A couple of weeks ago, I was heading on a trip and wanted to bring along a nice video recorder. Having heard of pocket size flash-based video cameras like the Kodak Zi8 and the various Flip products, I decided to give the Flip UltraHD a try.
Note: Before we go on, I forgot to take any photos of the actual device but there are enough reviews online that there’s no real los (here, here and here).
The device itself is twice as thick as an iPhone, and nearly the same in other dimensions. Usability was simple, a big red button that starts and stops the recording, and some navigation for reviewing your videos. What I found really impressive was the actual quality of the video. The video was crisp, and it recorded decent enough audio (in the direction the camera is pointing). The big drawback was the shaky quality of the videos when you record while walking. That, along with the small viewing angle – which meant I had to be at least a few meters away from subjects to get them fully in the frame – are the two drawbacks of this device for me.
Here are two sample videos I took with the Flip, and you can judge for yourself. First video is taken indoors to show how the camera works in low light, it is not HD. The second video was shot outside with good lighting but it was taken while walking and you can see the shakiness of the image. (To see the HD version click on the link to go to Vimeo)
Overall, I would get this camera for doing quick shoots and things that one would normally use a cellphone or point and shoot camera for. For longer videos, I would look to other more advanced cameras.
As with most things in tech, large companies catch on to the power of instant messaging late. Where I work is no exception. They rolled out Microsoft Office Communicator a couple of months ago (as a side note, that is a horrible landing page) and made much of the new and improved power of communication between employees. It’s a great thing that I can finally communicate using instant messaging, but the proprietary software threw a monkey in my desktop setup. After some research I found out how to get my desktop to connect to the Office Communicator server: Pidgin and SIPE.
First, I needed to install Pidgin
sudo apt-get install pidgin
Then, I installed the TLS plugin for Pidgin
sudo apt-get install pidgin-encryption
Now, the important piece of the puzzle was SIPE, which is needed to connect to proprietary server. I initially tried the usual
sudo apt-get install pidgin-sipe
But the version of SIPE available for jaunty was version 1.2-1 and it didn’t work. So, I went with the old school way of compiling my own binary. I got the code from here and followed the simple instructions on the same site. They are as follows:
tar -zxvf pidgin-sipe-1.7.0.tar.gz
cd pidgin-sipe-1.7.0
./configure --prefix=/usr/
make
sudo make install
Once installed, I started up Pidgin and after entering the necessary info connected successfully. You can see the detailed info of what I entered in the pictures below.
We run a large scale and highly visible website. This site is updated frequently, and is very complex. So far the way the site is updated is using subversion where the latest code is checked out into the public servers – after much testing, of course.
A typical release goes something like this:
checkout code from subversion
run a few scripts to modify database and generate intermediate files
generate various connections between site and underlying software
update underlying software
One problem with this approach is inevitably developers tend to push last minute fixes while in testing mode. It’s easy to update the code with a svn co but the code always tends to diverge and one fix usually leads to other bugs! Another issue is that each time a release is made a long list of complicated – and different each time – steps have to be followed. There are many other issues as well that I won’t go into right now, but suffice to say each release is as easy as pulling your own tooth!
So, one idea to cut down on all this trouble is to build a deb package for each release. This essentially locks down development, since each code change involves building a new package. I’m also fairly certain it will make life in the software lifecycle much easier.
And the debianized release would go like this:
apt-get install website package
apt-get install underlying software
Or even simpler if I made the website package depend on the underlying stuff:
apt-get install website package
Now only if I could get the decision makers to agree.
The desktop wars have been heating up since the arrival of ubuntu on the scene. There’s been many articles stating that Linux has arrived on the desktop and so on. But last month while at an open source conference I realized that aside from ideological battles, balance is what’s needed. My friend had a laptop running the latest version of Ubuntu, he quickly ran into trouble when doing something as simple as a hibernate and ended up having to reinstall the OS to fix the problem.
