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VW has announced that the new Scirocco will not be coming to the US. Apparently they expect people to buy a GTI or an Audi A3/S3 instead.
As a former Scirocco owner (and current owner of an Audi wagon) I'd like them to know that I would buy the Scirocco, but probably wont buy a GTI or an A3, so they're denying me choice and most likely losing me as a customer for something small and sporty.
To me, an Audi is too expensive (as a second car for fun) and a
Golf is too boxy, but, just like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the
Scirocco is JUST RIGHT. I am intrigued by the TwinCharger engine, I
like the raked coupe looks and the price would probably be within
reach. Please, VW USA, reconsider.
posted at: 13:05 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry
My latest hobby is deleting email. I used to keep it all, but I get way too much and I don't care about a lot of it. Now I've started to delete it. My new rule is if a machine wrote it, I am not interested in keeping it very long. It might be news, it might be a special offer, it could be a cvs commit, an error message on my server, but basically if I didn't look at it and act on it in a certain period of time then a) it's now old and probably useless and b) I can probably get the same information still somewhere else.
It's so liberating to see my inbox full of just personal emails that people typed to me. I think subscribing my own personal email to mailing lists is a time stealer, let alone Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Borders etc etc all spamming me regularly. So... they have all been nuked, even from my backups!
I've even discovered that Apple's Mail.app is not quite so slow as
I thought - it was doing quite a good job in face of a massive
overload of impersonal machine generated email.
posted at: 20:12 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry
Multiple Bifurcations is a term that I first heard from Andy Grove when he explained the future of Intel product positioning.
In my case, however, it's just a good term for how I'm slowly losing my mind. Instead of being interested in "Unix", now one has to consider Solaris, Mac OS, Linux, BSD etc. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, such that I can't just standardise on one. I love my old SPARC machines, for example, and Solaris is best on those. I use my various Macs for music, video, email and web browsing. Gotta have those. But for my webserver, my home-brew Slackware Linux machine is still plugging away after several years reliable duty.
Similarly, for blogging, I started off using Blosxom on Linux. It's really simple and I can work disconnected too. On my webserver I can post from a simple ssh session, or I can work on my mac and then upload afterwards.
However, for blogs with themes, photos, counters etc, I have been
experimenting with "iWeb". It's just about ok for a first 1.0 release
of a product, but has some shocking limitations. For example if you
have a slideshow, every photo is shown with a sort of reflective
foreground, like it was standing on a black shiny surface. There is no
way to turn this off. Personally I hate it. HATE IT. Also there is no
way to participate in the quality of photos, I can't ask for bigger
images, or smaller thumbnails, or more sharpening. I think that Flickr
is most likely better. Finally, a friend of mine has Aperture and a
quad Powermac with 4.5GB and produces some fairly nice slideshows
using that setup.
posted at: 19:05 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry
My Sun rep was kind enough to arrange an Ultra 40 box as a demonstrator. I've had it up and running for a couple of weeks now and overall, it's great. Herewith some of the highlights and lowlights. Drawbacks :
Otherwise though, it's an awesome machine. I replaced the cheap mouse with a Logitech item I had lying around, since the "middle button" function was sticky (you push in the scroll-wheel, but often it wouldn't click out again). Since the machine has convenient front-facing USB ports I simply plugged in the extra mouse and it just worked. I love USB.
I even like the new Sun Type 7 USB key, and fortunately it came with the PC layout that I prefer (Ctrl key below the shift key). If I were Rich Teer I would have been disappointed not to get the unix layout, but I've just never learned to type that way.
The noisy high-speed fan noise is only the first time power is applied to the box, once it settles it has, so far, never made that kind of noise again, apart from one time it accidentally got unplugged.
Since the machine is a demonstrator, I wasn't sure what kind of spec. I would be getting. I discussed it with my rep and tried to emphasize the things that are useful in my team and those that are not. In particular, we don't use a spectacular amount of RAM, nor high-end 3D visualisation.
For some reason, though, I ended up with the "large" configuration, which is as follows :
So I probably have the fastest PC at my office.
The machine came with Solaris 10 pre-configured, however since I no longer have any Solaris responsibilities at work, I reinstalled it with Windows XP Pro 64-Bit edition.
