OSNews

Forget the 5D and the 7D. This is the new hot shit in the market: Canon’s Rebel T2i (aka 550D).

For $800, you will be able to get a great camera to shoot your masterpiece. You have no excuse anymore to not shoot a short movie, or a music video to help out your local rock bands.

The T2i supports all the frame rates that the 7D does, at similar bitrates. It has full manual control, and an audio jack. No new video-focused abilities are present in the cam compared to the 7D, however, it’s a camera that’s half the price. The still picture side of it is not as powerful as the 7D, but when it comes to video, it’s up to par with it (sample). It’s also a smaller/lighter camera than than the 7D, using SDHC instead of CF.

Add in the mix a large-aperture prime, a wide-angle, and a zoom lens, and you’ll be in business. My [photographer] husband would suggest instead three prime lenses: one wide, one normal, one long (a good combo is 24-35-50mm). You should be able to buy the camera and three lenses of your choice for $1500 overall, which is a great price if you think that a high-end Canon AVCHD camcorder, or the 7D body alone, costs as much. Honestly, I think the Scarlet is in a bit more market trouble right now — even if it’s a much better camera. “Good enough” is what sells more actually. I see plain camcorders to also be in real trouble now. Except wedding photographers and travelers, the camcorder market will down-size significantly in the next few years.

Canon also announced their new digicam line today, which actually let me down. Their SX200 IS replacement digicam, the SX210 IS, is now 14 MP — at the same sensor size. The SX200 IS has low light problems, so stuffing more pixels in it will make things even worse. They added “zooming while recording” and a “stereo mic” as new abilities for the movie mode. Personally, I find these useless as a filmmaker. Actors only have one mouth, and zooming while recording is as cheesy as 70’s B-movies were. I would have preferred to see a 10 MP sensor instead, and the ability to also record at 24 fps in addition to 30 fps. That would have been more useful to the kinds of video I shoot (i.e. not random family videos).

So as far as P&S HD video digicams go, the SD780 IS remains the best bang for the buck for $180. Except of manual focus, it still has all the video features that the SX-series have.

• "Spices: the internet of the ancient world!" - Planet Money Podcast. Great storytelling about the ancient spice trade and how information about where certain spices came from eventually leaked out and popped the spice trading bubble/monopoly.
• Enterprise software is entirely bereft of soul. Reading this reminded me of antifeatures and the competitive advantages of open source software.
• Emulating Empathy. Nice summary of how interacting with users of software (customers) on a non-technical issues, or over high-level requirements, provokes creativity. Also, that good customer communication is a *skill* not an innate talent - meaning it can be taught and learned. :)
• Interaxon. Other than the cute name, this is a fascinating company and concept based in Vancouver, BC. Thought controlled computing! Looking forward to seeing what comes out of their "Bright Ideas" exhibit during the Winter Olympics.

Video for Everybody?the ugly kludge that it is?has seen more success than anything else I?ve made. The whole spat over Flash and the iPad really raised awareness of the need to get video out of Flash and into HTML5 where possible. Everybody has already said it better than I could.

What I have noticed is that VfE has taken on its own kind of momentum. I?m seeing anything up to 50 tweets a day mentioning it, and almost every blog post and news article discussing Flash and the iPad includes someone posting a link in the comments, if the article itself is not already linking to it.

Anyway, getting to the point, VfE is a fall-back mechanism and as such as time goes by and browsers fall out of use, it doesn?t have to fall back so far any more and we can drop fall-backs?Video for Everybody is a vanishing mediator. It exists to bridge the gap between the disparity of Flash and HTML5 and will fade away as legacy browsers are no longer needed.

Personally, I?m ready to kill VfE now with the next version, but I think in reality it still needs another two years for it to reach developers everywhere and for HTML5 video (without requiring JavaScript sniffing) goes mainstream?and it will, because Flash will never reach as many and as diverse as platforms as we will have in many years time when?as it is in Japan right now?more people browse from mobile devices than desktop browsers.

VfE is just an empty template that creative developers who ?get it? can take and adapt to something more polished and practical for the mainstream. SublimeVideo is not based on VfE but does demonstrate what?s possible with JavaScript controls and that other than legacy browsers Flash is not required for playing videos any more. Sublime makes the huge mistake of not falling back gracefully (no video download links), yet, and not being free for commercial use.

