Staying in sync with the latest official patches on Ubuntu is a bad idea. After the recent samba updates I can’t connect to my Windows share anymore with Ubuntu, something I was able to do for 2 years now. Just like that, poof, a feature just gone. Very poor testing. Nothing ever works well in any OSS desktop, something is always broken one way or another.

Dell released tonight their new Studio laptop line. They are very nice looking laptops: they go up to full HD 1920×1200 at 15″ or 17″, they have an HDMI out to watch movies on the HDTV, and there is a choice for a Blu-Ray player. I swear, I would go for one, but not without the following three features that I also need:
– Keyboard backlight. On my current laptop I hit the stumbling block all the time: I mostly use the laptop when JBQ is sleeping and the lights are off or down. So I really need the backlight like the one on the Macbook Pros.
– DVD burning ability with their Blu-Ray player drive option. The current one reads CD/DVD/BD, but doesn’t burn CD/DVD. I do video, so I need the ability to burn DVDs.
– An SDHC reader slot (not plain SD). I need that to use with my Kodak HD digicam.

Give me these three hardware features (possibly for another $70) and I would buy one of these babies with closed eyes. I am afraid though that while these features will eventually come, by that time the firewire port would be redundant and it would be excluded — and I need firewire for my DV/HDV cameras.

A few more, nothing better to do this evening. I like the painted look a lot…

Original picture by Darren Hester, licensed under the CC-BY.


After extreme color grading

Original picture by shioshvili, licensed under the CC-BY-SA.


After extreme color grading

Original picture by waterwin, licensed under the CC-BY-SA.


After extreme color grading

Original picture by Petteri Sulonen, licensed under the CC-BY.


After extreme color grading

I used the following plugins on Vegas Pro: Pixelan BlurPro (preserve edges at 77%, Gaussian at 16%), a custom Magic Bullet template, and unsharpen mask at 0.350 amount with 0.230 radius. It takes 3 seconds per frame to render that look on my P4 3Ghz.

Original picture by Odalaigh, licensed under the CC-BY.


After extreme color grading (licensed under the CC-BY 2.0 as well)

* Remember Josiah Leming, the majestic homeless kid that was booted from American Idol for not having a super-voice? Well, he’s luckier than the American Idol winner. He got a Warner Bros contract (that’s possibly way less demanding than the American Idol contracts as many major labels was after him so was able to negotiate better terms), and he’s currently working on a new album. His album will probably be out before the Idol winner’s will. I wrote before about Josiah, he’s the ONLY contestant that will last. Why? Because he is an artist. He knows how to write music, not just how to sing. Remember, half of the American Idol contestants/winners who have got a contract, they have already lost that contract. The latest one who got sacked was Fantasia, very recently. And that’s because these winners are simple singers, not music artists. When their shining star is not so shining anymore, no one cares to give them new songs for free for a new album. Josiah will outlive all them in this business because he knows how to write, and what he writes is amazing. If you like Coldplay, you will love Josiah too. Check the first two demo songs on his myspace page. The first one is destined to be a big hit when it’s finished and fully recorded.

* Gnome’s Zeeshan Ali is pissed off because Ubuntu removed a release note when the guy reponsible for the feature asked for attribution. Sorry, but if I was Ubuntu I would have done the same thing. It’s simply not practical to list all the developers who worked on a particular feature, especially when the license doesn’t requires it. It would require an extra employee to put such a log together. Neither is fair to just attribute one guy and leave everyone else out. So removing the feature from the list was the logical step to do.

* I know you hate Madonna. But thing is, her tickets are sold out worldwide for her upcoming tour. Same story in Athens too. Her previous tour was the most successful of the year and the most successful for a female ever. There is a reason for this. It’s because she’s giving a real theatrical show, complete with effects and “wow” moments. She’s not a great singer, she’s only a so-so dancer, but her on stage music is really uplifting and the overall show is amazing. She is a show performer. So people go to see her droves.

