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Just arrived in Toronto and the big story here is an Ontario based pet food manufacturer that is facing almost certain demise after it has been discovered that Aminopterin, a reported rat poision, found its way into dog food.
Many dogs have died and hundreds of thousands of owners across North America are worried their dog could be next. 60 million dog food products are being recalled.
Just watching the press conference live now on CityPulse 24.
Crazy.
Just finished watching an interesting debate between Robert Scoble of Scobeleizer and Michael Arrington from TechCrunch.
The debate centered on the issues of 'quality content' and content marketing, but perhaps more so... text versus video.
While perhaps not the easiest audience (it was an Internet TV conference), Mike Arrington said what many people in the room know if they are honest with themselves - that producing video content is much more labour intensive than text.
From his perspective, the effort to edit video is simply not worth the investment for him personally, or worth the expense of hiring people to help him "at this stage..."
"I can write an article in 30 mins, and that provides a much higher return on investment than the (effort) involved in editing video", he said. He has a point.
Robert Scoble had a different perspective, but then as he said "I have a 6 figure deal from Seagate to do it". Michael Arrington quipped "How many times do you need to say the word Seagate today?"
It is certainly true that video is a lot more effort to produce and edit, assuming you give a crap about the production values. Working in TV we used to spend a day or two shooting 1 to 2 hours of footage and then a week doing post production. All this for a 4 minute story.
Running a blog is a different proposition but the challenges remain. I still haven't got round to editing some rather cool footage I shot in the former USSR, and that was 2 weeks ago. With each passing day it gets less relevant.
An interesting debate and intriguing to hear both speakers in person.
Arrived in San Francisco and spent my first day today at Jeff Pulver's Video on the Net Conference being held at the San Jose Convention Centre.
It's my first time visiting San Jose and it was pretty cool commuting with an old buddy of mine down the 101 this morning past the headquarters of Google, Yahoo! and Adobe.
The weather here is crappy at the moment like it seems to be everywhere right now - London is freezing all of a sudden, New York is snowed in, and the temperature here in Silicon Valley is definitely not what I expected. But enough of that...
The 2nd ever Video on the Net Conference is positively hopping. I was fortunate to go to the first one last September in Boston and the quality and attendance has grown leaps and bounds. The panels are top notch and some real heavy hitters including Jeff Jarvis, Jeremy Allaire, Niklas Zennstrom and execs from AOL, Yahoo! and IBM gave barnstorming speeches today. It was fascinating stuff.
I ran into some old faces from last time and some new ones too. The guys from Vividas are doing cool stuff with full screen, high res video, Bubbleply are going from strength to strength, and I particularly liked a new offering from Doubleclick that offers a platform for inserting ads into flash files - very cool.
Jeff Pulver hosted a fun and semi-private hotel suite party tonight and in usual fine party throwing fashion he organized Playstation 3's, buckets of booze... and I ended up playing poker with him... and losing!
My memories of the Cal Train ride back to San Fran are hazy - I really should call it a night...
So I finally made the plunge and picked up a Blackberry yesterday on my way through Heathrow airport.
I've resisted getting a Blackberry for ages simply because I couldn't see how I would ever integrate it with my tried and tested (12 years old!) Eudora POP based e-mail system. If I send e-mails from my Blackberry for instance, how can I have a copy in my Eudora Out box?
That problem is for another post, but for now I'm interested in the process of getting contacts off my old phone and into my shiny new Blackberry Pearl.
Anytime I've done something like this before I've made use of the Mac address book application and iSync. iSync has a habit of being rather 'out' of sync with the latest phones and in the case of the Blackberry Pearl my usual fears were realized. No support at this time - either USB or Bluetooth.
Thanks to this post however I discovered that a 3rd party application called PocketMac SyncManager, now officially licensed by Blackberry makers Research in Motion, and available to end users for free, does just what I need it to do only with some significant caveats. The problems are not insurmountable however, and if you take things slowly and carefully, things will work out fine.
Firstly you must approach your 1st Blackberry sync in the following order...
Doing anything else it seems throws an error and by the looks of it many people have experienced this problem.
My needs were pretty simple - I wanted to transfer over my Address Book contacts and nothing else. I don't use iCal, nor Entourage, nor any of the other supported apps (Lotus Notes ???). This is a shame because I do sometimes use Palm Desktop as a calendar (it's way better than iCal) but this is not supported.
Back to Address Book...
There are a few quirks that you should be aware of before proceeding...
As mentioned above, field names in the Mac Address Book are mapped to fields within the Blackberry Address Book. Custom field names (set in Mac Address Book) do not transfer over despite there being the presence of 'User' fields on the Blackberry, and some standard fields do not transfer over either. Some field names are changed! The full details are below...
| Mac Address Book | Blackberry Address Book | |
| first name | -> | First Name |
| last name | -> | Last Name |
| company | -> | Company |
| custom image | -> | X |
| work | -> | Work |
| home | -> | Home |
| mobile | -> | Mobile |
| main | -> | Work 2 |
| home fax | -> | X |
| work fax | -> | Fax |
| pager | -> | Pager |
| other | -> | X |
| custom | -> | X |
| work e-mail | -> | |
| home e-mail | -> | EMail* |
| other e-mail | -> | EMail* |
| friend | -> | X |
| assistant | -> | X |
| instant message fields | -> | X |
| work address | -> | Work Address |
| home address | -> | Home Address |
| notes | -> | Notes |
One little gotcha to be aware of is that within the Mac Address Book it is perfectly okay to have different fields with the same field name, but SyncManager can't handle this.