So what do I want to say here? Well, to me where open source makes sense is in the enterprise. A place where the cost of software is minimized and the benefits of open source are quickly realized. But on the desktop, where I don’t have time to deal with unsupported hardware or small issues it makes no difference! So at this moment, the deciding factor should be what runs what I need to run painlessly and seamlessly…
Someone at VIA didn’t think that introducing a 60% off sale would slow the site to a crawl. Since yesterday, their stunt (thanks to the strike) has made their site and all the services they offer through it inaccessible to the public.
I’ve been on their site for 2 days trying to get a ticket. During the day it’s non-responsive and even past midnight the site doesn’t function. I’m not sure if they thought about this rise in traffic. But in today’s world, this kind of weak infrastructure really looks bad on the organization, especially the guys greasing the wheels in the server room!
Here’s a thought guys: before you put out a call for a going-out-of-business sale, buy some bandwidth!
The recent elections in Iran have reminded me of something I was pondering for a while.
I listened to an interview with Ethan Zuckerman about the multilingual web and put it in the back of my mind. But now that the events in Iran are escalating the need for a multilingual web becomes even more important. In the first two days of uprising (June 13 and June 14) there was a lot of news reports coming in from people on the streets. They were filing them on social media (twitter and friendfeed) but mostly in Farsi. The at that point the rest of the world wasn’t able to make the most of these reports. There was even a meme created on twitter about how CNN missed reporting this election: #cnnfail. Slowly as the reports came in English, other sites tried to aggregate the torrent of news. I especially liked what twazzup did with their Iran Unrest site. They were smart enough to notice that more content can be added by search for Farsi keywords and capitalize on this gap.
I now fully agree with Ethan Zuckerman, and think we need the web to become inclusive of all languages. If we can easily and quickly translate between languages on the web, news and information can flow more freely. Of course there are inherent problems in translating various languages, and I think currently without human intervention that can’t be done easily. Case in point is that the site balatarin started to ask for volunteers to translate important Farsi language blog posts.
However, things like this will not take off until the big players get involved. And today I heard that google has entered the game by adding Farsi translation services. It still has a long way to go, but it’s a good start!
What’s the hottest new thing these days? Why it’s twitter! And where people are, the spammers will surely follow. Like the parasites of the internet ecosystem, they will find a way in. Then they will start hammering away, sending messages until they get a click here and a click there.
I woke up this morning to see that 5 or 6 people had started following me on twitter. When I went to their profile to check who they were I was greeted with the page below.
This can mean bad things because twitter’s sign up page has the standard anti-spam measure of captcha. So either the spammers are using sophisticated technology to get in, or they’ve outsourced the sign up process to a large number of human workers. I would prefer if it was the latter since it means there’s a limit to how much spam I will get. Although I remember a reading a while back that Gmail’s captcha was broken.
Yesterday I went to my home theatre pc to be greeted by an endless barrage of error messages. In my efforts to fix the problem, I forgot to take a snapshot of the error, but suffice it to say that it was some odd error about svchost.exe being unable to write to a memory location.
I tried a reboot hoping it would fix the problem, but after the system came I was bombarded by pop-ups! Good old adware! It was years since I was a victim of one of those…
I saw this chance to put one of my diabolical plans into action: Install Linux.
So, I didn’t even try fixing the computer. I quickly backed up my important files, and knowing my media files were safe in a separate drive popped in the latest copy of Linux in – which happened to be Kubuntu 8.04. The install took no more than 45 minutes, and right away the difficult stuff was over with and the Logitech diNovo Edge was detected with all buttons working!
As we speak the system is updating itself to the current version of Kubuntu: version 8.10 and soon I will be able to install MythTV and have a proper HTPC.
Man, I remember the days when I had to scour the internet boards to get info on get X working on my old 90MHz Pentium. Or when a simple install was a frustrating experience.
Someone at 
Yesterday I went to my