cast42

Design inspiration

2011-10-10T09:42:00.000+02:00

This weekend I was browsing with zite app on Ipad. Especially in the "webdesign and user experience" section I encountered some interesting links:

THE TYPOGRAPHY-OUT APPROACH IN THE WORLD OF BROWSER-BASED WEB DESIGN

On a more technical level, I taught these are interesting:

Offline Web Applications, we’re not there yet.

The above is proof I'll need a lot of good lessons about design (but it probably won't help)

Back from holiday

2011-08-22T11:14:00.002+02:00

This video sums up how the holiday was. Two of the boys that are jumping are my sons. It was shot with a simple Canon Ixus 300HS. The video video resolution is only 320x240 pixels and was shot at 240 frames per second. Enjoy it.

It's not the story, the people, the technology, it's the team

2011-06-25T14:32:00.000+02:00

I was directed to the blog of Amir Salihefendic, and i bounced into this gem:

Finally, these are the operating principals of Pixar as quoted by Catmull:

constant review
it must be safe for people to tell the truth
communication should not mirror the organizational structure
people and how they function is more important than ideas
do not let success mask problems, do a deep assessment
mix up creative and technical people

So it's not the story, the people, the technology, it's the team, but remember:

"Once one can articulate an important idea into a concise statement, then one can use the statement and not have to have a fear of changing behavior." (Ed Catmull, pixar).

Maybe I should read the pixar book that's on my reading list for some time now.

Panoramic picture taken with Iphone 4

2011-03-16T13:21:00.001+01:00

Made with Pano

Bye bye battery of MacBook Pro

2010-12-07T19:27:00.001+01:00

Today, I replaced for the second time the battery of my Macbook Pro. The battery had 560 reload cycles. Apple's documentation states that normally a battery should be able to deliver about 800 cycles before replacement is needed. I got my (now iconic) Macbook Pro beginning of 2007 and this is already the second time I have to replace the battery. So with my (heavy) usage the battery worked for two years. The new battery is again made in 2006. So problem's again in 2013 ? Or will I have a new Macbook Pro with a fixed battery by then ??? Maybe I have to recalibrate my battery more often.

Fireworks shot with Canon Ixus 300HS

2010-09-11T11:40:00.000+02:00

Yesterday evening, I went to the yearly firework held in Leuven, Belgium. I filmed the finale with my new Canon Ixus 300HS (aka Powershot 4000 SD) at 720p. Here's the result:

I also took some pictures in the fireworks mode. I think the movie catches the moment much more than the pictures. But for those interested, here is a picasa album containing the original unedited files. Here's a nice one:

From Vuurwerk

Darth Vader on a Chipmunk, the analog way ;-)

2010-07-31T20:10:00.000+02:00

Hosting my pictures in the cloud: Google Storage

2010-07-27T21:08:00.000+02:00

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

I finally did it: ordered 20 gigabyte of Google Storage to store my pictures in the cloud. I need to pay 5 dollar every year. A real bargain if you ask me. I wished to upgrade my quota because the free gigabyte everybody gets on Picasa Web was getting full. My pictures are stored on my mac and are backuped by Time Machine. So a solution to safeguard my pictures in case of a real catastrophy that destroys both the mac and the backup was not in place yet. With the extra gigabytes on Google storage, I now can store an extra copy in the cloud. It's not only an extra safety for the storage but comes in very handy because of the convience of the Picasa tool and Picasaweb website for sharing pictures.

My workflow is now as follows:

Copy the pictures from my digital camera (currently a Canon Ixus 300 HS) to my mac with Iphoto. Iphoto puts the pictures into new events (= pictures taken at the same time of the day)
Then I select the pictures I like and put them into an album of Iphoto.
Next I export the album on Picasa Web using Picasa Web Albums Uploader, selecting "Actual Size" so that it archives the original files in the cloud. This may take a bit longer for uploading but will save the day when all my pictures disappear from my mac and backup.

If I manage to fill up the 20 Gigabyte, it can upgrade to 80 GByte/ year for 20 dollar/year. So that's save for the future ;-)

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

HTML5 example to change the opacity of an image via CSS3

2010-05-19T14:04:00.000+02:00

Here's a simple HTML5 example that changes the opacity of an image via CSS3 using an input range element and some Javascript.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
 <title>HTML5 example to change the opacity of an image via CSS3</title>
</head>
<body>
<img id="img_0576" src="IMG_0576.jpg" alt="My bike"style="opacity: 0.5;" />
<input id="img_op" type='range' min='0' max='100' value='50' onchange="changeOpacity()">
<script>
function changeOpacity() {
 var opacity = document.getElementById('img_op').value/100;
 document.getElementById('img_0576').style.opacity = opacity;
}
</script>
</body>
</html>

This example is mainly to test out the use of code highlighting on Blogger as explained by Luka Marinko. It seems to work well. Huray!
If you're interested in HTML5 you can follow the Friendfeed on HTML5.