VfE needs something that I am not able to provide it: a clever developer who can wrap VfE up in a developer friendly and especially, consumer friendly interface with beautiful, JavaScript-added (i.e. hidden if JS disabled) controls that are mirrored in the Flash player (I can?t write Flash software). UniversVideo kind of does this, but it needs to be more like SublimeVideo, use minimal JS and provide control compatibility between HTML5, QuickTime and Flash.

I wrote VfE for two reasons. The first was developers were (and still are) doing HTML5 video wrong?no fallback message / download-links, non-free, lots of bad examples of JS-only insertion and generally botched code and a complete lack of testing. It?s infuriating to think that so many developers?especially Mozilla, the very people who should ?get it? the most?don?t seem to ?get it?; that <video> is no more sophisticated than <img> (which supports multiple ?codecs?) and should never require any JS to insert into the page. This is simple. You people who are so beset with avoiding change are making this complicated?this is nothing like the days where every user had to install QuickTime, Real Player and Windows Media Player to view content online. VfE was therefore invented to shock developers into doing the right thing with its stunning obviousness and simplicity (No JavaScript, imagine that! :|).

The second reason I wrote VfE was that because I don?t have Flash installed I discovered just how far developers have slipped into a comfort zone where nobody does accessible fall-backs of any kind, for anything.

Adobe?s ?open? government website. Image courtesy of Ars Technica

It?s shocking to think that so many websites already have H.264 video files that they want to show you, yet insist on wrapping it in a crashy, unreliable and slow Flash shell without any kind of fallback, not least allowing users to actually download the video in question so that?I don?t know?they can view it. This is absolute madness and indicative of a closed web lead by a company that blinds developers into being locked into a single-vendor solution.

And this maddening scenario (being needlessly locked out of the videos I want to watch all for the lack of THIS insanely difficult bit of code to grasp: ?<video src="abc.mp4" />?) is still happening.

I include this e-mail I sent here, in the hopes that it helps get things moving.

The last thing to note is that I am well aware of the issues with H.264 patents and costs (now detrimentally delayed until 2016), and others have called me out for being a hypocrite when it comes to me proselytising an open web when I?m supporting the H.264 patent trap with VfE. Video for Everybody was not written for me. It?s not something I will use on my own website for videos, I don?t have the bandwidth anyway (BTW, does anybody know a site where I can upload and hotlink OGG files?). Video for Everybody was written so that website owners who are already using H.264 (inside Flash) can let me see their content. They already made the decision to use H.264, I haven?t changed that one bit, I?ve merely offered them some different HTML to show videos. I?m trying to be pragmatic because I know the mainstream web will simply not hold to my ideals of HTML purism and creating a solution that nobody will use is useless.

The H.264 thing will sort itself out in due time, Video for Everybody makes no difference to that as all it does is swap one H.264 decoder (Flash) for another, as well as guiding users to begin to provide OGG as well. Just as Video for Everybody is a vanishing mediator between Flash and HTML5, so it is a vanishing mediator between H.264 and OGG. Patience.

Official music video for “Solomon”, by the San Francisco rock band As A People. You can download the song for free at the band’s site, or the HD video at Vimeo.

I had immense fun shooting this video, the band was really cool, and the song rocks. I consider it the most complex, and best video work of mine so far. I learned a few new things about the process, and I believe that the next step for me as a videographer is rigorous story-boarding, and having a grander plan. It’s the only way to avoid weak spots of continuity, like the ones found on the first 30 seconds of the video.

I shot the video with a Canon 5D Mark II, at 30 fps, and then slowed it down at 24 fps. I can’t wait for Canon to at last release the 24p firmware, it’s a long time waiting. It was my first major video with the 5D. Overall shooting time was 3 hours.

On location tools: a tripod, and a shoulder rest. A single Canon 50mm f1.4 lens was used. Software tools used were Sony Vegas Pro, Cineform, Magic Bullet (tools that didn?t always want to co-operate very well, so editing took quite some time: crashing, and bugs).

Many thanks to my beloved husband, Jean-Baptiste, for his support and feedback. I wouldn’t be able to do jack without him.

