richardgoodwin.com

I’m starting to get really sick of auctions like this:

While perusing the latest article over at Performancing entitled Blog About What You Love, The Money Will Follow, I had to sit back and really think about what encourages me to write on this, my virtual pulpit-o-love.

Well, though it is contrary to the spirit of the article, it’s not [currently?] about the money. (As regular readers will notice, I switched themes and broke my Google ads, and I’m not even sure when I’ll get around to fixing them.)

While I would love to believe that whining about technology can pay my electric bill, I’m not anyway near the point where I think that’s a viable option.

So the more I think about it, the reasons that I will write on my blog, usually center around the same reasons I am glued to Bloglines at all hours of the day: I love new things and new people.

I know that any day of the week (hour of the day?) I can flip through link after link, and I can find an Infinite Number of Celebrities lurking within. It’s exciting to think that the everyday flashes of brilliance that everyone has are now often captured for others far beyond their reach to experience. 

Of course, a lot of mundanity is captured as well, and sometimes it can be just as interesting. Whether it’s the raving of dooce on her family activities or Michael’s opinion on the latest movie, they all add value and can be just as enlightening as any speech made by any of innumerable well known leaders, or as funny as a joke by stand up comedians that finally ‘made it’ on HBO or Comedy Central.

with AJAX, RSS, drag and drop, and friendly pastel color palettes.

This is probably one of the best contendors for a very easy to use blogging engine that I have seen.

Of course, some minor complaints:

• No image upload in posts
• No WYSIWYG editing (but simple Textile formatting)

I’ve been trying to keep an eye out for something with moderate customizability and low barrier of entry for a website or blog for my family members. Ideally it should be as WYSIWYG as you can get, while offering some basic layout change capabilities and image management (gallery, inclusion, etc.).

Besides Logahead, anyone else have examples of contendors in this space?

Somewhere in my pile of feeds this morning I ran across Wufoo’s form building demo. As they acknowledge, form building is not the sexiest of endeavours. However, some great design, sexy interactivity, and great flexibility had me floored.

If this is any indicator of things to come I can easily see it being the standard to beat!

Technorati Tags: blogging, firefox, breeeport

Update 2/24/06: Damned if Yahoo doesn’t do something a little similar with their Social Media Tools. Of course, it’s limited to Yahoo 360 but it’s along the same lines.

Don Hinchcliffe is back with the next installment of his Web 2.0 predictions: The Most Promising Web 2.0 Software of 2006.

Finally a baby snot attachment for a vacuum. Of course my kid is too old now, but it could be useful for for those bad grown up snot days…

Update: 8/11/06
Multimedia Mike msged me to say:

“I just wanted to point out that it may be helpful to amend that post to note that the current SVN copy of FFmpeg contains a native VC-1 decoder; no more painful hack to get the slooooow reference decoder working”

So hop on over to his site for more information

—

This post is for uber geeks, so move on if that’s not you

While using Gallery 2.1 for my photo gallery I finally got around to start uploading movie files as well as pictures. Being lazy, and wanting a small, compatible file type that most of my family could play, I opted to use Windows Movie Maker to output .wmv files. They come out pretty small, with great quality, and anyone on Windows (and some Mac/Linux users) can play them.

Well, lo and behold, the Gallery uses the ffmpeg module for generating thumbnails of the video files, and the current ffmpeg builds/CVS can’t handle later versions of Windows Media encoded (wmv3/wmv8/wmv9) video. Luckily, I was able to find a hack for it that got me going, and I’m re-posting it here for posterity (and when I lose my binaries and need to build them again).

(Caveat: my web host allows compilation from source; yours may not, and you may be out of luck if so. Unfortunately the binary I built is for x86_64 and probably not useful to many so I am not going to post it here.)