Trailer for the episode 3 of the virtual revolution on the Flemish television

2010-04-26T22:34:00.006+02:00

On tuesday 24 april 2010, VRT will air a dutch spoken version of the third episode of BBC's Virtual Revolution. Here's the trailer:

The code to embed this:


<!-- BEGIN EMBEDCODE CANVAS--> 
<div id='canvasvideo_container_47281' style="width: 507px; height: 320px; border: 1px solid black;"> 
  <object id="canvasvideo_47281" width="507" height="320"> 
    <param name="movie" value="http://static.vrt.be/swf/jwplayer45.swf"/> 
    <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /> 
    <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> 
    <param name="flashvars" value="config=http://video.canvas.be/embed%3Fvideo%3D47281"/> 
    <param name="wmode" value="transparent"> 
    <embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" name="media" src="http://static.vrt.be/swf/jwplayer45.swf" quality="high" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="config=http://video.canvas.be/embed%3Fvideo%3D47281" width="507" height="320"> 
    </embed> 
  </object> 
</div> 
<!-- EINDE EMBEDCODE CANVAS-->

It's a pitty the embed code is not working on Blogger.....

UPDATE: It tried to solve this by using an Iframe:

Your browser does not support iframes.

usign this code:

<iframe src ="http://programmas.canvas.be/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/The-virtual-revolution-Aflevering-3-trailer.html" width="507" height="320">

But that is still not working. Strange.

UPDATE 3: maybe I have to URL unescape the value of flashvars to

http://video.canvas.be/embed?video=47281

Skiing in Stuben am Arlberg, Austria

2010-03-06T15:07:00.005+01:00

In a yearly tradition, I publish a short movie about the skiing holiday. It's not as cool as with a Go Pro Hero cam but still interesting. This year I edited again with Imovie on the mac. Imovie is really the tool you need for such a job. When finished, I pushed the button to upload to youtube and half an hour later:

This year we stayed in Stuben am Arlberg in Austria. They say that stuben is the capital of off piste skiing, but this year we stayed on the slopes because the danger of snowavalanches was very real.

I only noticed an annoying bug. Although the star wars end trailer is in imovie:

the end of the movie on Youtube is just the black background with white stars but without the moving end credits. Annoying bug !

How to deal with search crawlers for your mobile site

2010-02-01T17:51:00.006+01:00

So you've setup your mobile site (for example hosted at http://m.yoursite.com) derived from a desktop version (for example hosted at http://www.yoursite.com).Typically, you're using a Content Management System and by providing adapted templates for your mobile items, you can provide a mobile version of your site. The question is now how to deal with robots that crawl the web to build a search index. The danger exists that the robots detect duplicate content because the mobile version from a content item might contain the same text and pictures but wrapped on another template. I think the following steps should be taken:

Only allow the mobile web crawlers with the following robot.txt in the root of the mobile site (for example http://m.yoursite.com) by allowing bots with user agent "Googlebot-Mobile" or "YahooSeeker/M1A1-R2D2" and to disallow all others:
User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile Disallow: User-agent: YahooSeeker/M1A1-R2D2 Disallow: User-agent: * Disallow: /
Also, disallow mobile crawlers to your desktop version of your site by adding the following robot.txt in the root of your site (for example http://www.yoursite.com/robot.txt ):
User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile Disallow: / User-agent: YahooSeeker/M1A1-R2D2 Disallow: / User-agent: * Disallow:
With the first robot.txt in the mobile root and the second one (here above) in the root of your desktop site, your mobile site items should only appear when people search with a mobile search engine (for example by using http://m.google.com ) but not when searching with the desktop version (for example http://www.google.com ).

As far as I know, the MSNbot that crawls for the Microsoft Bing index together does not have a bot version that crawls strickly for the mobile Bing search engine at http://m.bing.com.

Add your mobile site to Google : http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40348 , Bing http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx, Yahoo (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mobilesubmit) and other relevant mobile indexes

Create a mobile sitesmap : http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34648&cbid=-1rt6r3us7wrvl&src=cb&lev=answer

Let me know I've you have anything to add to this strategy in the comments.