So when will PostgreSQL version 9.0 come out? I decided to "run the numbers" and take a look at how the Postgres project has done historically. Here's a quick graph showing the approximate number of days each major release since version 6.0 took:

Some interesting things can be seen here: there is a rough correlation between the complexity of a new release and the time it takes, major releases take longer, and the trend is gradually towards more days per release. Overall the project is doing great, releasing on average every 288 days since version 6. If we only look at version 7 and onwards, the releases are on average 367 days apart. If we look at *just* version 7, the average is 324 days. If we look at *just* version 8, the average is 410. Since the last major version that came out was on July 1, 2009, the numbers predict 9.0 will be released on July 3, 2010, based on the version 7 and 8 averages, and on August 15, 2010, based on just the version 8 averages. However, this upcoming version has two very major features, streaming replication (SR) and hot standby (HS). How those will affect the release schedule remains to be seen, but I suspect the 9.0 to 9.1 window will be short indeed.

As a recap, the Postgres project only bumps the first part of the version number for major changes (Although many, myself included, would argue that 7.4 was such a major jump it should have been called 8.0). The second number occurs anytime a "new release" happens, and means new features and enhancements. The final number, the revision, is only incremented for security and bug fixes, and is almost always a 100% binary compatible drop in for the previous revision in the branch. (What's the average (mean) days between revisions? 84 days since version 6, and 88 days since version 7. The medians are 84 and 87 respectively.)

How busy were those periods? Here's the number of commits per release period. Note that I said release period, not release, as commits are still being made to old branches, although this is a very small minority of the commits, so I did not bother to break it down at that level.

There is a strong correlation with the previous chart. Of note is version 8.1, which had few commits and was released relatively quickly. Also note that version 8.0 is still winning as far as the sheer number of commits, most likely due to the fact that native Windows support was added in that version.

Some other items of interest from the data:

• There have been roughly 140,000 commits from version 6.0 to 8.4.2.
• There have been 32 CVS committers since the start of the project (and of course, many hundreds of others whose work was funnelled through those committers)
• The mean number of commits per person is 4383, but the distribution is very skewed: Bruce, Peter, and Tom account for 80% of all commits, with the mean between them of 37,000 commits.
• Commits changed about 40 lines on average.

Alright, two final charts: commits per time periods. I'll let the data speak for itself this time. Stay tuned for future blog posts exploring this data further!

I heard a lot of people wondering: “Why doesn’t the radio play less known artists? There are some amazing songs out there that are lesser known and need to be heard. Commercial/ClearChannel radio sucks.”

However, it’s not the radio that sucks. It’s the listeners.

Consider the following: The music director at San Francisco’s Live 105 (owned by CBS) is Aaron Axelsen (who I’m a fan of). Aaron decides what’s get played by the DJs during the day, but he also has a show of his own on the station: Soundcheck, every Sunday night. In it, he plays the kind of music we are longing to listen to during daytime: From Manchester Orchestra, to The Temper Trap, to Surfer Blood, to many local Bay Area bands that caught his ear (scroll down for his latest playlist).

However, the rest of the daytime programming is terrible: the same 20-30 hit songs are playing on a rotation. How many times it happened to me already: driving for sushi lunch, Phoenix’s “1901″ would be playing on our car’s radio. Coming out of lunch, and Phoenix’s “1901″ would be playing AGAIN. The rotation is so fucking short that it’s not even funny.

Now, it’s easy to put the blame on Aaron or his corporate overlords, but it’s not really their fault. They are just doing what makes sense for their business. And what makes sense is to keep the listeners from switching channels.

You see, the vast majority of the radio listeners don’t listen to music. They hear music instead. There’s a difference. They put the kids on the SUV, and drive them to school, and turn on the radio in the meantime. Or, they’re stuck in traffic, pissed off, and need to listen to “easy” music to pass the time. Or, they’re sitting on their sofa, reading a magazine, and have the radio ON as a background.

Very few people actually drive somewhere in order to turn on the radio and listen to music. Or sit on their sofa, closing their eyes, and listen to just music. Normal people instead, are so busy with their lives, their problems, the quick pace of this civilization, that simply don’t have the time to discover new music. Listening to unknown kind of melodies, or new kinds of sub-genres altogether, takes them out of their comfort zone. Listening to something like Dan Deacon instead of Lady Gaga, for example, while the kids shout at each other at the back of the car, makes it difficult to level your head. Not only you have your problems, but you have this new ‘annoying’ music playing instead of the music (or kind of music) you already know so well.

Basically, commercial radio works as a kind of a depressant for the masses. At first, it feels like music is exactly the opposite: an excitement that is, but in reality, in the large scheme of things, as far as FM radio is concerned, it’s nothing but one of the ways that helps you kept in check. No, this is not a conspiracy theory, it’s just how things work. Listeners want it that way too.

