Green Party’s Elizabeth May in Calgary
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Calgary, Canada, Politics on 2009-07-08
July 2nd to 4th, the leader of Canada’s Green Party, Elizabeth May visited Calgary to attend fund raising and community events. After a fundraiser, Elizabeth allowed me to record a quick Q&A with her regarding one of my concerns: The Pirate Party launching in Canada.
The Pirate Party’s platform is not as outrageous as many assume. They don’t want to abolish copyright, rather limit its duration and focus its impact on commercial (for-profit) activities. The Pirate Party also wants to abolish software patents, which many software programmers consider a restriction on free speech. However, many of its policies are closely mirrored by the Green Party’s platform.
What is Elizabeth May’s response to Swedish Pirate Party members being elected to European Parliment?
I’ve posted my concerns in a R4NT.com article. Single issue candidates can not get elected to Parliament under Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system. If a Green MP will defend consumers (and the economy) against Bill C-61 horror shows, is splitting the digital-rights-minded vote a smart move?
Another interesting moment during Elizabeth May’s visit was during her Saturday morning visits to a series of Calgary Stampede breakfasts. People started tweeting that she’d caved on animal rights for a photo op, thinking that her attendance at a Stampede function implied she was attending a calf roping type event.
Elizabeth May’s daughter, Victoria Cate May Burton was monitoring Elizabeth May’s Twitter account. They discussed and responded to the tweet in 15 minutes. I have no idea how other political parties manage their social networks, but clearly a tech-savvy daughter is one effective approach.
Stock footage of Elizabeth May’s visit to Calgary can be found on Internet Archive concerning copyright and volunteering, fund-raising and the economy. Elizabeth’s Twitter and Facebook collaboration with her daughter Victoria Cate is also recyclable via Internet Archive. All footage is creative commons licensed.
Vista’s Windows Explorer Crashing
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Uncategorized on 2009-06-27
My Windows file explorer (“Windows Explorer” as Microsoft calls it) was crashing when I looked at folders containing MPEG-4 (.MP4) video files recorded to H.264 spec.
This has not always happened to me. I can confirm while many other people are experiencing this problem, not everyone running Vista does. It must be related to bung codecs we’ve installed, or the video files themselves not properly adhering to specifications. Unfortunately, sometimes a “corrupt” video file is all you’ve got to work with, and File Explorer crashing does not help the situation.
A proper fix would be to remove the codec which is not gracefully inspecting the video file, but instead I offer a work-around: decoupling the failing codec from Windows Explorer.
Install shell extensions manager “ShellExView”. (It is free and clean.)
Disable the extension named “Video Thumbnail Extractor”, and restart Windows Explorer (letting it crash and automatically restart works for me).
I can’t see video thumbnails any more. But at least I’m able to manage video files (and their neighboring files) once again.
MJ Lecture: Buying Money
Posted by gordonmcdowell in startups on 2009-05-26
Shortly after the economy tanked, when people lost the spring in their step and life’s soundtrack became an endless loop of O Fortuna… MJ gave a lecture.
“Your landlord doesn’t want your stock, Safeway doesn’t want your stock. They like cash.” -MJ
I used CastingWords.com to transcribe this video. They’re quite excellent.
Calgary iPhone Developer’s CRUSH FACTOR
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Calgary, iPhone on 2009-05-08
A couple weeks ago I created a commercial for MJ’s (Michael Sikorsky’s) iPhone application, “CRUSH FACTOR“. Today the app is available on iTunes, and I can finally show off the video!
Friends of Michael and Camille also submitted witty compatibly appraisals for couples. As a testament to high editorial standards applied to the game, none of my suggestions were used.
One shot in the video I must give credit to is Chris Hartigan, who created a BMX video in the 90s. He’s let me use that shot in… oh 3 videos now. Which shot, you ask? Go on… guess.
The commercial was created with the scientific genius of Nelson Adams. While Nelson does not have a scientific diploma per se, he’s forgotten more about science than Carl Sagan ever knew. Did Stephen Hawking help craft the dialog in this commercial? Did Richard Dawkins sit on a really uncomfortable stool and recite dialog that I kept changing on him with every delivery?
No they didn’t. And that is why Nelson is Dr. Science.
May 30th and 31st MJ is offering a lecture on iPhone Development at University of Calgary. The CRUSH FACTOR back-end is hosted on Google App Engine, which is the exact combination of technologies I’m pursuing for my own iPhone app.