Hooking Up The SMPTE VC-1 Decoder In FFmpeg

Filed under:
Open Source Multimedia — Multimedia Mike @ 5:22 pm

Some people have asked me for my code to make the SMPTE VC-1 reference decoder work with FFmpeg,
slow though it may be. I suppose I could make a patch. But the official
version of FFmpeg is whatever happens to be in CVS at the current
moment. So any patch I could produce would work for maybe a day. So get
ready to do a little editing on your local FFmpeg CVS tree. The steps:

1. procure the VC1_reference_decoder_release6.zip file from the main site and unzip the tree somewhere
2. have a copy of FFmpeg’s CVS tree handy; the rest of these instructions will assume that you are sitting in the root of the FFmpeg tree
3. create a directory called libavcodec/libvc1
4. copy all of the *.c and *.h files from VC1_reference_decoder_release6/decoder/ into libavcodec/libvc1/
5. copy all of the *.c and *.h files from VC1_reference_decoder_release6/shared/ into libavcodec/libvc1/
6. place the libvc1-makefile.txt into libavcodec/libvc1/Makefile
7. change directory into libavcodec/libvc1 and type ‘make’
8. change directory back to the FFmpeg root
9. place the smpte-vc1.c file into libavcodec/
10. edit
    libavcodec/vc9.c, go the very end of the file, and add #if 0/#endif
    around the wmv3_decoder AVCodec structure; this will keep it from
    conflicting with the new SMPTE WMV3 decoder
11. edit libavcodec/Makefile and add smpte-vc1.o to the end of the OBJS list
12. edit the top-level Makefile and add “-L./libavcodec/libvc1 -lvc1″ (without the quotes) to FFLIBS
13. run ‘./configure’ at the top level if you have not already done so for this tree
14. run ‘make’ at the top level

Now, there’s also a magic step 12.5 that I had to do, which was edit the libavcodec/allcodecs.c and uncomment the section about wmv3. If you don’t, the wmv3 support won’t get compiled and this will all be for naught!

Big thanks to merbanan on #ffmpeg (irc.freenode.net) for assistance with getting this going!

I’ve also linked the reference decoder zip file locally if you can’t find it anymore…

Technorati Tags: ffmpeg, gallery, photos

(or, how I learned to love my Inbox)

Some time ago, I stumbled on to a way of sorting my mail in Outlook that actually makes me [more?] productive and able to deal with the constant torrent that is unleashed up on me daily.

It’s very simple, but works amazingly well, and I am inspired by this post at 43folders to post it here for further review/comments:

1. Go to View…Arrange By…and Custom.
2. Choose “Group by” and set it to Conversation (Ascending). Hit OK.
3. Then choose “Sort”, and set it to Received (Descending). Hit OK.

Now all conversations will be grouped together, and any new mail that comes into a conversation will make the conversation jump to the top of the Inbox. This works great for those times when there are 30 mails on a subject, and you can confidently delete all but the most current with a single action, knowing that you will have the most up to date information.

Let me know if this helps/hurts your daily routine, or if you have other tips on taming your Inbox!

Technorati Tags: outlook, email, inbox

My dear sweet mother, bastion of the last generation who identifies businesses by their brick and mortar presence, opted to provide me a gift certificate to bn.com for Christmas.

I literally put off using it until now becuase of the paltry (i.e. no) research tools BN provides on their site. I had not realized how accustomed I was to using the recommendation and review tools that Amazon offers until I started searching on bn.com. When looking for Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble (which was, like every other selection, more expensive than Amazon) I wanted to see other titles or authors that might have similar content.  Imagine my dismay when I saw not a single suggestion, or conversation, or link on the product overview page for related items…

Suffice it to say, I spent 90% of my shopping experience on Amazon (and flagged many other items for future purchase) researching, and 10% actually spending the gift certificate at bn.com.

In an era where 50% plus of a product page on Amazon is user generated, and almost always provides a value add to the shopping experience, it’s unacceptable for Barnes and Noble to continue to function as a staid, stiff-white-collar off the shelf storefront.

By the way, the books I picked up:

• Naked Conversations
• The Cluetrain Manifesto
• The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

Technorati Tags: amazon, barnes+and+noble, online+shopping