OSNews

Why is it that I’m still a little freaked out by flying? Even I, a staunch logician aware of the safety statistics, am still creeped out by every bump and drop? Why?

My mother, Barbara, is showing us how to cook macaronopita (also makaronopita), a pasta-based Greek pie recipe. One of the best foods to take with you on picnics or trips.

Shot with a cheap Kodak V1233 digicam. The video has no editing niceties or direction, it’s just a point-and-shoot handheld video at my mother’s kitchen. HD version here.

Sony Vegas Platinum 9, released a few days ago, is the most flexible consumer video editor out there. To me, it’s the best bang for the buck editor for the $85 it costs. Sony added full customization support on its h.264 encoder now, it has full 1920×1080 read/write AVCHD support, better HDV support and more. If you are looking for a cheap editor that’s full featured and not “dumb and drop” like iMovie or Ulead, then this is the one for you.

I have two problems with Platinum 9 though:

1. The newly added “new project” wizard. I think the wizard was a good idea, but the screen where it asks you what kind of project you want (e.g. DVD, Blu-Ray etc), is the worst thing ever. I really don’t understand how Sony could make such a tragic usability and technical error. You see, it’s very easy for someone to pick the DVD option while his/her source video is HD. Problem is, when this person comes back to that project weeks or months later and wants an HD export, several elements in the timeline will not automatically adjust to the new resolution (e.g. the text frame sizes must be changed manually throughout the video if the project properties change). Let alone that most people don’t know in the first place that they must adjust the project properties before export in HD (and that can lead to massive quality loss). To add to that, editing in a non-native resolution/frame rate, has up to 50% speed decrease in overall performance. So what the hell was Sony thinking when introduced this wizard that asks what your target export is? Don’t they know that people export in more than one formats/targets? Don’t they know that most people don’t even use the project properties? Don’t they know that performance goes down? Thankfully, for those few of us who know, there is still the “match media” icon in the project properties dialog. Moral of the story: always edit in the native properties of your video. Decide how to export at the very end. All Sony needed to do in the wizard was to launch the “match media” procedure instead of the “how do you want to export” dialog.

2. After enough bickering, Sony added 1920×1080 AVCHD export in the free update v9.0a (the original v9.0 didn’t support this). Unfortunately, the AVCHD “custom” export screen still doesn’t let you specify 24p even if it easily could let you do that (23.976 frame rate and progressive field order, that is). Consumer camcorders like the Panasonic SD9 support such formats. While this omission doesn’t affect everybody, there is no workaround.

If Sony fixes these two issues, I think we are looking at a near-perfect consumer editor.

A few new TV shows start this season, some of them might turn to be interesting as it seems to be a trend to have a sci-fi/fantasy elements in them, although they certainly are rehashes of older ideas we’ve seen before:

* Crusoe. A guy shipwrecked on a tropical island tries to make it back home.
* Eleventh Hour. A tech/science-type detective. Obviously a crime drama geared towards geeks.
* Fringe. An X-Files/Alias type of paranormal drama. Might make it big, might not.
* Kings. The biblical story about David, but set in our time and world.
* Knight Rider. This one is going to suck, just like its preview movie did.
* Life on Mars. Yet another detective drama, but this one has some time travel elements. Remake of a BBC drama.
* The Mentalist. Another detective story. Between “Psyche” and “Life” last year, we’ve seen it all before.
* My Own Worst Enemy. Multiple-personalities spy thriller.
* Dollhouse. Multiple-personalities spy thriller. You read that right.

I’m a firm believer in the fact that boys should always remain boys. At least, during some moments. Told you I’d buy it. And build it. In 6 hours.

110 EUR. Am I crazy? Of course I am. That’s why everyone loves me.

* Back from Greece. Too long of an overall flight time for my taste (15 hours, 3 flights one of which had a stop).

* To everyone who is looking for a business idea: bubble-bursting touchscreen device for babies. My 8-month niece would usually throw away her normal-looking toys after 15 seconds — she quickly grew bored with them. But when I gave her the iPhone… with the iPhone she was totally surprised. She wouldn’t stop bursting bubbles with the two such iPhone bubble games I had installed in it. Especially with the one of them, where she could use more than one finger on the screen at the time, she wouldn’t stop playing! Now, that’s a toy for smart babies!