Sun did a nice job with the Windows drivers for this machine, after downloading and burning the ISO CD image they provide, we were able to get everything working nicely.
Once I finish setting the machine up for my main responsibility
(running a Windows development team) I hope to stick in a second hard
drive and set up a double or triple boot environment so we can explore
this machine under Solaris 10 and Linux as well. Our source code
repository is kept on Unix and runs a homebrew bunch of perl scripts,
so a nice unix dev box may come in handy from time to time also. I
have some ideas about using ZFS with our CVS setup, and this box would
most likely just fly as a ZFS host.
posted at: 17:33 | path: /solaris | permanent link to this entry
I've been away from blogging for a bit. I started blogging due to some encouragement from the OpenSolaris pilot crew and Jim Grisanzio, but then the OpenSolaris launch was so amazingly full of life and expert blogging, I didn't feel like there was much more to say. But life has settled down a little bit and perhaps I will be able to find the time.
So what's new? Well, lots of things... apologies for a 'portmanteau' blog post, I will behave myself and categorise entries properly following this one.
On the Solaris front I recently dipped my toe into Solaris x86. Previously over about 10 years of using Solaris, I had never seen or logged into an x86 incarnation. I converted an old Linux machine I had lying around unused and got b27a installed fairly easily. Netbooting, loopback filesystems and endian-neutral DVD images should make this all extremely convenient for the well-organised, however for hardware where it's unknown whether the OS will install, I prefer good old fashioned CD images. After all if there is a good chance that the install may fail at any point, then it makes sense to sit and babysit the process... so then feeding in CDs every few images is not much additional hassle. That's my excuse anyway.
The nominal reason for all this was I wanted to play with ZFS and the machine seemed like a nice target since it has 4 scsi drives. I got as far as making a mirrored pool and filesystem and mounting it and creating a txt file. It really is as simple as the blogs from the ZFS team claim. Very impressive. I plan to use the mirrored space for my most critical files - my documents, email, programming projects and digital photos. I've been distracted from getting any further by problems with the X11 configuration (naturally, I always have problems with this it seems) and also the NIC configuration.
The machine has a genuine DEC Tulip chipset 10/100 ethernet card, which unfortunately cannot be persuaded to run at anything better than 10Mb half-duplex under Solaris. Fairly horrible for a machine I am prepping to be a fileserver. I tried various setting in /kernel/drv/dnet.conf including a reconfiguration boot each time, but to no avail.
First impressions are that Solaris x86 on this machine, in its default install, is a bit of a dog. Slow to start, slow to shut down and not that snappy in between. However, I am sure this is partly because lazily installing the entire set of software on a machine with only 256MB RAM, as I did, makes no sense. It was a first install, I plan to do it again when a ZFS enabled build makes it to an official Solaris 10 point release, or perhaps Solaris 11 comes out. And ... yes, I did know that I could pick and choose the packages myself if I wanted to. For a first install the urge is always to finish the job and she what the machine can do.
On the other hand, Solaris nicely recognized both SCSI host adapters and didn't barf when it noticed the IDE channel is idle. Yes, this is a PC with nothing connected to the IDE controller : SCSI hard disks, SCSI cd-burner, SCSI tape drive, SCSI zip drive. Has an original Athlon 750Mhz slot-A cpu. In 2001 this was something of a dream machine in my eyes.
For my trusty Sun Blade 1000 I upgraded the backup facilities. As much as my DDS3 drive gave good service, a Quantum DLT7000 is a significant step up. I managed to get a factory refurb with very low hours on the heads for about $300 on Ebay. 35GB native capacity and DLT tapes have a bit more reassuring heft and solidity than DAT tapes. Some people apparently feel that the non-helical-scan formats are a more reliable choice for backups, I wouldn't know, but choice is always useful. I can for example backup up selections from that machine to cheap, ubiquitous DDS3 media, but occasionally do an archival level 0 dump to good old DLT tape and put it away for safekeeping.
Other stuff I'll blog :
Made Out of Babies played NorthSix last Saturday 7/23/05. The gig went pretty well, and featured the New York City premier of their latest song "Gunt".
No, I don't know what it means! It's kind of dreamy and hypnotic in part, chaotic in others with a chugging beat.
