I had lunch with my father the other day, and I explained this series as well as I could to someone who didn't start programming when he was 11. His immediate reaction was, "Why are there so many different formats? Why can't everybody just agree on a single format? It is political, or technical, or both?" The short answer is, it's both. The history of video in any medium — and especially since the explosion of amateur digital video — has been marred by a string of companies who wanted to use container formats and video codecs as tools to lock content producers and content consumers into their little fiefdoms. Own the format, own the future. And when I say "history" — well, it's still going on. Read more – ‘Mark Pilgrim – A Gentle Introduction to Video Encoding: Constraints’.
Unless you're going to stick to films made before 1927 or so, you're going to want an audio track. A future article will talk about how to pick the audio codec that's right for you, but for now I just want to introduce the concept and describe the playing field. (This information is likely to go out of date quickly; future readers, be aware that this was written in December 2008.) Read more – ‘Mark Pilgrim – A Gentle Introduction to Video Encoding: Lossy Audio Codecs’.
The most important consideration in video encoding is choosing a video codec. A future article will talk about how to pick the one that’s right for you, but for now I just want to introduce the concept and describe the playing field. (This information is likely to go out of date quickly; future readers, be aware that this was written in December 2008.) Read more – ‘Mark Pilgrim – A Gentle Introduction to Video Encoding: Lossy Video Codecs’.
You, like many people, aren’t stupid, but it’s an unfortunate fact of life that you can be fooled. Since the dawn of time, the best salespeople, rightly or wrongly, have been known to exploit vulnerabilities and weaknesses of the human mind to their own gain. Read more – ‘You’re Being Gamed’.
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying 'no' to 1,000 things. Read more – ‘Steve Jobs: Get Rid of the Crappy Stuff’.
Restarting Apache on my MacBook Pro today, using the command line argument sudo apachectl -k start resulted in a rather strange error Read more – ‘Apachectl Ulimit Error’.
If you’re comfortable with installing applications on your Mac and are reasonably familiar with MySQL, installing MySQL on Snow Leopard should be relatively simple. Here are the simple steps you need to do to get MySQL up and running on your local machine. Read more – ‘Installing MySQL on Mac OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard)’.
Dieter Rams is a German industrial designer closely associated with the consumer products company Braun and the Functionalist school of industrial design. Many of Rams’ designs — coffee makers, calculators, radios, audio/visual equipment, consumer appliances and office products — have found a permanent home at many museums over the world, including MoMA in New York. Read more – ‘Dieter Rams' 10 Rules of Good Design’.
Crossed between quasar and a game of tag, QR-kill is the new phenomenon spreading around the mobile community. Utilising high-end mobile phones like the Nokia N95 and Applie iPhone and 2-dimensional barcodes called QR-codes, this game is best played in public places like shopping centres or department stores for added amusement. Read more – ‘QR-kill – The Hi-tech Mobile Game’.