* I am thinking of growing some tomatoes on our balcony. I got jealous of the nice tomatoes I had in Greece during my stay from our vegetable garden.

* My mom prepared and cooked some kokoretsi for us. That’s most of the animal internals, well-cleaned, and tangled together. Then, roasted.

* This was the first time that I felt that I didn’t want to leave Greece after being vacating there for a few days. I was happy there.

Geeks.com sent over this nice mp3 player, an iPod Nano look alike. It costs just $35, which is a very fair price for 4 GB storage.

The device has a 1.7″ passive matrix color LCD, an FM radio with station bookmarking option, a speaker on the back side, a normal headphone jack, a microphone, a mini-USB interface for both data and recharging, and 5 buttons on the front. There is no “hold” button on the player, but instead the buttons are rigid enough to prevent accidental clicking in most cases.

The player supports mp3 and WMA audio files, and it also has support for JPEG picture viewing, an e-book, tel-book, and video player. Unfortunately, there is no documentation to tell us how to create and use the right formats the e-book, tel-book and video player. I tried both as WMV v8 and XViD at small resolutions/frame rate/bitrates, but nothing worked. The manual says nothing about what kind of videos exactly it supports which makes it impossible to guess it right.

The audio screens are pretty good, but dated in terms of design. Nevertheless, it supports an equalizer, replay, shuffle etc. Unfortunately, there is a buzzing noise when the audio interface is up or you listen to low-volume music. This usually happens when cheap electronics are used.

The overall speed of the device is good, although the flash storage is very slow. It took minutes to copy a few songs over, much slower even than USB 1.1. Battery life is pretty low too, just 4.5 hours compared to iPod Nano’s 24 hours (plus, the Nano is even thinner than this player). On the plus side, the power adapter it comes with has a full USB port, so you can use the same adapter to charge other devices too (in my case, a cellphone and a Kodak digicam).

Now, all things fair, the player does the job. It doesn’t have the good interface and usability design or better hardware of an Apple product, but then again it’s much, much cheaper and if you are not a person who wants perfection out of such a gadget, this player will suffice. I gave this player to my brother and he liked it anyway. He said he prefered it over his cellphone-based music entertainment while at work.

Rating: 6/10

I found this interesting link today from a renowned foodie’s blog.

Not too bad. 46/100. I’d love to see some readers’ or OSNewser’s results.

Perl programmers,

Moose roles give a really nice way of maximizing code reuse within an object system, while favoring composition over inheritance. This makes for shallower inheritance trees, reduced method dispatch spaghettification, and a more comprehensible, maintainable, extensible codebase overall. Revel in the glory.

That is all.

Everyday, I’m a little more amazed and impressed by Facebook. The way it works, the way information is connected is just so useful and really smart.

First of all, I am simply blown away at the “friend suggestions” that Facebook offers me. I am constantly seeing people I really do know or names I recognize. I understand it’s probably not a very complex algorithm - see who my friends have recently friended who is not on my friend list and present them to me - but you know what? - it works. And that other site is miles behind, tech-wise.

I’ve also noticed that the number of people in my age group on Facebook is seemingly tripling every day.  I can’t believe the people I’m coming across these days - people I haven’t even thought of in over a decade are cropping up regularly.  And the fact that the “mini-feed” is keeping me informed of what they do via pictures and blurbs is just genius.

There are plenty of concerns about Facebook, from their Beacon debacle to the privacy issues to the data mining they are presumably doing, but the truth is that they are providing an amazing service in the meantime.

In the past few days, I’ve had some really interesting conversations pop up on some photos I posted.  The interesting part is that these are people, in some cases, I haven’t spoken to in years, and others I still talk to, but in all cases, it feels like a mini reunion.  I get to keep up with my friends easily.  I’ve not experienced another social network that has delivered like this, for me.

You wanna know what I’m gonna buy tomorrow?

This.

I so totally earned it for facing my demons.

