Yow. Nearly a year since my last entry. Got an email reminder form my hosts reminding me that I was still paying for this domain name and webspace and that's spurred me on to upgrade my DasBlog install (now fortified with .Net 2.0 framework) and start blogging again.

Started a new job in January at VioCorp. Some exciting projects on the go there: foremost is the Viostream portal which has been so well received that we've already got 3 clients (rabbitohs, dragons and ivy.tv) using our alpha version.

Features include:

1. Ajax based UI that allows video to keep playing as users 'navigate' around the site.
2. Leverages the YUI (Yahoo User Interface) Library for cross-platform DHTML effects and other UI goodness - most notably the Browser History Manager library, allowing users to use their browser history functions (back and forward buttons) to navigate via Ajax.
3. Playlist functionality: users create/edit playlists of videos (on the fly) that can be shared.
   
4. (semi-)Modular approach (yet to be implemented as self-contained asp.net user controls) that allows for quick configuration of sites to enable/disable the following functions:
1. A branded Poll (with nice DHTML results animation if I say so myself)
2. User registration/login/password reminder (nicely animated too)
   
3. Commenting on videos (anonymous/registered/confirmed users) + moderation via user flagging
4. User rating of videos (anonymous/registered/confirmed users)
5. Separate/integrated picture album support - using M.I Jackson's excellent Shadowbox.js media-viewer. I've added in an inline gallery thumbnail viewer as well. When I'm satisfied that it's robust enough I'll release my 'extension' to it under the GNU licence as per the terms of use.

I am becoming a big fan of YUI and have lost some of my disdain for JS. It's still a tricky and pretty arcane subject, but using a cross-browser library like YUI really simplifies the process - knowing that you can rely on some really smart people to have sorted out most of the cross-browser quirks for you already.

 

Stumbled across this video on google video

I've played with compressed air/water bottle rockets before, but it never occurred to me that I could use a rack of these to actually FLY!

This guy deserves some sort of medal, and possibly a new pair of board-shorts - preferrably brown coloured

 

Found ElectricSheep the other day. It's fantastic. It's a distrbuted computing app that uses your PC's ( or mac's) idle CPU cycles to render frames of stunning algorithmically generated animations, called for some odd reason, sheep. The upshot for you is that you get a stunning screensaver that keeps evolving and changing and that you have helped create.

Actually, the name is odd for a good reason, it's inspired by Philip K Dick's novella - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep:

Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". The result is a collective "android dream", an homage to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

 

Paint.Net is a photograph editing and drawing app that was originally developed "as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it"

It's written in the .NET framework using C# and was intended as a replacement for MS Paint.

It far surpasses MS Paint, although to be honest, I've never been able to stick with MS Paint for more than 10 minutes. It falls somewhat short of Photoshop though and even given the large community of plug-in developers it will be a long time before this app comes close to PhotoShop standards.

A notable shortcoming, straight off the bat, is the lack of paths and I found the bezier line drawing tool very hard to use. There is no Select > feather tool in the default installation, there is a feather pixel blur plug-in that can be used in a very oblique way to recreate some of the functions of a feather pixel selection, but it just doesn't work in some cases.

Comparisons are inevitably made with Photoshop because Paint.Net not only tries to do effectively the same things as phoptoshop, but also the tools and much of the workflow is very similar too. Unfortunately on most fronts Paint.Net loses out to it's US$649 rival.

Of course, one important comparison is price and here Paint.Net wins hands-down over PotatoChop. Another being it's relatively light hard-drive footprint and economic use of system resources. It's a pretty good avdert for the .Net framework in this regard, especially as this is an amateur project. The only thing that stops this being a REALLY good advert for .Net is that it's not open source. This is slightly mitigated by the presence of the effects API, which is apparently documented somewhere but, at the time of writing, I couldn't find

 

My first reaction was admiration for the format of the movie. A simple blue-screened narrator with a slowly changing backdrop of sound and image

The ambition of these films is to communicate the current answers to three of the most often asked, and hardest to answer questions: Where am I? How did I get here? and what's for lunch? Who am I?

...

Just checked out the website http://www.global-mindshift.org. I am afraid that this site really appeals to the geek in me. I've only given it a cursory glance but the title of the site says: Global MindShift promotes an expanded view of what it means to be human based on knowledge of our evolutionary journey.

I'm finding the front-page promo movie a bit annoying and there's a faint whiff of woo woo spiritualism in the New Story movie, but the aims of the site seem noble enough

 

A few days ago, some publicly spirited people posted the 128 bit encryption key that encodes all HD-DVD roms published by the AACS LA consortium (Disney, Intel, Microsoft, Matsushita (Panasonic), Warner Brothers, IBM, Toshiba and Sony) and prevents them being copied

• Lot's of other people decided they'd write about it and published the key on their websites.
• The AACS LA consortium decided to issue legal threats under the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) against the owners of every single webpage that mentions this number (1,960,000 so far, and counting).

so, there you have it. The AACS LA own a number - one that requires 128-bits to represent as a hexadecimal. You cannot use it yourself, because according to the DMCA, THE AACS LA OWNS IT!

Luckily for us mere individuals we can take claim our own numbers before they're all gone. Thanks to Ed Felton and his recently developed VirtualLandGrab technology, you too can get in on the action and claim your own slice of the 128-bit number pie. Visit his page and you will get your own 128-bit key that has been used to encrypt a copyrighted haiku of Ed's own invention and voila. you have the same legal rights to your number as the AACS LA.

I love it how the AACS LA's moto is 'Share the Vision' - I think they should add a little asterisk and footnote to it: * sharing in no way implies dissemination of information. May cause loss of freedom

 

PS. I also own C3 BF BC 97 3C E3 0C CF E7 24 D4 9E 7F 45 9E 87, so don't you get any ideas about using or even printing that one either!!!