Podcasting What Geeks Really Want To Hear

Episode 57 URLs & Notes
Friday, June 29, 2007

Episode 57 URLs & Notes (MP3) (AAC)

posted by Nem W Schlecht at 00:52 in General,Podcast    
Ep.#56 Follow-up: Scripts
Sunday, June 17, 2007

Here’s the ‘rename.pl’ script I mentioned in Ep. #56, originally written my Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington in “The Perl Cookbook” (Chapter 9.9, Renaming Files, O’Reilly, 1999)

#!/usr/local/bin/perl


# Usage: rename perlexpr [files]


($op = shift) || die “Usage: rename perlexpr [filenames]\n”;


if (!@ARGV) {

    @ARGV = ;

    chop(@ARGV);

}

for (@ARGV) {

    $was = $_;

    eval $op;

    next if (-e $_);

    die $@ if $@;

    rename($was,$_) unless $was eq $_;

}

Note: I added the 3rd line in the for loop, “next if (-e $_);” to prevent clobbering already existing files.

Some common cases where I use this:


    Lowercase all filenames:
    • rename.pl ‘tr/A-Z/a-z/’ *

    Change spaces to underscores:

    • rename.pl ‘s/\s/_/g’ *

    Change JPEG to jpg:

    • rename.pl ‘s/\.jpeg$/\.jpg/i’ *.jpeg

    Zero pad numbers in filenames (ie. ‘blah_1.jpg’ to ‘blah_01.jpg’):

    • rename.pl ‘s/_(\d)\./_$1\./’ *

    Clean up pesky downloads:

    • rename.pl ‘s/.xvid//i’ *
    • rename.pl ‘s/.hdvt//i’ *

    Clean up filenames:

    • rename.pl “s/\’//” *
    • rename.pl ‘s/\”//’ *
    • rename.pl ‘s/[\s,_]//’ *

posted by Nem W Schlecht at 15:25 in General    
Episode 56 URLs & Notes
Friday, June 15, 2007

Episode 56 URLs & Notes (MP3) (AAC)

posted by Nem W Schlecht at 14:21 in General,Podcast    
Right up our alley: ‘The List’: Open Source Advocates Unleash Fury at Microsoft
Wednesday, May 23, 2007

You might be suprised that I’m writing this, after all, I’m the official MSFT guy that’s on this podcast/blog, but I think its important to note both what the argument is here and its ramifications on the war between Open Source and Commercial Software, especially Microsoft.

The article ‘The List’: Open Source Advocates Unleash Fury at Microsoft drives the point home that the Open Source Software (OSS) communitiy is tired of being called ‘criminals’ by one of the most aggressive corporations in the world. While MSFT has been both pardoned and convicted of crimes, no one argues with the fact they’ve been aggressive in what ever their pursuits are. This time, they may have been pushing too hard and too long on the “open source software is stealing from the world economy” shtick.

I for one, am glad that the OSS community is finding a way to fight back, using the very core of what has made the OSS community strong, by using their collective voice to say we would love to get into fight and prove your (MSFT) assumptions wrong.

MSFT may have deep pockets, but they’re going to have a hard time fighting what they’ve chose not too enforce on other vendors, if their claims are true. They’re going to have to “put up or shut up” as they say. Well, there’s always a clever PR / marketing move that could get them out of this. And, honestly, that’s exactly what they’re going to do. They won’t risk being proven wrong to prove a point to the OSS community. They’ll lay low until it all blows over and pick some other minor fight to start with the OSS folks.

–Chris
Resident MSFT guy
http://www.labrat.com (sorely out of date)

posted by cgrant at 14:50 in General    
Episode 55 URLs & Notes
Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Episode 55 URLs & Notes (MP3) (AAC)

posted by Nem W Schlecht at 02:07 in General,Podcast    
Episode 54 URLs & Notes
Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Episode 54 URLs & Notes (MP3) (AAC)

posted by Nem W Schlecht at 22:43 in General,Podcast    
Episode 53 URLs & Notes
Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Episode 53 URLs & Notes (MP3) (AAC)

posted by Nem W Schlecht at 22:43 in General,Podcast    
NAB 2007: My Recap
Wednesday, April 18, 2007

NAB2007

I am aware everyone new of Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, and pretty much all of the broadcast and new media industry were going to see some big things launched at NAB this year. Was that the case? Oh, YES! I am happy to had been there to see all these new applications, tools and hardware.