I just recently started listening to the podcast done by the guys at RailsEnvy. It's an excellent resource for keeping up on what's new in the Rails world and it's how I found out about the new acts_as_xapian search plugin for Rails. The podcast mentioned this blog post which contains a very thorough rundown of all the different full-text search options currently available for rails. The timing of this article couldn't have been better since I was in the market for a new solution.

I was approaching a deadline on a client project here at End Point and I was having lots of trouble with my existing search solution which was acts_as_ferret. Setting up ferret was relatively easy and I was very impressed with the Lucene syntax that it supported. It seemed like a perfect a solution at first but then came "the troubles."

Ferret is extremely fragile. The slightest problem and your server will just crash. What was causing the crash? Unfortunately the server logs won't give you much help there. You will receive some cryptic message coming from the C++ library if you're lucky. Note that I skipped the suggested Drb server setup since this was a development box.

After a while I would notice something wrong in my model code that might have caused an error while updating the search index. Unfortunately this was impossible to verify since I could not predictably reproduce the error. So in the end, I think there may have been issues with my model fields but ferret was of no help in tracking these problems down. The final straw came when the client started testing and almost immediately crashed the server after doing a search.

Enter acts_as_xapian. Jim Mulholland's excellent tutorial was pretty much all I needed to get it up and running on my Mac. Documentation for acts_as_xapian is a bit thin. It consists primarily of the afore mentioned tutorial and a very detailed README. The mailing list is starting to become more active, however, and you are likely to get a response there to any thoughtful questions you might have.

One major difference with xapian (vs. ferret) is that it does not rebuild your index automatically with each model update. When you modify an ActiveRecord instance it will update the acts_as_xapian_jobs table with the id and model type of your record so that the index can be updated later. The index is then updated via a rake command that you can easily schedule via cron. You can also rebuild the entire index using a different rake command but that shouldn't really be necessary.

I was a bit concerned about the lack of a continuously updated index but I came to realize that it has some significant advantages. The biggest advantage is that it's much faster to update your model records since you are not waiting for the re-indexing to complete on the same thread. It also means you can skip the step of setting up a separate Drb server for ferret in your production environment.

With xapian you can index "related fields" in other models by constructing a pseudo-attribute in your model that returns the value of the associated model as a text string. Ferret allows you to do this as well, but unlike ferret, xapian gives excellent feedback about any mistakes you might have made while constructing them. If you have a nil exception somewhere in one of these related fields, xapian will complain and tell you exactly what line it's bombing out.

I was also able to setup paging for my search results with paginating_find which I prefer to will_paginate (just a personal preference -- nothing wrong with will_paginate). There is also a cool feature that will suggest other possible terms ("Did you mean?") if your search returns no results. So far the only disappointment has been the lack of an obvious way to do searches on specific fields.

If you are in the market for a new full-text search solution for Rails, you should really give xapian a try.

I come across really funny internet videos often, but this one is really too perfect.

Ryan Masters had his book review of the No Starch Press published over at OSNews.com. Sounds like it was a decent book.

Being multilingual is both a blessing and a curse. Especially right now, when I’m continually speaking and writing three different languages at the same time.

I’m on a short vacation in Germany visiting friends, so I’m speaking German with all the people around me. I phone home a few times a day, and send emails in Dutch to friends, so I still use my mad Dutch skillz. And obviously, I’m still ravaging through the depths of teh internets every day, using my superb comprehension of the routinely disorganised English language. Still wondering why on god’s sweet earth those pesky Americans decided to McDonaldise the Queen’s English.

Anyway, you can see how difficult it’s going to be to keep those three languages separate from one another. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve unknowingly reverted back to English while trying to construct a beautifully grammatically incorrect German sentence. Or the downpour of Dutch words intertwined in German-English geschichtes.

My thoughts are all messed up too. When I’m thinking of my Dutch friends, or I’m telling a story about them to my friends here in Germany, I see them wearing lederhosen while holding 1ltr beer glasses - and moustaches. Lots of moustaches. Even on women. Sorry Renate, I’m never getting that imagery out of my head.

I’ve seen you wearing lederhosen, while having a moustache. BEAT THAT, BART.