A clever short

Now if I could just get my printer to create this print

A tribute to John Williams

This one is amazing. If you want to have your very own one-man-band, this is how to do it.

John Williams

There is a light at the end of the tunnel …

I think it is great to have Obama move into the white house and hopefully repair some of the damage done during the past 12 - 8 years.

Obama has this John F Kennedy’esque touch to him, with a young family moving into the White House. I firmly believe we’ll be in a better place four years from now and I am not saying that because he is black or because he is a democrat or for any other idealistic reason.

I say that because he has his head on the right place and he makes decisions based on FACTS and research rather then based on religion or “gut feeling”.

One thing though I am very concerned about the negativity of the Republicans around. I heard people calling into C-Span to say he is a Muslim ( which is NOT true at all ), or he is a terrorist ( which is NOT true at all ). Republicans calling in were saying that we fight “Hussein’s over in Iraq, how could we elect a Hussein for President …”.

I am asking the Republican leadership to talk to their folks and tell the truth and calm the masses down before something unimaginable happens. If Rush Limbaugh would come out and debunk some of the false statements I think it would help.

I just hope that the right wing will start to see that a radical point of view and ruling with an iron fist wil never be the best for this ( or any other ) country.

I am looking forward to the next four years …

Help, Republicans annoy me …

I went canvasing for Obama the other day and one of the rule was “don’t annoy people”, which meant don’t leave pamphlets for Obama at peoples doors if they have a McCain sign in their front yard.

Now I have one big Obama sign in my front yard and it was stolen this morning. After replacing it I found a McCain ad at my door a couple of hours later.

Mind you they were too chicken to knock on the door, so the only thing they are trying to do is to annoy us here in Northern VA.

I also received a hate ridden DVD about Islamic extremists, which of course is intended to frighten people. I had to ask myself : “What about those christian extremists, or the right wing neo-cons, or the jewish extremists ? Isn’t it obvious that extremism IN ANY FORM is very bad and frightening ?”

Sorry I wanted to keep the blog free of politics but I think people should know the dirty truth.

Update: I can’t believe some one stole the sign again. And not only ours but all Obama signs on our street. Those Creeps
Update 2:I lost yet another sign. What are they doing with all those signs ?
Update 3:I had to get some more signs. Total stolen Obama signs from my lawn so far 5. All Obama signs from my neighbors are gone too. I am the only one refreshing.

Some progress …

So I am still not feeling 100% but at least I felt good enough to continue working on the integration of the new QRender features in ‘Q’ DVD-Author.

While I was playing around with this I added a new auto-play feature into the image Previewer and include now the preview of Vids in said ialog.

I also added support for the Previewer to DialogFiles and thus you can now play videos inside both dialogs ( DialogFiles, and DialogImages ).

I suspect by now you are wondering WTF is this guy talking about. Not to worry, simply be assured that functionality is increasing

… and now to something completely different …

The presidential elections are about 10 days away here in the States and I would like to ask any one who is eligibe to go out and vote. I firmly believe that this will be one of the most important elections in a lifetime.

In this spirit, might my candidate win

QDVDAuthor update :

Being sick sucks, but there are things that could be worse …

So I have been busy the past few days / weeks with adding vid support into QRender. You can now create a simple slideshow by mixing images and vids together.

I chose to limit the extensions for vids to AVI, MOV, and MPG, which is what most digital cameras will produce. Now the difference between vids and videos is mostly the length of the clips.

While you are on vacation or attending some other important event you are most likely to shoot a few longer videos ( maybe even with a DV camera ) and a lot of short vids and even more images ( a lot more images I might add ).

So the DialogImages will allow you sort and group these large amount of images / vids into groups which will then be rendered into slideshows.

While the back end is now up to the task I still have to tune the front end to allow you to select vids.

Here are some numbers …

Doug Beaver over at a Facebook Engineering blog casually mentions that they have just had their ten billionth photo uploaded. Not only that, but since they keep 4 copies of each in different sizes, that’s 40 billion files just for the photos. Then he drops these little nuggets:

* 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day
* They have just over one petabyte of photo storage
* They serve over 15 billion photo images per day
* Photo traffic now peaks at over 300,000 images served per second
…

but then I saw this …

Iomega releases 1TB network hard drive for $299

So you want your local copy of Facebook … Easy … $300k and you are up there …

Update: Here you’ll find 1 TB for $99,-. Whoaw, all I can say …

This is a nice car indeed …

Any one who wants to give me this car as a present please contact me …

But then, ever since I was a boy I wanted to have one of those …

Piracy … reeeeeaaaaaallllyyyy ???

From the article : … hoping to find the earliest public mention of the elusive 750,000 jobs number. And we found it in—this is not a typo—1986 … Baldridge estimated the number of jobs lost to the counterfeiting of U.S. goods at “anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000.”

… That’s especially significant, because these numbers are always invoked as proof that the piracy problem is still dire—that everything we’ve done to step up international enforcement of intellectual property laws has been in vain. But of course, if you simply recycle the same numbers from 15 and 20 years ago then it will necessarily seem as though no ground has been gained.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/dodgy-digits-behind-the-war-on-piracy.ars

64 = 65 ???