Set all links target to _blank on a XHTML 1.0 Strict using jquery

2009-08-02T13:39:00.008+02:00

As explained here, opening links in a new window is no longer possible via target=_blank in XHTML 1.0 strict. This code is a workaround using Javascript:


function externalLinks() { 
 if (!document.getElementsByTagName) return; 
 var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a"); 
 for (var i=0; i<anchors.length; i++) { 
   var anchor = anchors[i]; 
   if (anchor.getAttribute("href") && 
       anchor.getAttribute("rel") == "external") 
     anchor.target = "_blank"; 
 } 
} 
window.onload = externalLinks;

A link with attribute rel set to external will open in a new window:


<a rel="external" href="http://castfortwo.blogpspot.com/">cast42</a>

On the Friendfeed realtime embed code, I saw they use jquery to do the job:


<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.js">
<script type="text/javascript"> 
$("body").mousedown(function(e) {
for (var target = e.target; target; target = target.parentNode) {
  if (target.tagName == "A") {
    if ((document.location.href.split("#")[0] + "#") == target.href) {
      return;
    }
    target.target = "_blank";
    return;
    }
}
});
</script>

The advantage is that all links will open in a new window, except if the refere to an anchor in the page. Hence there's no need to add the attribute rel to each anchor.

Urbain Airship: a webhook based service for Iphone 3.0 Push Notification

2009-07-28T10:53:00.005+02:00

This morning I discovered a new recipe on Google App Engine Cookbook to send out Iphone 3.0 Push notifications via Google App Engine. In fact, the recipe makes use of a service called Urban Airship. They provide a free service that allows to send upto 5000 Push notifications a month. For larger volumes, the price seems reasonable. Image now that all content producers become pubsubhubbub (the pseudo realtime webhook based enabled publish/subscribe protocol proposed by two Googlers) enabled and maybe we scratch the surface of the future internet architecture that will drive the realtime web. Who knows?

Pubsubhubbub: a webhook based publish/subscribe

2009-07-20T10:27:00.005+02:00

On Friday 9 July 2009, Google engineers Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin showed a demo of a new realtime protocol called pubsubhubbub. This new technology could lead to a more reactive, pseudo realtime web. I my humble opinion, this might be much bigger news from Google then the announcement of Chrome OS. Of course, only the latter made a big splash in the mainstream news.

The issue of messaging is a topic addressed already many times in the course of computer science. Common wisdom is that the publish-subscribe pattern is a sound solution to this. The problem is that due to all kinds of practicalities it often regresses into a polling solution. Even with pubhubsubbub, the website that want to display realtime updates has to poll the hub to check if an update has happened. So there's still a nut to crack! In the example of a subscriber , a Javascript polls the hub to check for an update.

If anybody would know an implementation of the client that does not poll, please let me know.

In the demo at Techcrunch, updates made by blogger appeared almost realtime in google reader. Currenlty, not all blogger accounts support pubsubhubbub.

To be ready when your blogger account is updated, do not forget to add your feed to Feedburner and to activate Pingshot:

A pubsubhubbub plugin for wordpress exists and the Drupal community is probably already working on it. Check the overview of publisher code for clients on the pubsubhubbub project page.

Pushed on publish post on monday 20 Juli 2009, at 10:41. Updated at 11u17

Spore Galactic Adventure Released in Europe, today 23 June 2009

2009-06-23T20:27:00.003+02:00

This afternoon i received a SMS that my preordered expention kit, called Galactic Adventures for the EA Spore game, was available. I picked it up for 30 euros and installed it. Everything went smooth.

After a succesfull installation, we clicked on the Spore icon in the dock of the mac and prepared for the new fun....that we didn't find. Looking up the documentation and calling the EA helpdesk brought no prevail. I tried a second install. Nothing helped. Until I went looking in the installation directory Spore in the Applications directory. I saw that a new executable was there called "Spore Ruimteavonturen" (dutch for Spore Galactic Adventures). Dubbel click this new executable and of we go:

links to JPEG images in ATOM feed entries must be typed image/jpeg

2009-05-02T17:35:00.004+02:00

After some debugging, I found a nasty bug in an ATOM feed that validated by the W3C validator service. I was trying to parse image url's out of an ATOM feed. ATOM 1.0 feeds are defined by the RFC 4287. In paragraph "4.2.7.3. The "type" Attribute" it is defined that the type must conform to the syntax of a MIME media type. The MIME media type is in turn defined by RFC 4288. Media type registrations are listed by the IANA at: http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/
If we look up the media subtypes of image/ we find that JPEG images have MIME type image/jpeg . The feed I was parsing had images with MIME type image/jpg instead of image/jpeg as it should have been. Apparently the W3C validator does not validate the type of links. I reported the bug/unconformence. Hopely it will be fixed soon.
A handy list with all MIME types to be used as reference is also provided by w3cschools.

