Advanced Theory

Transcript Manager Pro is almost released and I couldn't be happier! I was worried we were going to come uber close to our release deadline, have little to no testing done and have major P1 bugs that needed fixing. Thanks to some luck and planning we're going to actually have time to enjoy the release.

Apple has our presentations up and confirmed for Century City and San Fransisco. Just a few more days and we'll see if all the work pays off.

I thought this video regarding resizing of images using an algorithmic processes was brilliant. Resizing is determined by figuring out sections with the least energy. If I understand this, mathematically a gradient is taken from connected pixels starting from the border of the resize direction. Protected image areas and additional information can be embedded to assist the algorithm. Take a look:

Potentially big news on the next-gen player front. Paramount and Dreamworks have decided to release exclusively on HD-DVD (except for movies by Steven Spielberg which are format-neutral). Privately, I predicted about 6 months before a player for either format was released that HD-DVD would win out purely based on format's lower cost to produce, the ability to put DVDs on HD-DVD discs (consumer insurance) and lower costs to produce players. This announcement combined with the predicted sub-$200 player by Q4 and HD-DVD could pick up enough momentum to steam-roll over Blu-Ray.

Why would I want a huge table in my living room? Wouldn't it be better if it were a home automation system that integrated with televisions already placed throughout my house? I honestly can't see a homeowner ever buying one of these unless they're REALLY into Ms. Pac-man. Maybe they'll make this mobile with a foldable OLED screen and put some really cool board games on it and drop the price to a few hundred by 2025!

With everyone falling over themselves to talk about how great AppleTV is I still find myself really disappointed with my choices in integrating the digital home. Sure AppleTV gives you a glorified iPod connected to your TV, but what about streaming media from your AV closet / AV center to any TV in your house? I designed my house to do this over a year ago and it cost me almost six hundred bucks just to send a composite and component signal over my cat6 cabling and another hundred bucks for an audio balun. When somebody lets me take a live signal and send it over the wire through the reliability of TCP/IP then I'll look at these devices again. I mean, what's the point if I have to record and transcode my media before I send it to my AppleTV? I've already wired my home with Cat6 and I'd like to be able to hook in my DVD players, computer or other media devices into cat6 and deliver this programming to my TVs. LinuxMCE is the closest I've seen to converging all of my equipment to a single location and I plan to install it later this year after I run a HDMI cable to my plasma.

Since I've bought my DS and Wii I've had a lot of fun with gaming. I still use my Xbox to play Halo 2 (pretty regularly in fact) and I love the franchise so much I'm sure the next console I purchase will be the Xbox 360. But this idea by Playstation called "Home" really caught my attention. It is exactly what I've wanted ever since I was a kid dreaming about having a 3d world as an operating system. Take a look