Many people do not agree with the upgrades or new offerings of many new products, but I must disagree with them, for the following products have many, many tricks under their sleeves, and I was really impressed for what I saw:

1. Final Cut Studio 2: I could go in detail about many of the new upgrades to FCP but in reality, I am amazed at two things with this upgrade, Motion 3 and Color. To see Motion move into the 3D space in all of its parameters, filters, particles and even with replicator is just impressive. And, the nice addition to the FCP suite is Color, an application that is so advance for all color calibrating and finishing and it is all up to 4:4:4 32bit float processing.

2. Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium: From this collection three of the applications that had many upgrade were:

Adobe Photoshop CS Extended with streamline 2d/3D compositing. You can place, manipulate, change lighting/rendering options, and edit the textures of 3D models. Supports 32-bit HDR. New tools in Camera Raw 4. And vanishing point is just amazing at creating perspective 3D output from a 2D image and then exporting it to After Effects CS3 Professional where you just select the areas and can create a fly-around animation, really nice. And, Flash CS3 UI was incorporated and it looks more integrated to CS3 suite, so its tools and palettes are more ‘Adobe’ like Photoshop/AfterEffects. You can now import a Photoshop file and all of its layers will be sent to Flash layers with its respective names, and if you have layers grouped in a folder in Photoshop, you can import them as MC (MovieClips) inside Flash. ActionScript turns 3.0 and now video-encoding and playback is more advanced and has options as deinterlacing.

And we had a sneak peak at Adobe’s new Media Player. YES, a new player to the market, and while many of you may think, What are they talking about, Willis? I would respond, Microsoft Media Player, be affraid, very affraid. Because as most of us know, which format is the most used one in video playback on the web? No Quicktime, No WMV, but FLASH Video! Maybe that’s the reason Microsoft launched Silverlight, would this be as succesful as Zune? BTW, What’s is Zune?
3. A new Photoshop/FCP Plugin or Stand Alone Application that I saw was DFX by Tiffen Filters. If you’re a professional in the film and photography arenas, you know that some of the best polarizer and such other filters is Tiffen, they are expensive, but they are great. They launched an applucation named DFX, and when you see what this application can do to images, I would say it is amazing. Certainly it is an addition to Lightroom, Photoshop and Aperture, and a great addition.

4. One of the most talked about products and companies at the NAB was definitely Red Digital Cinema Camera’s product RED ONE, an amazing Digital 4K camera that is affordable and highly configurable. They also have their own codec: RED CODE that works great in FCP. The Camera’s package prices start at $ 17,500.00 This is a really affordable high end camera. People that wanted to see it were willing to wait in line throught the show for even up to an hour and a half ( I used my time to eat and read a lot of spec. sheets)

There were plenty of things to see, but really there is no way to walk through out 4 Million square feet of booths and displays. And to sift through more than 120,000 people is just so overwhelming in anly four days, but in any case I just wanted to mention a lighting company, that I hope many pople got a chance to view at the show, It is Element Labs, and they have a great product: Kelvin. I had been looking for a set of Flashes in the past six months, I do not want to spend a lot of money, and I want it to be portable and affordable. I had been looking at fluorescent tubes and banks, since they are cool and also are great for soft looks, and then I see this little brick that is only 6×1.7×2.3 in. that contains INTELLIGENT WHITE LIGHT SOURCE. Yes, indeed, it is a brick with an array of 5×17 ‘pixels’ or sources of light, but it is not only white light, it is an intelligent LEDthat provide unlimited variable color temperature settings and maintain a color rendering index(CRI) of 95 between 3200K and 6500K, resulting in extremely high-quality light. And unlike traditional light products, color temp remeins consistent throughout the full range of intensity variation. This brick provides 40 foot candles @ 3.3 feet. You can control it using a remote control or via software. And the price is only USD650.00
If you have any questions about NAB2007, send them to me, I did the best to visit most talked about companies and products, but I also visited many new comers.

posted by Ludvik at 13:10 in General    
Joost successfully run on Apple TV : JoostTeam.com
Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Joost successfully run on Apple TV : JoostTeam.com

FYI, from joostteam.com;

tutorialninjas.net has reported success in running Joost on the Apple TV. There are currently some problems with fonts but I am sure this will be fixed in a near future… right? What does this mean? Once Joost goes live you will get free, unlimited TV experience in your living room for less than 300$… plus what Apple TV currently offers you:

posted by Nem W Schlecht at 18:31 in General    
Episode 52 URLs & Notes
Thursday, March 22, 2007

Episode 52 URLs & Notes (MP3) (AAC)

posted by Nem W Schlecht at 22:10 in General,Podcast    
« Previous Page — Next Page »

24 queries. 0.497 seconds.