First experiment with Imovie '09

2009-03-17T09:55:00.003+01:00

This weekend I bought Ilife '09 for the mac. The software packet has four components : Iphoto, Imovie, Garageband and Iweb. So I played around with Imovie '09 and made a small project with my ski trip movies I shot with an Panasonic DMC-FS3. The movies are 640x480 and come in a .mov file container. The video tracks are encoded in Photo Jpeg and the audio tracks are in 8-bit unsigned mono 8KHz. The resulting movie project is uploaded to Youtube by Imovie's built in share function. Here's the result:

The soundtrack is from World of Goo. The track is "Brave Adventure" by Kyle Gabler.

I really enjoyed using Imovie'09 for this task. I works fast and intuitive. It proves that the choice to abandon the timeline is really working out for consumer oriented movie editing. Time will tell if this will also hold for professional editing. Imovie'09 has an export to Final Cut Pro (Apple professional editing program). Hence an escaped path is on board.

Back from ski trip

2009-03-05T13:16:00.004+01:00

Back from a skitrip in Nassfeld, Austria in Hotel Berghof with the Sporty organisation. Enjoyed good things in life.

Sync Nokia 6124 Classic contacts with Google Sync via SyncML

2009-02-15T12:26:00.008+01:00

I own a Nokia 6124 Classic since a few months. It's the entry model employees get from my employer. Since I work on mac, I could not sync the contacts because there is no free Isync plugin available yet. Recently, Google Sync was announced. It worked very good to sync my contactc on my Iphone with my Google contacts. I use Google Contact as my main database. Hence, I begun to wonder if I could sync my Nokia using Google Sync. Based upon the instructions from Google for another type of Nokia phone, I was able to derive a working setup. Here are the instructions:

From the main menu, go to the "Settings" folder and select "Connectivity".
From the Sync screen, select "Options"->"New sync profile" and enter the following:
Sync profile name: Google Sync
Select "Applications" then "Contacts"
Include in sync: Yes
Remote database: contacts
Synchronisation type: Both Ways
Select "Back" then "Back" then "Connection settings"
Server version: 1.2
Server ID: Google
Data bearer: Internet
Access point: Always ask
Host address: https://m.google.com/syncml
Port: 80
Username: username@gmail.com (fill in your own username)
Password: the password of your Google Account
Allow sync requests: Yes
Accept all sync requests: No
Network authentication: No
Select "Back", "Back" and then "Exit" to save the settings
You have now finished the setup

To perform the sync operation, take the following steps:

From the main Settings menu, select "Connectivity".
From the Connectivity menu, select "Sync"'
Highlight your Google Sync Profile.
Select "Options" and click "Synchronise".
Select your access point: Px Live (depends on your configuration)
That's it. Your 6124 Classic will now connect and sync its phonebook with your Google Contacts. The contacts on your phone will appear in your google contacts and all your Google contact are stored into your phone. If you don't want this, change the value for the synchronization type set in step 7 of the setup

The synchronisation goes via Internet over the air (OTA). The next I would like to find out if i could pair the phone to my mac via Bluetooth and use the internet connection of my mac to do the synchronisation. I don't now if that possible. On the other hand, the synchronisation of my 800 contacts or so only took a few minutes, so I don't know its worth the hassle.

Login failed for EA Spore : solution on Mac OSX

2009-01-04T13:47:00.005+01:00

I bought the galactic version of Spore when it was released in Europe on 5 september 2008. Since then, me and my two kids of 8 and 10 years old, enjoyed playing it offline. Due to some strange reason, I could not get Spore online. The error messages were different over time but last month I got a message something was wrong with privileges. I tried to change my password but that did not help. Finally, I found "What do I do if I get the error: 'Login failed: You do not have the proper spore.com privileges'?" on the support site of EA. Unfortunately, the explanation is windows only. But after some sniffing around I found the login.prop file on OSX :
You can find the file as follows:

Go to your home directory
Double click on Library
Double click on Preferences
Double click on SPORE Preferences
Double click on p_drive
Double click on User
Double click on Application Data
Double click on Spore
Double click on Preferences
In this folder there will be a file login.prop, right click and delete this file and try Spore once again.

After the login.prop file was deleted, Spore asked for a new email/password/nickname combination (or you can login with you EA account). You can find our Spore creatures under the name losesi.

