You might have heard that the latest fashion is brain doping. In a world where the most intelligent or best performing employees get the most benefits, it appears to be “wise” for some people to dope themselves to equally compete in the workplace. The reason this is not illegal (yet), it’s because these pills are prescription medication and there are no conclusive studies (yet) if they are truly harmful or not.

I am personally a purist when it comes to medicating oneself, so I dislike drugs in general. However, I can understand people wanting to perform better. That’s how our competitive society is built. So I can’t hold this against them, although I am concerned that doping the brain is the same as over-clocking your CPU. Eventually, it will crash, except if your brain is actually built by mother nature in a way that can handle this pressure.

However, I gotta say that it doesn’t make sense to dope humans forever. Instead, allow some gene manipulation so the next generations are by default more intelligent than us. When we have the technology for something like this, of course.

Happy holidays everyone!

We just came back from vacations in Reno, NV. I shot 25 minutes of video there, that translated to 2 minutes of a presentable video clip. I hate casinos btw, but hey, they make nice flashy videos. HD version here.

We are currently in Reno,NV and i only got with me the nokia n800 to use with the hotel’s wifi service. This blog post message is written with the n800 too, painfully slowly. So, while using the file manager, it automatically picked up smb connections from other users in the hotel. It didn’t ask me if i wanted to search for computers in the network, it just did it. There are a bunch of people with sharing on! I did not open their files but there were a lot of documents there that *obviously* belonged to the company that employs them (filenames). Such is the ignorance of some computer users. And this ignorance can put honest users into legal trouble, just because their device automatically connects to network shares. I hope nokia is listening and adds a checkbox preference for that feature or only search if someone hits the ‘shared’ virtual folder – the same way mac and win do it.

And yes, even if these folders are shared, connecting to them it’s still considered ‘computer intrusion’ according to the law, because obviously this was not intended by these clueless users.

Cogratulations to my little brother and his wife in Greece for becoming parents of their first child, a 3.3kg daughter. My parents are grandparents for the first time, and very happy too. This was the first time i wish the iphone had mms support so my brother could send me a pic of the baby right away.

* I put together a Christmas tree last night (not my style to do that stuff you see). It went all well, except that at the end I found out that half of the lights were burned off and wouldn’t light up. Bummer.

* I dreamt of Tiger Woods and his wife last night. I was trying to convnice him to let go of his career, “go chill man, you got enough money now…”.

* We will be going to Reno, NV for the holidays. I hope to shoot some video of snow and skiers.

* I am watching the “Lost” season 3 on Blu-Ray. Looks really good. In one of the documentaries on the discs we see a typical day for the writers. They go to work at 9:30 AM, but they also leave at 9:30 PM… Hard work.

* Speaking of Blu-Rays, it seems to have won the war. Not clearly yet, but it currently sells 2:1.

* JBQ seems to be happy at Google. He’s becoming fat.

Nokia wrote on their feature-list of their Tablet OS2008 for the N800/N810 devices:

Supported video formats: 3GP, AVI, H.263, H.264, MP4, ASF, WMV, MPEG-1, MPEG-4, RV 7/8/9 (RealVideo)

I was shocked to find out that absolutely none of my h.264 files worked (.mov or .mp4), none of my DivX files worked, and none of my ASF & WMV8 files worked. I later tested mpeg2 (QVGA, always) and that didn’t work either. The only files that I managed to playback was 3GP, XViD, WMV9, Mpeg1 and *some* Mpeg4-SP files (not all). Given the fact that XViD and DivX are very similar, their decoder should have (or should have been made to) work with both MPEG4-ASP formats.

Last night, Sony had a firmware upgrade for their PS3 too. They promised DivX and WMV support. They both worked perfectly, and we also got XViD support and partial MPEG4-SP support for free too. If Sony was to add .mov container support for h.264, their solution is perfect for video viewing, beating even the AppleTV which was created for that reason alone.

I like the OS2008 upgrade for the rest of its features, but for video support, it sucks. It sucks less than OS2007, but it still sucks hard. Nokia needs to get their shit together. As a video person, that’s all I have to say.

(we watched “Transformers” last weekend with JBQ on HD-DVD)

If you start using Final Cut Studio or Pro/Express with a Mac, forget about interoperability with the PC world. There is not a single intermediate format that works out of the box between Apple’s video software products and the PC products. Apple has not made the effort to support some common intermediate .avi formats.

I put an ad on a filmmaking forum to help indie filmmakers with color grading, and we haven’t found a single lossless codec that can be read on the PC right off the bat (and that includes the PC version of Quicktime which can’t read the Apple Intermediate Codec while the Mac version can). Even the .mov uncompressed version someone sent me didn’t work (seems that the format has somewhat changed in the latest version of FCP).

There are few ways to do it: you either export in DVCProHD on the Mac and then you buy the Raylight decoder/encoder for $200 on Windows, or you buy Cineform on both platforms that costs much more than that (my personal preference would be Cineform if cost was not an issue). Another trick is to load the lossless video on the Mac version of After Effects and export again from there, but that costs another $1600 and it takes lots of time.

This would be a great opportunity for Lagarith to step in and port the codec as a Quicktime component for the Mac and part of ffmpeg on Linux. This way, the open source Lagarith codec would be truly useful and help in an area that right now is simply a no-no area. Heck, the guy who maintains that could even charge some money for it. That’s how big the need is right now.

A vectorized version of the BeOS/Haiku icons were shown last night half-way through on “Journeyman”, the scifi NBC series (series finale tomorrow, it only lasted half a season). It was nice to see the BeOS icons on a supposed next-generation holographic screen.

Also, on “Heroes” a few weeks ago, on Ando’s computer screen, there was a Japanese version of KDE. Konqueror was clearly visible in HD.

If I ever have a child (chances are that I won’t), I will never, ever, let it go to school in Greece. Why? I’ve written here why, 3 years ago. In most Greek school exams, the only thing that matters is how well you can remember a book’s words, not what you truly understand in that book. And don’t get me started how little world history Greeks get taught, and how much Greek history do in return (about 10 to 1).

So in a recent competition, Greece found to be the WORST country in Europe in terms of education. An official talked to the journalists about it and he spoke the truth: “it doesn’t matter how much information you have in your head, it only matters how you can use that information to solve problems” (loosely translated).

So obviously, the officials understand the problem. And yet, after 50 years, they haven’t done a fucking thing to fix the situation. We have supposed reforms of the Greek education every 3 years, but all change, and all stay the same.

This is one of the top 5 things that I hate about Greece. Moussaka remains the No1.