Having bought a MacBook for the sake of programming my iPhone, I’m a newcomer to iPhone development. The Xcode experience regularly presents me with showstoppers. While decent books are mandatory, in many cases only watching a video or witnessing someone navigate the environment has helped me understand how to accomplish a particular task.
The fact that MJ is a Canadian iPhone developer is particularly useful to any Calgarians wanting to sell their iPhone app via iTunes. There’s lots of paperwork. MJ can help you get that ball rolling ASAP.
If you attend MJ’s iPhone dev school, I’ll be seeing you there!
DemoCampCalgary14 Coverage
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Calgary on 2009-05-01
DemoCampCalgary is a get together for those crafting new software in Calgary, and anyone looking to support upcoming Calgarian businesses.
I performed a video capture and summarized the event, which is available in full at Calgary’s BarCamp / DemoCamp blog. Below is a copy of the full video, with shortcuts to my favorite moments.
David Gluzman let me use his photos of DemoCampCalgary14 in the video, which is released under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license.
If you think you’d enjoy DemoCamp, then you will. I’ve been to just about all of them in Calgary, and there’s always been at least one presentation which surprises me.
Alternatives to the CBC?
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Canada on 2009-04-25
The above video is R4NT.com’s coverage of a April 17th Calgary rally protesting cuts to the CBC. A downloadable remix is available at Internet Archive. See OpenSourceVideo.BlogSpot.com for more footage links and Creative Commons licenses.
As CBC’s ad revenues fall (forcing the sale of $125 million in assets & 800 job cuts), the federal government is considering subsidizing Canadian private broadcasters with $150 million in aid.
While promotion of Canadian culture is important, the entertainment landscape has remained relatively unchanged over the past decade. Many download BitTorrents of pirated movies and music, pay to download legal copies, but by-in-large simply pursue pre-broadband forms of entertainment: People mostly watch TV, and rent DVDs.
Newspapers and news programs are where the real changes are occurring. Historically sustained by advertising revenue based on their subscriber base, newspapers have been losing audience share to television and now news aggregation services such as Google News and blogs (say 95% news aggregation and 5% original content). Newspapers cannibalize their own content as they find it necessary to post their stories online to retain brand loyalty (and hope of attracting new readers).
Conglomerates such as CanWest reduce costs by cutting local reporting in increasingly larger and larger municipalities. This again, makes free online alternatives (Twitter being an example of tools for local news monitoring) even more attractive.
That has been the slow, steady decline of the news media as broadband internet spread across Canada. No one is certain how the average Canadian will be absorbing news 20 years down the road, but it is clear very few will be reading newspapers or watching the same insert-your-city-name local news coverage on television as their neighbors.
Creative destruction will certainly be part of the evolution of news. The conservative government’s decision to potentially supply private broadcasters with $150 million in aid can’t be a easy one… the typical conservative mantra of “let the market sort it out” could result in job losses which would lengthen the current recession.
For simplicity sake, let’s create a false choice. The federal government can spend $150,000,000 on either supporting private broadcasters or the CBC. Which is a smarter move?
Support the CBC.
CBC shows itself to be extremely flexible in this broadband era (offering up podcasts, tweets and an iPhone friendly news page) which multiplies the value of every news report they file: A news story is only valuable if its consumed, and CBC News is by far the easiest to receive.
This flexibility comes at the cost of profitability. CBC does not launch such services with the goal of monetizing every new news feed. CBC’s goal is to simply service Canadians. This it does remarkably well.
Will any Canadian private news organization ever be able to match CBC’s effectiveness? The gap is widening, not closing. Conglomerates are reducing local news coverage to cut costs as people migrate from newspapers to online services (and video news in various forms).
What I would like our government to consider, is that perhaps no profitable model will emerge to replace the in-depth news coverage offered by newspapers.
There will always be news. But will there always be the same quantity and quality of investigative journalism? From this point forward, there will always be bloggers and “citizen journalism”. But a dozen hobbyists don’t fill the gap left by a salaried employee.
I’m hopeful a new profitable model will soon emerge. But until it does, it is extremely reckless to allow the CBC to diminish in any way. In the long run, it may be institutions like PBS, BBC and CBC are the only reputable news gathering organizations left standing.
“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”
– Thomas Jefferson after 5 shots of Jagermeister.
SONY VEGAS vs AIPTEK 720P
Posted by gordonmcdowell in SONY VEGAS on 2009-03-23
Aiptek video cameras are great for picking up extra angles of coverage. Their low cost makes them ideal for placement where they might get smashed, submerged, gnawed on or stolen.