Happy sporing

Canon EOS 5D Mark II : a game changer

2008-12-07T10:23:00.005+01:00

Recently, Canon made available a new picture camera that might become a game changer. A good preview, based on a preproduction sample, is made by dpreview. The reason that this camera generates high expectations is twofold : a 35mm (full frame) sensor and the new Digic 4 processor. The large sensor means wide angle shots and excellent low light performance. The new digic 4 processor means that now you can record video from that excellent sensor with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels (Full HD) at 30 frames per second. Hence, we might see a crossover happening from the photo camera business to the video camera's. The first results are indeed stunning. First, there's a professional made movie called "Reverie". A second movie, made with much lower budget, still captures my imagination:

Tokyo Reality (Canon 5D MarkII) from utsuru on Vimeo.

The resulting movie files are Quicktime Movies encoded using MPEG-4 AVC and uncompressed PCM sound (a total of 38.6 Megabits/second).

I asked Eirik Solheim (Project manager, development department
at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK)), who already has an Canon Eos 5D Mark II two questions:

How is the process of getting the video into Final Cut Pro. Is there decoding/transcoding going on. If yes, does that take time ?
Answer: You don’t have to transcode, but at this point you would probably end up transcoding: the files are standard H264 and can be edited directly in Final Cut. But the problem is that you need very powerful hardware to edit full HD H264 in Final Cut. If you want to edit on a laptop you have to transcode to Apple Intermediate or another less compressed format.

Video quality is amazing judging the videos that already circulating in the net. But how about audio ? How does the build-in microphone performs and what do you get if you connect an external passive microphone. This issue will determine if external audio recording is still necessary or not.
Answer: With the tests we have done the audio is OK, but not good. Using the internal mic on the camera has serious limitations of course. Picking up the sound of all operations you do on the camera and the image stabilizer motor if you use an IS lens. With an external mic it is better, but still a bit noisy.
For professional productions you would be better off recording audio with a separate device. For interviews and simple background audio you could do with the built in audio and preferably with an external mic.

To test how my macbook pro with a 2.33 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo processor would be able to handle the HD files, I downloaded the full HD version of "Tokyo Reality" via bittorrent. Playback on the macbook pro was unfortunately not smooth. On an Imac, playback was perfect. Hence, I guess my macbook pro will not be powerfull enough for working with Full HD files coming from the Canon 5D. Maybe a new technology, called OpenCl (Open Computing Language), will solve this issue. OpenCl makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing. OpenCl is a new powerful Snow Leopard technology.

Wifi on steriods in the USA

2008-11-05T10:22:00.009+01:00

While all news is currently alloted to the presidential campaign and the election of Barack Obama, on Tuesday 4 November another important vote was casted. The American regulator of the airwaves, FCC (Federal Communications Commission), voted 5-0 for the use of the white spaces between the television channels. Current wifi equipment makes use of the 2,4 GHz band (or the 5GHz band for more modern equipment supporting 802.11a/n, for example Apple Airport Basestation Extreme). The new vote of the FCC means that new wifi equipment will be able to use the unused white space between the channels alloted to TV. Why is this important ? The reason is that the TV spectrum has better characteristics for in home use. The UHF band, used for televison distribution, spans from 300MHz upto 3GHz. Lower frequencies have larger wavelength. Therefore they propagate better trough walls and other obstacles typically encountered in urban environments. It boils down that using the white space frequencies will lower the cost for providing ubiquitous wireless networks. Hopefully we will see more wide area wifi networks that provide free or cheap internet access in the near future.

More info:

A vote for broadband in the "white spaces", Official Google Blog

Open skies for white space broadband as FCC gives thumbs up, Ars technica

Google’s Election-Day Victory: FCC Approves Unlicensed Use Of “White Spaces” Spectrum, Techcrunch

Simply Explained, Cartoon by Geek and Poke

FCC okays white space spectrum for wireless service, Telecom Magazine (thx, Kris for the tip)

On the workfloor

2008-10-10T15:39:00.002+02:00

My collegue is wearing this T-shirt this week.

Iphone friendly version of this blog cast42

2008-09-28T19:11:00.003+02:00

Apple's Iphone and Ipod Touch can render this blog using mobile Safari out of the box. Unfortunatly, this might not really what you want. Webservice DoYouFeed.com allows for for an Iphone friendly rendering. Fill in the feed address of your blog, choose a theme and click. Et voila, a link to an iphone optimized rendering appears. You can see the result for this blog at http://tinyurl.com/4cgap6 . It looks like this :