EGOPOLY

(I like to take notes on the interesting tidbits from paper magazines. Otherwise I forget when they go in the trash.)

podner: video conversion to H.264

I just recently (yesterday) got an early xmas present from my wife: an HDTV. I have comcast cable, and do not yet have the HD converter box, so I didn’t think I would be able to see any HD channels.

The TV is “Digital Cable Ready,” and it discovered a bunch of digital channels on its own, including all the HD channels. (And I’ll mention what I’ve heard every other person I know who got HDTV: you will actually watch just about anything just because it looks so good in HD.) The thing is, the channel numbers don’t match the channel numbers published by Comcast. So my TV displays Comcast channel 807 (which is the local NBC affiliate) as 84.2. Here are the other ones I figured out:

Name        Comcast channel     My TV Channel
WGBH PBS    802                 82.1
ABC         805                 84.1
NBC         807                 84.2
CBS         804                 85.2
FOX         825                 85.1
UPN         838                 83.5

So it doesn’t really have any predictable pattern. They seem to just map whatever those dot-separated numbers are into nice mnemonics (the Fox affiliate is UHF channel 25, for example). I spent a while clicking through each channel, trying to figure out what the show was, then checking Yahoo TV listings to see what channel it was.

But here is the fun part; there were all these other digital channels that I couldn’t figure out. They were showing movies that I couldn’t find in the TV listings for the time I was watching. Furthermore, these were clearly movies from pay channels I don’t have (like Showtime.) I don’t have my converter box hooked up yet for HD, and I don’t have the cable card (which is what I will need to see my HBO in HD. I was stumped.

Then I flipped to this one station (90.10), and I saw a movie that looked like it was being fast-forwarded, with no sound. That’s weird. Then the movie stopped fast-forwarding, played for a minute, then started fast-forwarding again. Then it dawned on me: I was watching somebody else’s on-demand movie, and they were fast-forwarding!

So you can watch all the pay, in-demand movies you want, IF you have a DRC TV and you don’t mind watching whatever random movies you’re neighbors are watching!

Ecto is a fat/native client for editing blogs. This post is mostly a test of ecto and what i can do. Install was fairly easy (typical Mac install: drag this icon to your “Applications” folder).

It seems pretty nice. Much better than the generally clunky Movable Type form editor. It even has emacs-ish key bindings!

It supposedly can import photos from iPhoto. Let’s see if that works:

Wow, cool. That was pretty easy. There is an iTunes button, but, I’m not sure what that does. It has an “amazon” button which does this:

“Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition” (Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, Andy Hunt)

Here is a screen shot of editing this post:

OK, now post!

I first read about FolderShare on Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed. (Infectious greed is an excellent site; Paul is some kind of freakish VC who actually can write code and has a very high common sense IQ. If you read two sites about the Internet business, they should be Infectious Greed and Paul Graham.)

I finally figured out he was talking about a web service/application, so I went and tried it out. At first, I didn’t really get it; the interface seemed a bit clunky. But then, whoa. Something clicked and I realized that it was something I have been thinking about for years. Real, simple, fast, unobtusive file synchronization.

They really nailed the simplicity of it. Well almost, since it did take me a bit of time to “get it.” There are a few things they can do to guide people to that moment of clarity a bit quicker.

I keep many parts of my home directory under CVS control; this lets me synch the dozen different unix home directories I have around the world, at least in terms of things like shell setup, emacs lisp, etc. It works well, except:

• I have to remember to check-in and check-out semi-regularly.
• If I change a file on machine A, then I don’t check in, and I go to machine B, and I don’t have ssh access to machine A, then I’m out of luck.
• It’s not something I could ever get my wife to understand or use.
• While easy to set up on just about any unix (cvs and ssh are pretty much everywhere now, it doesn’t help on Windows. Not that I use Windows much, nor do I need my shell init when I do.)
• Binary files are a bear.

Now, FolderShare can’t replace my little CVS hack, partially because there is no Linux client (or any client except Windows and Mac), but also because I actually care about the revision history for those files I keep under CVS. But, for Word documents, or keeping my wife’s files in synch between her office computers at home and work, FolderShare totally rocks.

I’m still poking around, and the security issues have me a little bit on edge; but I haven’t seen any serious holes yet. But if you are a Windows or Mac user, or both, and you have a lot of computers you have to work at, you have to try it.

OK, here’s the kicker. FolderShare is a Microsoft product now. They acquired the company that makes it. Maybe they are finally waking up and smelling the network.