Month: April 2004

Real, no longer evil..?

Russell Beattie Notebook
Russell makes some good points about how Real is starting to change it’s game. Here is an interesting snippet:
But check it out! Funnily enough, in addition to 3GP support, Real has added TiVo-like cacheing to the new player as well! I was listening to KQED at work today, and I paused the station while I did something else, and when I came back and hit play, I expected Real to re-buffer as normal and grab the latest from the stream. But nope, it had been cacheing the stream the entire time and I was able to go back and forth through the recorded audio and didn’t miss a thing. VERY COOL.

Now THESE are TV’s

transvision
Chekout the Flash version of this site as well: http://www.transvision.us/
From the site:
Transvision’s intent is to change you’re relationship with what you are seeing rather than simply mindlessly relaying information. Each of the fully functional televisions proffers new prototypes for watching and reconceptualizing our ideas about television. These new schemes of interface problematize the act of watching TV by imbedding interaction into a medium traditionally resolved to the goal of complacency. The individual transformations in Transvision expose the power of the mediating object, reanimating both the content and the viewer while cutting through the static and stasis of media. Whatever you do, don’t sit back and relax.

Crazy networked and responsive environment

RIPLfield info
From the description:
… it consists of light and soundscapes which respond to the actions of people in the environment and remote data from a second environment in new york city. the project is a collaboration between students and instructors at the technical university of berlin and parsons school of design in new york.

Script your video compositing and other processing

iMagine Video
From the site:
A powerful image processing tool for AppleScript that uses Apple’s Quicktime, Quickdraw and Quartz technologies.
iMagine Video is a compositing tool for images, movie frames, shapes and text for AppleScript. iMagine Video provides comprehensive exif and IPTC support for image files and comes with example scripts and AppleScript droplets for the typical image file processing of scaling, cropping and rotating.

A peek inside the Google datacenters

Topix.net Weblog: The Secret Source of Google’s Power
From the entry:
Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It’s a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup.