When
· Naughties
· · 2006
· · · May
· · · · 11 (5 entries)
Getting From HD to the Screen · As of mid-2006, iMovie HD doesn’t export HD video to QuickTime in a usable form; it comes out in 4:3 rather than 16:9, the display is marred by scan lines, and even at a modest width (say 800) reasonably-powerful computers can’t render it smoothly. Here’s the recipe for fixing the problem. [Update: Forgot the acknowledgments! Thanks for good advice to Jeffrey Czerniak, Mike Curtis, Tony Coates, and Charles Witgen.] [Update: Mike Curtis has suggested a substantial improvement, and it works.] ...
iCal Sucks Hugely · I’ve been using iCal for a couple of years now; never really loved it but it’s OK. Today for some reason my PowerBook locked up (no big gripe, this hardly ever happens) and when it came back up, iCal showed a little red splodge next to my calendar which when clicked said “iCal was unable to load the calendar. The file might be corrupted or temporarly (sic) unreadable. you can try again later or reset this calendar. Resetting the calendar will remove all calendar content.” There are not words to express how much this sucks. A programmer working for me who left this kind of hole in a personal-productivity application would be subject to dismissal. Anyhow, I got my life back; read on to find out how, along with some other advice to iCal users and to Apple ...
It’s Odd · I’m quoting Stephen Duncan Jr, describing the fact that Bloglines would rather try to fool people who subscribe to my Atom feed by switching in my RSS feed, as opposed to just fixing their stupidly broken Atom 1.0 handling. “Odd” is one word for it. Countermeasures are appropriate and if I have to I’ll take them, but wouldn’t it be so much better to just, like, you know, implement the Internet Standards? Nobody’s asking anyone to stop processing RSS, but the world (unlike Bloglines) didn’t freeze solid in 2003.
New Neo · I’ve been kind of quiet, and that’s because the Java One people lowered the boom on me, told me that if I didn’t get the slides for my session in they were going to cancel it. So I’ve been spending quality time with Open Office, in particular the NeoOffice flavor. They’ve got an alpha of their version of OO.o 2 up, and it’s a vast improvement over 1.2, with a bunch of useful sidebar navigators and better view-switching. Also, it’s all-ODF. There’s some interesting business model innovation; although Neo is GPL’ed, you have to sign up and pay to join the Early Access program if you want to use the 2.0 alpha pre-release. I didn’t hit a single bug with the alpha in two days of hard editing; I assume the Neo boys are slaving away over performance, because it’s pretty slow at the moment.
Bad Days for Rob · Robert Scoble I mean, who’s going through tough stuff (the picture here is heartbreaking). A happy ending doesn’t look very likely, but let’s hope everyone’s pain and suffering are as small as they can be. One thing Rob wrote brought me to a full stop and I had to read it again to be sure he’d really said that: “If I have a chance to look at a screen and comprehend what it says, keep me alive. Otherwise please don't perform heroic measures to keep me alive.” I don’t know if I’d go that far; but it’s thought-provoking.