* I read about depression today. Some say that it’s a physical condition and not a psychological one, but come on. I lived in the country. I have never met a person who was “depressed” in my village. Life was hard, but that was life. Over here in US you find more depressed people than you find healthy ones (and I am one of them). It’s my opinion that living in big cities, like the rats, is killing us little by little. If only JBQ was to follow me, go live on a mountain, have our potatoes, tomatoes, goats and a simple life… And be able to drive our big speakers to the max with Iron Maiden music and no one would complain… 😉

Dear AIM hacker,
please give me back my account. I did nothing bad to you, so I don’t understand why you are doing this to me. Being an open person and writing about everything in my life you probably figured out my security question. You proved your point. Now, please allow me to have my account back.

Thank you.

Look, there are reasons to have a Linux port on the cell-based PS3. Mostly research and scientific software development. But for regular folks like you and me, the only reason we would want Linux on our PS3s is for one thing and one thing only: media playback.

The problem is that the only usable players with enough codecs, VLC and Mplayer, have compatibility problems with the PPC-based PS3. Thankfully, with the newer PS3 firmware versions, except the MOV container incompatibility, it supports all other major media files already. And for the MOV container, I just use the $20 Quicktime Pro which is able to re-wrap MOV h.264/AAC videos to MP4 without re-encoding in 1 minute time.

So what I really need is Flash 9 support so I can run Hulu.com and watch “Arrested Development” in the TV instead of the browser. But the PS3 browser only features Flash 7, and the Linux PPC ports doesn’t have PPC Flash 9 plugin support either because Adobe doesn’t care about it.

So honestly, as a normal user, I see no reason whatsoever to run Linux on a PS3.

It is not practical or technically possible to shoot movies with exposure bracketing because there is no such camera that can do that (namely, shoot 3 or 5 identical versions of the same shot at the same time with the same lens but at different exposures). However, a camera that already has high dynamic range and shoots RAW can make it possible to create tone mapped HDR-looking movies. 1 RAW copy is not as good as 3 or 5 RAW copies, but it’s better than nothing. The RED One camera should be good enough for this job.

If I had that $150 million that Spielberg has available for the creation of each of his movies, I would do an HDR-like movie. I always had in the back of mind an epic sci-fi movie (a’la Star Wars) with visual elements from the Final Fantasy franchise. A new application or plugin would have to be developed specifically for the movie that does tone mapping (kinda like Photomatix for video), while the actor’s faces would have to be smoothed out in post to look as pristine as in the FF games (I never said my movie would be about humans anyway).

I like the look of these pictures and I think that with a lot of visual effects and CGI buildings would look interesting: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. If you are careful with such color grading you can create a convincing look without looking totally CGI or cartoonish.

Yesterday Nokia bought all of Symbian and today LiPS and LiMo joined forces. We live in the most interest and most difficult of times when it comes to cellphone operating systems.

To make it more clear: today is nothing but 1985 in PC operating system times. Apple has just introduced the Macintosh (iPhone), an OEM-based Windows OS is about to come out (Android), while the developer friendly Amiga is currently have more users than anyone else (Symbian), while the older Atari (PalmOS) and Amstrad (Windows Mobile) are still fighting for a while more. And of course there are myriad other smaller OSes that are not based on the older command line doctrine (“feature phones”), that will almost eclipse in a few years.

The point of my analogy above is that while we don’t know who will finally make it and get that same 95% market share in the mobile industry (as Windows 98 managed to achieve for PCs), that day is coming. It’s unavoidable, because as these devices mature and do “more”, people will rely on them more. And when you have too many people rely too much on these devices, then these people need compatibility between all these devices. And this eventually creates the “monopoly”. We are 10-12 years away from such a “monopoly”, but it will eventually happen. Either through elimination or consolidation.

The real question is: will Apple redo the same mistake with the iPhone as they did with the Macintosh by not opening it to OEMs?

“Fifty artists who recorded Prince covers in honor of His Purpleness’ 50th birthday June 7 have been slapped with a lawsuit by the short-tempered star”, writes Wired.

I am afraid that Prince once again is right, when it comes to the law (even in Norway, which is part of international commerce agreements). These guys didn’t pay royalties, and it’s kind of Prince to not ask for millions of dollars in damages, but simply ask for the records destroyed.

Does this suck? Yes. Couldn’t Prince just be nicer? Yes. But the law is the law, and Prince has it on his side every time he initiates all these shitty actions.