Author Archives: skullbochs

New Blog, and More Ogg

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Posted by skullbochs on 24 August 2009 – 6:42 pm
Filed under ain't that nifty
Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

As you may or may not know, I have a new blog, Being a Bad Ocelot. So far, I’ve used it to embed Ogg Theora videos.

I’m passionate about Theora. I want it to rule the Internet. The main thing that makes me confident that it will eventually do so is that it’s free. A lot of computer games now use Ogg Vorbis, the audio codec, internally because it gives great quality and doesn’t cost the company a dime to use it. When companies realize that they can stream Theora without paying an MPEG tax, I think they’ll start switching.

But some extra things need to heppen if we really want Theora to go mainstream. First, of course, Theora needs to keep getting better. If you’re good with video compression, you might want to volunteer to help improve it. Another thing is that major streaming video centers need to adopt it. Dailymotion already has, and I hope YouTube will. Browsers need to adopt it, too. For the most part they are: Firefox already has, and the next versions of Chrome and Opera will, as well. Safari can use Theora if you install the XiphQT plugins for QuickTime.

Some myths also need to be dispelled. First, yes, Theora is ready. It’s a good codec; not the best codec, but then, JPEG isn’t the best image format, either. But they get the job done, everybody can use them, and they don’t cost a dime.

Secondly, one thing that I think will make many people and companies hesitate about direct <video> embedding of any kind is that it will be easy to download them. But the fact is that it’s never been hard. Anything sent over the Internet can be captured en route — Safari has an “Activity Window” that logs all files coming in, even from Flash applets — and there are several sites and bookmarklets that let you easily download videos from YT, etc. If you really feel that you need to keep people from watching your videos offline, you really need to use something like Silverlight with its support for Microsoft’s DRM scheme. But considering major companies feel comfortable enough using YouTube (the easiest vid site to download from) to distribute entire shows and movies, some in HD, you may want reconsider whether you really stand to gain anything by making it hard for your users to download to your videos to their computer.

More on Theora, with some tips on using it: Working with Ogg Theora and the video tag.

Persuasio Neopragmatistorum

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Posted by skullbochs on 14 August 2009 – 3:55 pm
Filed under ain't that nifty
Tagged as ,

Credo vitae in poteste potestatis,
in quo vitae mundi noster confingamus.
Non sunt res, neque deis neque mensis, at
ea quod in linguis noster exprimamus.

In deis vel in mensis, alius credat.
Non oppono ego, si is non contradicat.
Nemo sed socios et me ipse praesto,
credo rebus in omnibus quod optimum est.

Wilber vs. Rorty on Anti-Reductionism

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Posted by skullbochs on 7 August 2009 – 7:21 pm
Filed under Uncategorized
Tagged as ,

One issue on which Ken Wilber and the late Richard Rorty agree is that reductionism, or scientism, is a bad way to look at the world. Both agree that natural science provides a poor guide on ethical, social, and spiritual matters. Both would, I think, agree that reductionistic accounts of what it is to be human are abhorrent and dehumanizing, and that they should be replaced with more robust accounts.

Where they would disagree, I think, is on whether such accounts are missing the obvious, overlooking features that are plain to see and so are not only less useful than some non-reductionistic accounts, but also intellectually irresponsible. Wilber would agree that this is so. Rorty, I think, would refuse to go so far.

Rorty eschewed any purely intellectual attempt to establish what entities exist. So he was dissatisfied by the reductionistic tendency to relegate, for example, tables to a kind of second-class citizenship, having existence only through their derivation from real entities such as electrons and quarks; or to deny the existence of some entities (such as spirits) not because we seem to have no use for them, but because they cannot be reduced to physical particles. For Rorty, there was simply no point to such tactics, and equally little point in the opposite tactics of chiding reductionists for supposedly missing out on the obvious.

For him, the question, “What exists?”, should be replaced by the question, “What is useful for us to talk about?” This is because the first question, taken as a question of absolute reality separate from appearances or practical utility, seems unanswerable. Our only reference for establishing what exists is to ask what seems to exist, which in practice isn’t a significantly different question from asking what is useful to talk about.

So where Wilber and similar anti-reductionists attack reductionism are both morally and intellectually irresponsible, Rorty would just stick to the first charge. I think this is because however much Wilber, etc. hate reductionism, they haven’t freed themselves from the hyperintellectualism that lead to reductionism in the first place.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

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Posted by skullbochs on 7 August 2009 – 3:37 pm
Filed under rantrantrant, well this sucks
Tagged as ,

I went to see the latest Harry Potter movie last night with my parents. It was Mom’s birthday, and she’s a die-hard HP fan. We had a good time, especially Mom. She and Dad loved the movie. Me? I thought it was majorly disappointing.

First, for a movie named after him, it tells you almost nothing about the Half-Blood Prince. Even knowing who he is now, I’m still not sure why I should care. So he was a great wizard. So he turned out to be _______. Nifty. Yawn.

The plot was completely rushed, almost to the point of not existing. I haven’t read the book, so I’m not complaining about what they left out from the book. I’m complaining that they didn’t put enough of anything into it to make it look like a story rather than a choppy sequence of scenes. This was especially bad towards the end, which didn’t feel climatic at all. Despite a major character dying at the hands of another major character and Harry learning how to finally defeat Voldemort and deciding not to go back to school the next year, I left the movie feeling like nothing really happened. They should have either expanded the movie to 3 hours or cut some of the annoying myspace-drama between Ron-Lavender-Hermione and used the time to fill in the gaps in the plot.

