The real steel version of the weapon that Colonel Yevgeny Borisovitch Volgin used in Metal Gear Solid 3.
Archive | Blog
RSS feed for this sectionBlog Posts.
Kevin Rudd on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
Kevin Rudd
Image: ABC Television
On Firefox 3.5, HTML 5, and The Third Great Format War…
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have noticed that Firefox 3.5 was released.
With it, came the mainstream acceptance of HTML 5, the new web standard – and as a direct result of that, XHTML is effectively dead.
What’s most interesting about HTML 5 is the new <video> tag, however – allowing web content people (what’s their name again?) to embed videos directly without using clunky <object> or <embed> tags.
About time, too. Video is now more prevalent than ever on the internet, and the widespread usage of sites such as YouTube just goes to show just how popular such sites are. Even Flickr, a primarily still-photo based site, are now incorporating video features into their lineup.
Now, about this format war…
So the story goes a little like this…
Right now, the common way to include video on the web is by use of Flash, a closed-source technology. The answer to this is the HTML5 video tag, which allows you to embed video into HTML pages without the use of Flash or any other non-HTML technology; combined with open video codecs, this could provide the perfect opportunity to further open up and standardize the web.
via Slashdot.
The problem lies in which codec they’re going to use for this video. Mozilla, along with the rest of the open-source community, think it should be something open-source, such as the Ogg Theora codec which is based on open-source standards. The issue is that not all parties in the browser war agrees – Apple and Microsoft, in particular are against the move to use an open-source codec. Being the large corporations that they are, they want to use their own patented codecs. As they’re not a small portion of the browser market, Mozilla can’t simply ignore them and implement Ogg as the primary codec for the <video> tag in HTML5 (paraphrased from Slashdot comments).
So the question is: why don’t all the parties do what Chrome is doing and just support both proposed formats (H.264 and Ogg Theora) at the same time? In my opinion, this would undoubtedly be the way to go. The issue here is that “Safari won’t support Ogg Theora and Firefox and Opera won’t support H.264 — doesn’t mean you can’t support all three browsers. It just means that to support all three, you need to include at least two <source> elements within the <video> tag, one pointing to an H.264-encoded file, the other to an Ogg Theora file” (thanks to John Gruber for that one.)
That having been said and done, pleas enjoy the video below, whichever browser you happen to be using 🙂
Okay, scratch that idea. Either I just fail at using the <video> tag, or WordPress doesn’t like it, or something. I can play video just fine on the Firefox demo page, but Firefox itself doesn’t seem to want to play ogg video from any page that I create. I’ll just go now…
A WTF counter? I’ll take two.
As in any office, my co-workers and I experience several WTF-Situations during our working day. So we decided to implement a simple system to count the WTF’s and use them as a metric for our working climate 🙂
we use an “emergency stop”-Button which is connected to an arduino. This arduino sends the string “WTF” on the serial line a little python scrip writes them to a file, another processing app count’s the lines in the file and offers the result via http, which is read by a processing app for visualisation …
Awesome Post-It Stopmotion!
This is my senior project at Savannah College of Art and Design. Where my idea comes from is that every time when I am busy, I feel that I am not fighting with my works, I am fighting with those post-it notes and deadline. I manipulating the post-it notes to do pixel-like stop motion and there are some interactions between real actor and post-its.
Facebook > MySpace? You’re a racist.
Abandon your MySpace account for Facebook? You might just be a racist.
[…]
Referring to MySpace as the “ghetto of the digital landscape,” Boyd indicated that MySpace users are more likely to be “brown or black” and espouse a different set of ideals in conflict with those espoused by the teens she surveyed over four years. She said that patterns in migration across social networking sites echoed those of a white exodus from cities in the past. Boyd also said that teens who use Facebook are more likely to condescend their MySpace-favoring peers.
via MySpace now a “digital ghetto” | TransCosmic – the ongoing journey;.
WTF.
I am, however, somewhat inclined to agree with some of the arguments – Facebook can generally be seen as the “rich man’s MySpace”, the social network for those who put some sort of value into their personal networks. Facebook is generally considered to be a “better, more refined” version of MySpace, too.