And that’s the reason why you’ll never be able to hear Fever Ray, Antlers, or Local Natives on commercial radio, during daytime, at least in the US. Unless indie bands hit it big on their own, their music will play only late at night, or at specialized radio stations like college radios, KEXP, and Indie 103.1.

So stop hating the radio stations for doing their job. Either hate the system, or the listeners, or don’t hate anyone, and listen to your favorite music in your own accord. But don’t expect the population to follow too. They won’t. They have mortgages to think about rather than HEALTH’s awesome off-beat noise.

I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at LinuxConf.AU this year in Wellington, NZ. Linux Conf.AU is an institution whose friendliness and focus on the practical business of creating and sustaining open source projects was truly inspirational.

My talk this year was "A Survey of Open Source Databases", where I actually created a survey and asked over 35 open source database projects to respond. I have received about 15 responses so far, and also did my own research on the over 50 projects I identified. I created a place-holder site for my research at: ossdbsurvey.org. I'm hoping to revise the survey (make it shorter!!) and get more projects to provide information.

Ultimately, I'd like the site to be a central location for finding information and comparing different projects. Performance of each is a huge issue, and there are a lot of individuals constructing good (and bad) systems for comparing. I don't think I want to dive into that pool, yet. But I would like to start collecting the work others have done in a central place. Right now it is really far too difficult to find all of this information.

Part of the talk was also a foray into the dangerous world of classification. I tried to put together basic categories, based on conversations with individual developers and some fine-tuning with Josh Berkus. Josh gave a short overview of database models during "Relational vs Non-relational" in the Data Storage mini-conf, and we collaborated some on category definition. I also saw Devdas Bhagat give a use case talk on using Postgres, yet again confirming how wonderful transactional DDL is for developers. I also gave a lightning talk (WITHOUT SLIDES!) on Bucardo at the tail end of the Data Storage mini-conf.

Josh Berkus, during "PostgreSQL Development Today", announced to the world that the new version of Postgres would be version 9.0! And he did a live demonstration of streaming replication and hot standby. The audience seemed pleased.

I was delighted to see representatives from the Postgres community on the main stage of the conference three times during LCA!

And finally, I had the pleasure of participating in the Friday keynote lightning talks. I kicked things off by telling the story of the elections in Ondo State, Nigeria, in 5 minutes. I saw that one of the IT people I met while in Akure was now helping Osun state investigate and correct election fraud in January. So glad to see that their good work continues!

The funniest Mass Effect 2 moments. Spoiler alert, obviously.

Tali and Garrus about the good ol’ times.

And the most epic of wins, Joker and EDI during the Collector attack on the Normandy.

The funniest Mass Effect 2 moments. Spoiler alert, obviously.

Tali and Garrus about the good ol’ times.

And the most epic of wins, Joker and EDI during the Collector attack on the Normandy.

I shot the following interview with the Bay Area band Geographer last Sunday, for The OWL Mag. One of the tracks heard on the video below is unreleased as of yet. I shot it using the Canon HV20, since I had to save the battery of my Canon 5D MkII for the As A People music video that I shot an hour later after this interview. It was a busy Sunday. But I loved it.

In response to this comment on osnews. Note that I am not saying that jail breaking is piracy, certainly not, but that it creates the same result. Piracy is why Photoshop has no competition. Piracy is why Korea and China have 99% IE6 usage. Jail-breaking will be why Apple will never change their App Store policies.

Hacking the iPad will not create an open, viable alternative hardware and software platform.

A common task that comes up in PostgreSQL is the need to dump/edit a specific function. While ideally, you're using DDL files and version control (hello, git!) to manage your schema, you don't always have the luxury of working in such a controlled environment. Recent versions of psql have the ef command to edit a function from within your favorite editor, but this is available from version 8.4 onward only.

An alternate approach is to use the following invocation:

  pg_dump -Fc -s | pg_restore -P 'funcname(args)'

The -s flag is the short form of --schema-only; i.e., we don't care about wasting time/space with the data. -P tells pg_restore to extract the function with the following signature.

As always, there are some caveats: the function name must be spelled out explicitly using the full types as they occur in the dump's custom format (i.e., you must use 'foo_func(integer)' instead of 'foo_func(int)'). You can always see a list of all of the available functions by using the command:

  pg_dump -Fc -s | pg_restore -l | grep FUNCTION

Okay,
blog time.

