. Put simply, an ON show is coming to pretty much every glowing screen near you.
We have created a haven for smart, engaging and entertaining short-form programs of every pastime and pursuit. And since we believe in the future of our content, we ensure that everything is produced in glorious High-Definition.
I for one am incredibly excited about the site. One thing I haven’t been able to find out is whether they’re planning to implement some sort of revenue sharing option a la YouTube. This, I think, would boost their popularity among the growing indie producers community.
If you have a proven track record in professional high definition production and have an episodic story you want to tell, we would love to know more about you. Please contact us by filling out the form below. Our content development team will review your submission details, and determine if there is a good chance that with your content and our network, we can get it ON.
Nov 13
After updating to Mac OS X Leopard I started experiencing some annoying lags and delays with my NFS mounts.
What happened was that Eclipse kept crashing whenever I tried to open a file from a project folder mounted with NFS. After a quick search on Google I realized that I wasn’t going to get any help on this one.
When I updated my laptop we also moved our development environment to a new server so up until now I wasn’t entirely sure whether to blame Leopard’s NFS client or the new server’s configuration.
After comparing the configuration of our old and new server, which turned out to be exactly the same, I started frowning at my laptop.
Leopard’s NFS client is not entirely to blame though, Eclipse IDE is equally at fault.
The crashes looked suspicious and definitely weren’t caused by Java since Eclipse seemed to work great with purely local projects.
First thing we have to consider is that NFS handles file locking in a fairly chaotic way. This, especially with Eclipse trying to access all the files inside a project folder, might cause your mount to be extremely unstable, so much so that the entire Eclipse IDE crashes waiting for the network mount to react.
NFS and file locking is a peculiar issue, e.g. the Linux 2.4 NFS client pretends to lock files but actually doesn’t, Linux 2.6 does it right, but the implementation has some nasty side effects: locks are held using .nfsXXX files that pollute the directories and prevent operations on it you could do on a local fs.
Eclipse’s problem is clearly that the network is not responding quickly enough and I could think only of 2 possible solutions. Which in the end solved my problem.
1. Increase the maximum number of read/write operations your NFS client can perform
This can be achieved either with the command nfsiod -n <number of threads> (deprecated in Leopard, don’t know about earlier versions of MacOS X) or by modifying NFS’ configuration file in /etc/nfs.conf adding the following line – nfs.client.nfsiod_thread_max=<max number of threads>.
If I remember correctly the nfsiod parameter should be set to 4 by default and even a small increase (8) should do the trick. Be careful not to play too much with this parameter or you’ll end up with an overloaded NFS client crashing you local network.
Going from 4 to 8 nfsiod threads resulted in write speeds going from 700k/sec to over 3.2mb/sec!
For additional information check the NFS Performance HOW-TO.
2. Configure your mounts either from fstab or from the command line to use local lock-files
The option we’re looking for is locallocks. The main drawback here is that your server is not going to be aware of which files you are editing so I wouldn’t recommend going this way if you’re working on an heavily trafficked/edited share.
To use this option in a mount command just run sudo mount_nfs -o locallocks servername:folder localfolder.
Either one of these solutions should do the trick. I have used both on my laptop since I’m the only one working on the NFS share in question and it worked like magic.
Nov 09
I have just spent an entire week writing JavaScript code. Am i feeling suicidal? Not really, at least not just yet.
I know exactly how frustrating JavaScript can be, especially when you’re dynamically rewriting big chunks of you pages’ HTML code.
This problem is particularly evident now that your code needs to be tested thoroughly with N different browser, who, obviously, behave in N completely different ways.
Using a framework like Prototype can make your life considerably easier here, especially if you use it the right way. Because if you’re not you’ll be left with just a somewhat shorter version of document.getElementById without any actual benefit. You’ll still have to write tons of lines of code.
I have found just this morning a couple of articles linked on Ajaxian discussing Prototype programming best practices. They solved most of my problems.
Nov 01
Just found this post on Madriva’s blog. It’s an open-letter to Steve Ballmer from Madriva’s CEO.
We recently closed a deal with the Nigerian Government. Maybe you heard about it, Steve. They were looking for an affordable hardware+software solution for their schools. The initial batch was 17,000 machines.
…
And then, today, we hear from the customer a totally different story: “we shall pay for the Mandriva Software as agreed, but we shall replace it by Windows afterward.”
Wow! I’m impressed, Steve! What have you done for these guys to change their mind like this?
….
Oct 29
From AppleInsider
“We know that Apple has destroyed the music business — in terms of pricing — and if we don’t take control, they’ll do the same thing on the video side,” Zucker said at a breakfast hosted by Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Communications.
NBC originally claimed to be seeking more control over the pricing of songs and videos that it was selling on iTunes, in addition to better piracy controls and more flexibility to bundle video content in an effort to increase revenues.
For its part in the bitter feud, Apple responded by saying NBC was asking for a twofold increase in the wholesale price of its TV show content, which would have resulted in the retail price to iTunes customers increasing to $4.99 per episode from $1.99.
….
Answering questions at the breakfast Sunday, Zucker offered substantially more color on the iTunes matter, explaining that it was “a relatively easy decision” for NBC to walk away from the Apple download service because it had only earned about $15 million
He said NBC routinely propositioned Apple to breach its standard pricing model and experiment with higher pricing for one hit show such as “Heroes” by raising the price from the iTunes standard $1.99 to $2.99 on a trial basis. from the service last year in spite of accounting for about 40 per cent of the videos sold on the store.
Oct 27
I have finally received my copy of Leopard and have spent the entire day playing with DashCode.
My first widget leverages Covestor data export functionality and displays the live feed you normally see on “My Summary”
To use it simply install it (by double clicking on the widget file) then activate the data export from your account settings.
Once the feed is enabled all you have to do is copy the “Live Feed” XML url from the link on the page and paste it in the widget configuration.
As you can see there’s an additional configuration parameter which allows you to specify how often you want the widget to check for updates on Covestor.
his is just a first beta release so don’t expect anything fancy. This widget is compatible with MacOS X 10.4.3 or newer.
Click here to download the widget or use the link on the right menu (under Evangelion interpretation). Feedback and suggestions are more than welcome!