Once again I filmed the gig, and hope to share the results with the band at some point. Picture quality came out so-so due to low, mostly red light. Sounds quality not bad, varies depending on where I was standing. As requested I tried to get some footage from towards the back to show that, yes, there is an audience at these gigs!
New, non-album tracks now in the can include Gunt, Space Patoozy, Tractor, Fed and Out (Full Version).
I'm not a music writer, but here's my take :
I was thrilled to see a preview screening of Star Wars Episode III this afternoon. I had to take a 1/2 day off work but it was worth it.
I'd go along with a lot of what has been written in the favorable reviews, and also some of the negative ones.
The only thing left to say is the bits that I noticed that I hadn't read about already. Don't read any further if you are avoiding spoilers!
My feeling is George Lucas did not wimp out as much as I expected him to. He's bridged the two trilogies amazingly well, and ultimately it was about as good as it possibly could have been.
He also seemed to expand his own range, managing to intermix truly political observations with farce and physical humor.
I heard that Steven Spielberg cried at the end, and in a different setting i might have come close myself. Certainly the film made me sad. I knew a lot of Jedi weren't going to make it, but I wasn't ready for most of them to be summarily shot in the back. I also hadn't considered that there are Jedi kids at the academy.
Lucas' dialog is as bad as ever, I now like to think that in fact
they didn't speak English a long time ago in a galaxy far far away,
so in fact everything spoken in the film has been translated at
least once, possibly many times. In fact, once you accept that, the
dialog makes absolutely perfect sense. One day maybe someone will
fix it, with an idiomatic overdubbing, but until then we must make
do with flat computer generated dictionary speak dialog. It's a
small price to pay.
posted at: 22:22 | path: /films | permanent link to this entry
I'm now on my second high-def movie editing project.
I am starting to understand how it works a bit better. The slowness during importing is not because my laptop can't receive the data in real-time from the camera. That's no problem at all, as if you watch the LCD on the camera you see the footage replaying smoothly. Instead it seems to be the transcoding from HDV format (http://www.hdv-info.org/) to Apple Intermediate Codec format, since even after the tape stops, the laptop spends several more hours churning away doing something.
The first time I realised this is how it works I not only pressed stop on the camera as soon as the footage finished, and then disconnected the firewire cable so I could put the camera away (it's not something I like to leave out where it could attract Lucy's attention). Unfortunately, soon after this the laptop noticed the disconnect and killed the import operation retaining only the footage it had finished converting. This seems like a bug to me!
Not wanting to splice together two sections of footage from the continuous source, I deleted my project and reimported. The second attempt wasn't anywhere near done by 11.30pm so I left it running overnight.
The next morning, I came down to find the laptop hard drive near full, with the films clips totalling about 35 minutes - not the full 40 minutes. iMovie HD seems to graciously refuse to take the hard disk to 100% full, instead leaving a few hundred megs out of my original 25GB or so free space.
Editing a large file like this which used up nearly the last few megs of the drive is where even iMovie starts to breakdown. It turns out that the raw filesystem performance for that file can get down as low as 1-2MB/s as observed in the Apple "Activity Monitor" application. This causes iMovie to give up trying to replay the video, so editing becomes near impossible. I was forced to move the files to my external firewire hard drive, which isn't that fast, but is massively faster when it has 50GB free on it than my laptop drive with 500MB!
I eventually struggled through this project on my laptop, but it's clear I'm going to need some serious hardware!
posted at: 22:20 | path: /movie-making | permanent link to this entry
Sony HDR-FX1 - report on my first project
I shot a rock gig to start with to get a feel for this camera. At nearly five pounds, I don't expect to be able to hand-hold it for very long without the $300 brace (which I don't have) so instead I bought a general purpose tripod and took a rather static approach. I'm viewing this project as something of a test, however it turned out quite well and provided a lot of useful answers to questions I'd been wondering about.
I used a regular Mini-DV tape, not the special 63 minute Sony HDV tapes (which appear to be just high-spec Mini-DV tapes anyway). I didn't suffer any dropouts, but if I start to I might invest in the high-grade tapes for "events" like this. Regular tapes, plus regular cleaning, make more sense for experimenting. After all if I get a bit of a dropout filming something I can film again later, it's less of a big deal.