For example I had several cases where I had multiple 'mobile' entries for people - only the first one was transferred. This was a major issue for me and very annoying.
The solution was to go through these entries and change them to different field names. I relabelled a lot of fields as 'main' for example to get them over to the Blackberry as 'Work 2'. For some friends of mine for instance I had custom fields for 'mum' or 'usa home' or whatever. I made use of the Notes feature to remind myself in future what certain numbers represented. Being relabelled as 'Work 2' I would have no idea what these numbers were if I hadn't done this.
Hopefully the situation will change in future with an update to the software and if it does (and you become aware of it) I would kindly ask that you help other readers by using the comments section below. With RIMM now officially recognizing SyncManager, hopefully the boys in Windsor will ensure these quirks are worked out of an otherwise very useful bit of software.
The very first beta for WorldTV, the 'K...V' Beta was shown to other members of the team and some close friends this week. The reaction so far has been extremely encouraging.
In two weeks time, we'll be heading to San Jose for the Spring Video on the Net Conference, where the list of speakers is a who's who of Internet television. We're looking forward to visiting with the likes of Nikklas Zennstrom, Jeremy Allaire, Jeff Jarvis and Michael Arrington to name a few, to show off our next 'San Francisco' Beta to some friends, old and new.
We attended the last Video on the Net in Boston in September, and had a fun and productive time. It's not too late to attend if you're looking for a high impact kind of event.
The Beta itself is not yet ready for sharing publicly, we've decided to take a time out to plan our invitation strategy for the time being.
The Intensity HDMI card has arrived from BlackMagic, its makers, and I am just starting to put it through its paces. Early signs are promising and I have successfully captured 1080i footage from a Sony HDR-SR1 into Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 without any problems.
For UNCOMPRESSED storage, you will need a RAID disk array capable of around 150MB/sec sustained write for high definition video, but the Intensity provides a couple of built in hardware compression routines that let you capture, compress modestly, and store to a single SATA or IDE hard disk.
Using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Tool which came supplied with the card, I discovered that my Intel based MacPro tower with standard fit SATA drive could sustain 48.3MB/sec, thus in theory only requiring 3 x compression to work.
The card ships with some fun looking high definition live video mixing software called Blackmagic On-Air, but you will need two cards if you want to mix sources like this. It does not look like you would be able to mix an HDMI source with a standard definition source or a source from somewhere else.
I will extend this post over time but wanted to share these early findings.
Most people in the market for this card will probably not be the types to have a RAID disk array sitting around, and so are probably interested in the compression options it comes with. Remember that it is the speed of the average hard drive that is preventing uncompressed storage, and not the card itself.
To be fair, the only real benefit of uncompressed storage would be if you are planning on capturing live video (i.e. as you are shooting) from a camera such as the Sony SR1. All consumer and prosumer high definition camcorders compress the video before storing it internally, so playing back video from any of these cameras and capturing it via the HDMI output will mean that it has already been through one compression / decompression cycle.
While there is good logic in saying that you should not want to put it through another cycle, there's a law of diminishing returns here. The very best you could do with uncompressed capture is to replicate perfectly the already 'compressed' picture. Recompressing it a second time will likely not make much difference. The second compression routine will make use of many of the same averaging 'blocks' and should not introduce anywhere near the same number of new artifacts as the original compression routine.
The Intensity HDMI capture card offers two built in hardware compression options - DVC Pro HD and JPG.
Using JPG results in smaller file sizes (6mb per second in my tests) versus 15mb per second for DVC Pro HD. This correlates to compression ratios of 10x and 25x respectively.
Although the compression ratio using JPG is greater, I personally preferred the picture using JPG. You can see the full frames by clicking on the images above.
You will need a PCI Express slot for the Intensity card, this is not the same as a regular PCI slot or a PCI-X slot! Do check this on your machine.
The Intensity HDMI card IS HDCP compliant, meaning you will not be able to record copy protected content using it.
I'm away for the next couple of weeks but will pick up this review on my return.
Heading back to the UK today and am quite sad to be leaving this country. The guys here have been amazing, and apart from some very productive work the fruits of which will be seen soon, we've also managed to have fun in the process.
Last night we all went out for a meal, and the cries of "Wodka!" every 5 minutes are still resonating loudly in my ears. I especially loved the programmer humour story of how our coders had to set reminders so they remembered to tell their wives they were going out for a meal. I guess some things cross all borders.
It's inspiring to work with such brilliant programmers, and I look forward to coming back in a month or two hopefully to do more great work.
