Nathan Herald

In the past, I have recommended Flash Video (flv) as the best way to get video content online and make it available to users. However, I think my opinions about this are starting to change. H.264 is such a good codec that can be played by so many devices that even Flash running in a browser and play it. It's that easy to play.

<video> is now on the scene and it is reinforcing the idea that we can have a positive video experience without all the buffering and stuttering and general flash slowness. Don't get me wrong, I love flash, I started making websites in flash, I still do a fair amount of AS3.

But flash is slow. It's slow how Ruby is slower than C. Ruby is still great to use and I use it for all my web applications now, but it's slowness is acceptable because of the level of abstraction and productivity gains. All technologies have tradeoffs. However, I am starting to think that flash's slowness is not a tradeoff that is good for consumers of video content.

Apple TV (which is made from piece of crap parts) can play 720p video just fine. Heck, even the original xbox using XBMC can play some HD content from what I hear. Yet give an SD flash video to either and watch them cower in fear. Web sites shouldn't require users to have beastly machines just to enjoy the content.

Flash is bad for video unless it can speed up and become transparent. For now, it's very visible that it is working too hard to perform a job that we already solved in much better ways.

All is not Roses with <video>

My issue with <video> is this: how do you interrupt the show for commercials?

I assume current flash players just use AS code to determine those sorts of things and possibly even load each segment as a different FLV. While most of this can be duplicated in JS, that would be far more hackable than AS from inside the browser. I could rid myself of commercials forever, but then the video hosting site would go out of business.

Has anyone tackled this problem? Is this something where commercials just have to be integrated into the stream?

Experimenting lately, I have been talking to my computer.

Every Mac includes something called Speakable Items. Essentially you can say things like "Get my mail" or "Switch to TextMate" and it will do it. In System Preference, Speech you can turn it on and look at the help to figure out how to use it.

Essentially: it sucks and I love it.

It sucks, because it's buggy and it doesn't know how to isolate a voice. I love it because it could keep me from typing as much as I do.

In the end, I don't think I can use it on a daily basis, but it has changed my mind about speech recognition's usefulness.

While I don't know if I could use dictation too much, I do like the idea of asking what the temperature, time, do I have new email, and other short questions or commands.

Is anyone working on something like this? Is there research to improve this?

I am very interested in speech commands now and I would love to see progress on this in the near future.

I'm not a hater or anything, really, but come on: Video of Microsoft Store Opening That is an Apple Store with non-Apple computers in it.

If Growl notifications are not working with Colloquy on Snow Leopard, it's because Colloquy is using a 32-bit library to communicate with Growl. It can be fixed by setting Colloquy to open in 32-bit mode.

This is the first application I have set to do that so far.

The Turntable

Turntables are complicated. I picked up a cheap turntable today that works, but I am sure it is destroying the records I am playing. Reading online it appears that you need to align your cartridges, oil your belts, and lots of other things that I will probably never do.

Looking at the little thing, it appears that it's arm is pretty shotty, the wiring or something is causing a nice buzz, and the records seems to bounce a bit on their way around. I'm not sure if all of that can be fixed or not.

Either way, it's nice to finally checkout the Eagles LP I got.

Apparently I jotted down a quote from my dream last night before I forgot it. I found this in my iPhone's Notes application:

I have some unilateral thoughts about what it means - and those have changed over time. You don't get that deep without seeing rockets everyday.

Yeah, it doesn't entirely make sense to me either. Must be poetry.

How To Install id3lib-ruby On Snow Leopard

I compiled id3lib include /usr/local, then:

$ sudo -s
$ export CONFIGURE_ARGS="--with-opt-dir=/usr/local"
$ env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install id3lib-ruby
$ exit