Taking a $3400 camera to a punk rock gig in Manhattan made me a little nervous - I don't even have a case for it yet - so I put it in a plastic shopping bag and just took VERY good care of it!
On the other hand, something so big is a little unusual in such circumstances, especially on a tripod. When people came and stood right in my shot I just tapped them on the shoulder and pointed to the camera. They mostly moved like they'd been stung. I had no right, of course, but if they hadn't even seen the camera and didn't mind moving, well then it worked out. The one person who wasn't so impressed turned out to be half of the headline act - Gil Mantera's Party Dream - whoops, sorry! I'll have to make it up to them...
One thing I have struggled with on these types of shoots is the volume level. Basically these gigs are too loud to record on the built-in mic of my other camera, the DCR-TRV70, so I've had to use a decent quality plug-in powered microphone.
My first question was how is the manual sound level control on the FX-1. So far my answer is "mixed". I used the manual dial and the onscreen levels to adjust the sensitivity, but firstly it's not clear how high the peaks should be - all the way across? Half-way? Maybe this is in the manual, but I haven'd found it. I took a guess and set them to peak at about 75%, but from the soundtrack I ended up with, I would say perhaps this was too high. Next time I will probably try again with my external mic, but anyway my results were :
But I know this not the interesting bit. Audio recording isn't going through quite such an unheaval as the transition from SD to HD and 4:3 to 16:9. The big question is : what's the picture like?
It'd be nice to just post samples, but I haven't shared my results with the band yet, and since they haven't approved any video for release anyway, I'm not about to (but I'm working on it).
The answer though, is this : The picture quality of the Sony HDR-FX1 is absolutely freaking amazing. When I plugged the camera into our Sony TV and played it back for my wife and some guests, everyone was astonished. Colors, detail, lack of low-light artifacts. It has to be seen to be believed. It's kind of unbelievable. I'm glad I did the right thing, I bought one to find out for myself, because trying to be 100% certain it's a good buy by reading the web is a bit like learning about beer from chemistry textbooks. I made a "normal" DVD and I am thrilled with the results (not the audio, my camera-work or editing, but just the sheer image quality). For a rock gig in a tiny venue on the Lower East Side (small, cramped, poorly lit), it's beyond good value for money.
And now some "tech notes" for the truly interested.
These figures point to some of the downsides of the "HD Revolution". My laptop struggled to import the footage, running at 1/4 - 1/8 real-time speed. I'm sure that can't be good for the tape drive in the camera.
When I opened up iMovie with the resulting monster 19GB file, it complained that I need 1GHz cpu for HD (my powerbook is 867MHz). Doing very basic editing of the footage into chapters for each song worked perfectly well, but then when I output to iDVD, the rendering literally took all night. I had to put my laptop on a wireframe cookie cooler that I have, as I was afraid it would break (again) from getting so hot.
Some stuff is a bit more sensible though. For example, it is not actually necessary to own a high-def TV to start working with high-def footage - we don't for instance. When I connected my camera up, I just used the composite video cable, and it "just worked". Clearly it just puts out a non-high-def, but still widescreen signal, and the TV had no problem (Sony WEGA 32-inch).
I'm sure there are people who have put off "going high-def" until they can get an "end-to-end" solution, but in my view there is no need. My workflow is all regular definition for playback, but the extra definition is not impossibly intrusive and I am able to start accumulating raw footage in HD. As time goes by, I'll get the HDTV for living room playback, the "high-def Mac" for editing, and the HDDVD or Blu-Ray burner for making high-def DVDs, but by then my daughter will be a few years older and the bands I'm filming could be famous (or retired and flipping burgers) - I wont be able to go back in time and re-capture high-def versions of past events, and in the meantime, I'm getting better results in regular definition anyway.
High-Def : The Time is Now!
More links : CamcorderInfo.com
posted at: 00:03 | path: /movie-making | permanent link to this entry
I bought myself a new video camera. It's a Sony HDR-FX1. I've got a lot to learn before I can really try it out. In the meanwhile, here are some of the writeups on it that persuaded me this is the one for me
For now, though, I think the overwhelming impression is "that's a lot of
buttons!".
posted at: 21:16 | path: /movie-making | permanent link to this entry