I pride myself on the quality of my website and that instigates a certain amount of fussiness, but I also recognise that this is my website and I can do with it as I please. I always planned for it to be a personal website and to write more personally, rather than so formally. I blog for myself, not for some ?readership? that must be appeased. The more my RSS feed turns away people expecting a neatly formatted and consistent stream of coding articles, the better.

Since the new year I have been in a blind stupor, as if I've remained trapped in 2009, bumbling through this first month like one giant melodramatic, comic trip. Secular work has been immensely busy (I had to work seven days on one week), and this has left me with just fleeting moments of thoughts that provide all the time to think about what I should be doing in my personal life, but no time to do anything about it. Then I had a week off, in which I was harassed innocently by the mobile phone so often my nerves were strung as tight as a piano?s strings and I spent the time doing as little as possible and feeling no benefit.

I was asked, what seems a long time ago now, what it is I valued. An innocent enough question. It took me about a month to answer it. It?s easy enough to come out with a list of things you like the value of. ?I value ice cream?, one can say, and ?I value my music collection? and so forth, but these are no more values than farting is a right. That is confusing values, and value. A value is intrinsically valueless, yet very valuable to have. I went through a list of things that I could value, but dismissed them as being answers for the sake of answering?like a public persona that says what others want to hear. That is not me.

I came to the conclusion that the only thing that I value is my own opinion. Depressing as it sounds, it?s inescapably true. It may make a good designer, but it does not make a good person. Almost everything else around me could be changed and it would not change me. Do I value my friends? Not that my actions seem to show. I have no friends offline, or it could be said that I know many acquaintances that would count me as a friend, but that I am at a loss to find the times when I have nurtured a strong friendship (perhaps I cannot spot the obvious). I am not rude, nor offensive, nor disrespectful; I'm well known for being the opposite. I actively avoid socialising because I have a phobia of it, receiving a lot of attention leaves me extremely depressed and feeling unwell. So, as far as actions speak, I am happy enough to let friendships fade away because I cannot bring myself to stay in touch.

Online, the situation is different, though essentially the same. How well can I say I know somebody, when for the majority, they exist only as text that has appeared on my screen? It feels like being in a perpetual Turing test?no offense meant. There?s only one person I think I can count as true blue online friend who I would miss immeasurably. The people I talk to online regularly certainly have come and gone over the years, so neither can I say that this represents a value I hold.

That leaves an over apologetic, self righteous, highly talented (but misguided) manic-depressive sap; who?s extremely pleasant to know. That is why I have been in this stupor, I should be changing, but I'm lagging like an AOL connection.

Now I don?t have any proper way to end this blog post, in that expected formal way. Only realisations and pressures. But then, I'm not blogging for you? I'm blogging for me.

Prompted by Eugenia’s post about her iTunes library, I decided to post a glimpse of my own library. My library is still awaiting a massive import of my CDs, which will add several thousand songs.  Here are the vitals:

5406 tracks, 29.18 GB on disk, 17 days

Only 2699 have something in the “play count” field.   I’ve noticed that for whatever reason, it doesn’t register a play count unless you finish the song. Also, many of these were in an iTunes library on a previous PC. This library actually goes back until about 2000, was first in iTunes on Windows in approximately 2003, and was first moved to an iBook in 2005, and was finally rebuilt on my second Mac, a MacBook Pro in 1996.  Since then, it’s been ported to two different iMacs.)

Most played tracks:

1. ?Shankhill Butchers? by The Decemberists (104)
2. ?Tennessee Jed? by The Grateful Dead (104)
3. ?Leslie Anne Levine? by The Decemberists (101)
4. ?Terrapin Station? by The Grateful Dead (100)
5. ?Circle? by Portal (99)

Most tracks by the same artist:
1. Phish (442)
2. The Decemberists (112)
3. DMB (110)
4. The Beatles (71)
5. Pearl Jam (68)
6. The Pat McGee Band (61)
7. Guns N Roses (51)
8. The Grateful Dead (48)

Oldest track added in iTunes library: 3059 tracks added on 4/11/06
Newest track added: ?Alaska? by Phish: 1/2/2010

Shortest track: ?Wilkins Hyundai and Suburu? by Peter Griffin: 7 seconds
Longest track: ?35 Minute Jam? by Iron Maiden: 35:33 minutes

Lowest Bitrate: ?It’s Gary Shandling’s Show? 19 kbps (mp3)
Highest Bitrate: Several self-ripped WAV files at 1411 kbps (wav)