Sometimes video quality is simply not one’s highest priority. But quick and dirty video capture may come back to haunt you if the recorded video clips can not be used in your video editor. And SONY VEGAS is quite fickle about footage from Aiptek cameras.
The first catch is that Aiptek 720p cameras .MOV video files can not be directly imported into SONY VEGAS without losing all audio. While VEGAS will still pause to build peak waveform files (.sfk), those waveforms are flat-lined.
The simplest solution to this problem, is to rename your Aiptek .MOV files so that their extensions are changed from .MOV to .MP4 (which causes VEGAS to use a different MPEG decoder).
In my experience, this is effective for files smaller than 2 GB. To use 2 GB+ Aiptek video clips in SONY VEGAS (as of SONY VEGAS 8.0c) you will be forced to transcode the video file.
SONY VEGAS treats 2 GB+ Aiptek video files as if they do not have any video data. Given the fact that SONY VEGAS flat-lines audio from an Aiptek .MOV file unless it has been renamed, this makes the experience of a new Aiptek owner extremely unpleasant. One might see nothing but a flat-lined audio sample!
Experts are divided as to the proper terminology for this phenomena. Some call it “Aiptek Rage“, while others refer to it as “Death by SONY VEGAS“. I personally prefer to affix blame on whoever charges more for their product, in this case SONY. No, I can’t expect SONY to anticipate every wonky video device which will be manufactured in China. But the fact is Apple QuickTime plays those MOV files. If QuickTime can play Aiptek MOVs, then somehow it must be possible for SONY VEGAS to import them.
The disappointment with this limitation, is that Aiptek cameras can run off battery power for almost 2 hours, or run off AC power for 8 hours. An Aiptek camera populated with an 8 GB SDHC card, powered by AC is an 8 hour non-stop video capturing machine! Aipteks are perfectly sized to be clamped onto a wall or a desk, and left running for the full duration of an event.
Successful multi-cam coverage still requires some non-Aiptek cameras:
- Aiptek 720p audio is atrocious (but still adequate to synchronize waveforms).
- Slow grinding auto-focus forces the used to stay zoomed out at all times. Likely you won’t be capturing any closeups with an Aiptek.
But if you’re looking to focus all your attention on your “good” HDV camera, and simply want to set-up-and-forget some cameras to collect extra angles, Aiptek cameras can fit that bill. Except that, if you are editing with SONY VEGAS, you must cycle all your Aipteks every hour to avoid creating any files bigger than 2 GB.
Another use I’ve found for Aiptek cameras is placing them randomly on guest’s tables at weddings, so the guests can record their own messages to the newlyweds. They’re simple to use, can survive being dropped by kids, and cheap enough that you ultimately won’t care whatever happens to them. Someone might manage to destroy the camera, but they’ll have to run it over with a car to crack the SDHC card hidden safely inside.
Transcoding Aiptek Video to MPEG-2
If none of this matters because you’ve already recorded an Aiptek video clip longer than 2 GB and still need to edit with it in SONY VEGAS, the tool I use to transcode is called “SUPER”.
SUPER is a free Windows app written by eRightSoft. eRightSoft’s web page is rather confusing, filled with ads for commercial applications. Keep following the links to “Start Downloading SUPER” and “Download SUPER Setup File”, and eventually you’ll find the SUPER download. (No, I can’t link directly to the download.)
If you decide to mimic these settings when transcoding Aiptek footage, keep in mind that the resulting MPEG-2 file will be 20% bigger than the original, there will still be some quality loss, and that transcoding a single 3 GB clip can take half a day.
Sample Use of Multiple Aiptek 720p Video Cameras
One good use of Aiptek cameras is mounting them on the outside of cars. For the R4NT review of Watchmen, we used clamp-mounts to attach Aipteks to windshield wipers. It is not just a matter of the Aipteks being cheap enough to be disposable… their tiny mass let us use plastic clamps, and their small size kept them from catching too much wind.
I’ll be looking forward to future cameras from Aiptek, but will be paying as much attention to the ability of their data files to be easily imported into video editing applications as their resolution and frame rate. I’d like to assume that by 2009 both the creators of video editing applications, and manufacturers of cameras would be bending over backwards to ensure their products have no compatibility issues. I would assume SONY has the ability to pass the buck to Apple, and force SONY VEGAS to use QuickTime to decode troublesome MOV files. Even if there was a terrible performance hit, it would still be nice to have that as a SONY VEGAS option.