All in all, it felt like (at best) an overly-long prologue to Deathly Hollows, not like a full episode in the series.

And now for something completely different…

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Posted by skullbochs on 31 July 2009 – 4:27 am
Filed under ain't that nifty, something nice to look at
Tagged as , , ,
Guild cape for "Times New Gothic" -- My new guild in Guild Wars

Guild cape for “Times New Gothic” — my new guild in Guild Wars.

OggCast is on its way…

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Posted by skullbochs on 18 June 2009 – 5:35 pm
Filed under skullbochs radio
Tagged as , , , , ,

I promised a while back to do a podcast in Ogg Vorbis. I’m stilling going to do it, I’ve just been busy and haven’t had much time to do it. I already have the first episode drafted, and I’ll try to get around to it either tonight or tomorrow. I’m probably going to be using the Internet Archive for file hosting, and I think it takes a while for uploads to be approved, so expect the first episode by Saturday.

Update: I can’t find my draft for the first episode. I’m postponing the show until next week. Sorry.

2nd Update: I’m just going to postpone the show until Firefox 3.5 officially launches and I can be sure everyone has a chance to listen to it.

lilURL Bookmarklet

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Posted by skullbochs on 17 June 2009 – 10:23 am
Filed under ain't that nifty
Tagged as , , , , , ,

lilURL is a free URL shortening web app. It’s used by a number of sites, including ur1.ca, which was set up by the founder of identi.ca for use with that service. One of the problems with lilURL compared to other url shortening services is that it only accepts POST submissions, meaning that a simple bookmarklet like javascript:location.href="http://ur1.ca/?longurl="+document.URL won’t work.

Instead, you have to create an invisible form and submit it, like so:
javascript:myForm=document.createElement("form");myForm.style.display="none";myForm.method="post";myForm.action="http://ur1.ca/";myInput=document.createElement("input");myInput.setAttribute("name","longurl");myInput.setAttribute("value",document.URL);myForm.appendChild(myInput);document.body.appendChild(myForm);myForm.submit();document.body.removeChild(myForm); The above will work for any lilURL service; just change the address in myForm.action="http://ur1.ca/"; to the address of the lilURL service.

Finally, here’s the bookmarklet for ur1.ca: Shorten w/ ur1.ca.

Browser Elitism

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Posted by skullbochs on 16 June 2009 – 2:46 pm
Filed under rantrantrant
Tagged as , , , , ,

I am not a browser elitist. I frequently switch browsers just for the fun of it. When I’m on a Windows machine, I’ll even use Internet Explorer just for kicks (IE7/8 have a great UI, IMO; if only the backend wasn’t a piece of junk…). So it’s always with a heavy heart that I declare my undying hatred for Opera.

I wish it were not so, especially now that they’ve released Opera Unite, which is something I’ve thought should be down for a while. Opera has also been pushing for browser-native audio and video support w/ Ogg. On top of that, their theme system is better than Firefox’s.

The problem comes down to its lack of compatibility with a lot of the sites I use. Not only the occasional site that flat out won’t work (which I don’t actually mind too much), but also the sites that it renders annoyingly wrong, like Twitter.

Now, the general response you get to this around the web is this: Those sites are written using bad HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Opera is highly standards-compliant. So it’s not Opera’s problem.

I really hate this elitism. It may not be Opera’s problem that people write poor HTML/CSS/JavaScript, but Opera should make it their problem. Otherwise, it becomes my problem when I use their browser. Standards be damned, the web needs to work.

I’ve read that Opera labs are working on better compatibility for the next version. I hope so, because I really like what they’re doing with Unite and would like to be able to add Opera to my browser repertoire.

Firefox 3.5 supports <audio> and <video>!!!

2
Posted by skullbochs on 12 June 2009 – 12:23 am
Filed under squee!!!
Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

The Music of Erich Zann by H.P. Lovecraft, recorded by Cameron Halket for Librivox:

The above audio file is encoded in Ogg Vorbis, a patent-free, royalty-free format. Mozilla Firefox 3.5 supports the HTML 5 <audio> and <video> tags that facilitate browser-native handling of audio and video playback. Vorbis, like other Ogg formats (Speex, CELT, FLAC, Theora), is a free multimedia codec. There are no royalties, and the source code for the codec is available for no charge under a free software license.

It will also work in Safari 4 if you have the XiphQT plugin installed.

Play Ogg

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Posted by skullbochs on 7 June 2009 – 11:15 am
Filed under proprietary perils
Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

MPEG-1 Layer 3 (Mp3) audio has not yet been succeeded. Both Apple and Microsoft have been pushing their own newfangled proprietary codecs, but they’re just not sufficiently better for most people to care. Increasing storage and bandwidth have lessened the need for better lossy compression, while lack of widespread compatibility for any of the alternatives forces people to use Mp3 to ensure compatibility. Xiph’s Ogg Vorbis is in fourth-place, but has carved out a respectable niche for itself among GNU/Linux enthusiasts and video game developers.

What wrong with this picture is that, among the four codecs listed, Vorbis is the only one you don’t have to pay to use. The Mp3 format is restricted by a variety of software patents that won’t expire for several years yet. The early years of Mp3 were marred by controversy when many people who wrote implementations of the Mp3 format under the impression that it was royalty-free found themselves facing royalties. Because of this, many GNU/Linux distributions will not play Mp3 files out of the box. Users have to download additional software (usually illegally) to play the same files that will play on the cheap Mp3 player they got for Christmas.

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