In the midst of all the turmoil in the financial markets across the world, Indian markets ended on the higher side (+2%). I don’t believe anybody expected that to happen and that there is any explanation as to why that happened.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
I think the current shakeout was necessary and will eventually help everybody in the long run. For investors in Indian stock markets, this is another opportunity to build up a portfolio over the next few years. But I shudder at the thought of what will happen to Sensex and Nifty tomorrow (tomorrow as in Tuesday, 30/Sep/08).
Workflow is an interesting term and I guess it is very common in the Design/Photography/Video industry (I can only guess as I am not in that industry - in IT we use the term Process more often than anything else - of course one of the applications I am closely associated with - Siebel - has workflows, but then that is for the application usage - yea yea by users and developers both, but not for the application development process(!)). It is so easy to digress from a topic and you have seen an example now.
Anyway, I always had this skepticism about this workflow concept till now. At work (I don’t blog about work but this cannot be avoided) we decided to record the cross-group trainings we have every week and make the material available for distribution to the wider audience. And here comes my challenge to set up a workflow to download (errm no… capture footage), encode, and then deliver/ store (errm no… publish) the material. Does not sound too complicated. But then, I tied this up with putting my old eMac to thorough use instead of keeping my MacBook Pro busy and unusable for other tasks (eh eh… surfing). I didn’t want to use iMovie (as I want to spend much time on post processing and since the clean install of Leopard, I actually don’t have iLife on the eMac). I decided to put Quicktime for this task. But I can’t believe how complicated this has now become?
I use Canon HV20 for movies. I had already bought Quicktime Pro from Apple to enable Quicktime’s recording and export features. But one of the problems I initially faced was that Quicktime would not recognise the HD mode of the camera - that was no good for my HD blockbusters (no not the Training videos). After a few sleepless nights, found this pointer towards a developer utility called DVHSCAP that comes with the Apple’s Firewire SDK. And it was such a delight to find out that DVHSCAP captures HD video from the camcorder and stores it as a M2T file (MPEG-2 Transport) and that’s it. I had received pointers towards using MPEG Streamclip to convert the captured video to destination format (that search to decide what the destination format should be is still going on). But no life is not so easy, MPEG Streamclip requires a Quicktime MPEG-2 codec for converting M2T files and this is sold at an extra cost from Apple. Now I don’t want to pay more cash having already bought Quicktime Pro - that would be just a tenner or couple less than the price for iLife suite. But I already had ffmpegx on my eMac and gave it a try and it was successful in the conversion but then the quality was not that great - jerky in some places - possibly due to interlacing/deinterlacing or lack of either or due to some setting for frame rates (PAL - 25fps, NTSC - 29.97fps). Being an eternal optimist, I took this as a learning oppurtunity and increase my knowledge of this complicated medium. And everyday is a new surprise, e.g. today I came to know that there are square pixels (computer displays) and rectangular pixels (TV). That 4:3, 16:9 might end up displayed differently on computers and TV that many of the pixel sizes actually i.e. mathematically not in the ratios 4:3 and 16:9.
I had decided to go for SD recording instead of HD for the training videos. And Quicktime Pro can capture SD through its “New Movie Rcording” option in the menu after starting the playback on the camcorder connected through Firewire. But it severely limits the compression options available for the new recordings depending on the machine being used and rightly so (right now, a 3 minute clip is taking more than 40 minutes for conversion to Web Delivery format - something is bloody wrong somewhere). Quicktime Pro allows the capture with the fantastic ‘Device Native’ option in the video’s full resolution which I have selected. This creates a 12GB file for every hour. But then this is just halfway to the holy grail.
I am too sleepy to include links to the various utilities mentioned above - a quick Google search should do the trick.
If one has money to invest in stock markets, by and large he can pick a few companies to invest in from various indexes and buy their shares and hold it till he requires the money, at which point he can cash it. The probability that his investment will be worse off (at any point in time) than those suggested by the highly paid investment bankers is a random number.
The theorem can be extrapolated from ‘has money to invest in stock markets’ to ‘life time savings’ or ‘pension’, that could otherwise be handed indirectly to the investment bankers.
It can also be extrapolated to include ‘market analysts’, ’stock market experts’ and the like along with the investment bankers.
Leopard is doing great on my eMac since I loaded it a month back. But I have decided to make it zippier (it has only 512MB RAM). The first step was to use the nifty utility, Onyx and reduce eye candy. There are many options/settings that cannot be changed through Leopard’s ‘System Preferences’ and require a few commands from the Terminal. Onyx saves the hard work and provides a way to change these settings.
Of course, Onyx is not just for reducing eye candy. It is a maintenance utility which provides the following functions:
- verification of S.M.A.R.T. status, strucutre of volume
- syntax of preferences files (.plist)
- system file permissions (and repair, if required)
- manually run maintenance scripts (important, since many times we keep the machine in sleep mode and these scripts are skipped)
- rebuild spotight and mail index
- cleaning of cache and log files
- secure delete of trash files
There are other applications which provide similar functionality and I have read good reviews about them - Tinkertool (free) and Cocktail ($14.95). But as of now, Onyx does the job.
Google is releasing a new browser, Google Chrome today. And I thought the browser war was already over. More details at Official Google Blog: A fresh take on the browser.