Anyone wondering “Why don’t you just go Mac and use Final Cut Studio?” I’ve got a Mac and I’ve tried Final Cut Studio 2.0 – I don’t want to start whining about that now since version 3.0 has been announced. Evaluating and whining about Final Cut Studio 3.0 is on my to-do list.
FOX NEWS vs CANADA
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Politics on 2009-03-22
from: gordon mcdowell
to: brian.lewis@foxnews.com
date: Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 5:04 PM
subject: Could you be any more insulting?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcJn5XlbSFk
While this is not the best example of FOX broadcasting deliberately misleading information, it is a perfect example of an attitude which does not just represent what is wrong with your otherwise fine country. It is literally, exactly & precisely what is wrong with your country. FOX NEWS.
NEWSWEEK POLL – “Do you think Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001?”
2003 response: 47% Yes, 37% No, 16% not sure.
2004 response: 42% Yes, 44% No, 14% not sure.
2007 response: 41% Yes, 50% No, 9% not sure.
Saddam Hussein was not responsible in any way for 9/11. The Americans who don’t know this are the ones who consume FOX NEWS. Ask a fellow American if they believe Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Oh he was? Then ask them where they get their news. I promise you they’ll answer “FOX NEWS”. Canadians are well aware of this correlation.
The reason USA is bogged down in 2 wars, instead of having won the Afghanistan war and caught Osama Bin Laden already (with which we continue to help) is because you, working through your employer FOX NEWS, helped the Bush administration convince your fellow citizens of a lie. That “Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11”.
Likely if there had been no FOX NEWS, there’d have been only one war… the UN sanctioned war. USA would have won. And Canadians wouldn’t be looking south, waiting for the dwindling yet increasingly deranged fans of FOX NEWS to clue in that you don’t have their best interests at heart.
As an employee of FOX NEWS, do you ever stop to wonder what responsibly you might share for American casualties? And those of American allies?
Should my television cable provider ever offer me a bundle which includes FOX NEWS, my response will be a that they please watch the Red Eye clip, and that any inclusion of FOX NEWS would make such a bundle unacceptable.
Gordon McDowell
Calgary, AB, Canada
SONY VEGAS vs SONY HDR-SR1
Posted by gordonmcdowell in SONY VEGAS on 2009-03-20
SONY HDR-SR1 records AVCHD video onto its hard drive as .MTS files. Because the video camera’s 30 GB hard drive is using a FAT32 filesystem, if HDV video is recorded in chunks longer than 20 minutes, the size of that shot’s data will surpass 2 GB. Since FAT32 does not support this, the SONY HDR-SR1 automatically increments the filename and starts recording data to a new file.
This results in a series of filenames on the camera such as:
00000.MTS (2 GB)
00001.MTS (2 GB)
00002.MTS (last in series will be less than 2 GB)
When connecting the HDR-SR1 to your PC, you may be tempted (as I was) to navigate directly into the camera’s video storage folder…
J:\AVCHD\BDMV\STREAM
…and simply copy those files onto your PC’s hard drive. Vegas recognizes the .MTS files and will import them without complaining. Many video playback apps (such as VLC) understand that the MTS extension means video. Heck, what could be simpler than copy/pasting those AVCHD video clips right on into your computer… exactly where you want them?
Let me respond to that rhetorical question I’m pretending you asked with my own? How would you like a nice warm glass of FAIL?
My experience is that those .MTS files 2 GB in size are NOT always recognized by SONY VEGAS (including SONY VEGAS 8.0 including release 8.0c). The camera does not properly end the AVCHD data, and while the files may usually import into Vegas, such an approach will occasionally lead to…
- Gimped frames at the end of your 2 GB video clip.
- Vegas unable to import the 2 GB video segment at all (“unrecognized file format”).
- Vegas crashing when the file is imported (Vegas 7 does this, I have not seen it with Vegas 8).
Instead, be sure SONY PICTURE UTILITY is installed on your PC. It was included with your SONY HDR-SR1 camera, and once installed will automatically launch the “HDD Handycam Utility” when your SONY HDR-SR1 is connected to your PC.
This utility joins any multiple .MTS files which correspond to a single continuous shot into a single .m2ts file on your PC’s hard drive.
Since the MTS files usually worked, it took me quite a while (and a few support tickets to SONY) to figure this out. Hopefully this post will accelerate that understanding for someone else.