I was meaning to write this a couple weeks ago, but I’ll do it now.  I think this presidential race may end up being far closer than anyone suspected.  So many polls have Obama up, but I think this will end up being much tighter than people were thinking even a few days ago.  Not sure why I think that, I just do.  I do not think that we’ll see any 2000 Florida situation, but if it happens it won’t surprise me.

I just picked up an ‘old’ white macbook (the kind that are now $999 at the stores) for a pretty low price.  This is mostly for business purposes – I need a way to test sites on a Mac, and bugging my wife to use her business one isn’t terribly efficient.  I’ve put off getting one for some time – when they made the move to Intel CPUs it made it easier for me to consider getting one.  I’ve been a Linux user for 8-10 years, and rely on open source programs quite a lot.  OpenOffice, for one, Pidgin/GAIM for another, vim, etc.  We’ve had a Mac in the house for awhile, so there hasn’t been a huge *need* to get one, but with the recent deal that I got (not a steal, but close), and combining that with an interest in iPhone app development, it made some sense to get one.  Also, the designer who’s working on GroovyMag with me is using a Mac, so this might make it easier for me to eventually swap files with her (except I don’t have Indesign, and don’t think it’s worth it for me to fork out – perhaps I’ll get her to use Scribus in the future? but then I could have stayed on Linux!)

My Linux laptop isn’t going anywhere any time soon.  It’s hosting my XP VMWare image, and it seems VMWare costs something on the Mac, so I’m not rushing out to get it in the near future.  Also, I can’t find anything that states that an older VMWare image can be converted to Fusion (I’d think so, but can’t confirm it yet).

Anyway, so far so good.  Got most of my updates done, things installed that I normally use, and I’m getting settled in.  I’m living in too many worlds right now – Linux/Mac/Windows – so I’m not sure I’ll ever get down to just *one* machine, but maybe this will be the one?

I was meaning to write this for a while, then Colin Powell made roughly the same observation, though more eloquently than I could.  Basically – “so what if Obama is Muslim?”  Perhaps maybe – just maybe – it might actually do us some good to have a leader who really understands the mentality that we’re up against.  That was my line of thinking.  Powell’s went in a slightly different line, but still came up with the ‘so what?’ conclusion.

Personally (and I am unanimous in this) I’d prefer we had a secular President altogether.  I doubt it will happen any time soon, but perhaps just maybe Obama actually isn’t as religious as he felt he needed to make out during the primary season to fend off attacks from those holier-than-he.  I’d appreciate an intelligent and secular leader, and I bet I’m not the only one out there.

Would *you* elect an openly atheist president?  Will such a person ever even make it to the primaries in my lifetime (hopefully another 50 years or so!)

We’ve got a new Subway by us which I’ve been to once before.  Nice, clean and new.  I popped in the other day and saw a large banner for a $5 Chicken Pizziola.  It looked great, but it comes with pepperoni on it.  I’m not a pepperoni fan, so I asked if they’d make it for me, but just leave off the pepperoni.  I got a pained expression, then a sheepish “well, if I do that, it’s not the same sandwich, and I have to charge you more.”.  I appealed to the good nature of the older worker who appeared to be a supervisor of some sort – she just shrugged.  I then said “are you serious?”.  And I got a nod.  I then said – “So, if I ask you to simply move your hand with the pepperoni from the sandwich to the trash can – and you just drop them in there instead of on my sandwich, you won’t do that for the $5?”.  “No”.

I should have just walked out at that point, but I didn’t.  I was running late, so I got a different sandwich altogether – something that would hopefully cause them much less confusion (buffalo chicken on wheat).  So, while I ‘caved’ and gave them some business anyway, they won’t be getting more business from me in the future.  For the record, this is the new one on Capital in Youngsville, in the Youngsville Crossing shopping area.  I think the one closer to my house would be more obliging.

I’m still a bit flabbergasted that they wouldn’t *leave off* an ingredient for the same amount of money.  When I ask for ‘extra’ stuff (any food place) I now brace myself for an extra charge (tomatoes seem to be ripe for this extra charge).  But I’m not normally charged *more* for an item when I ask for things removed (no lettuce, no mayo, etc.).

Really fed up with the debate tonight.  Very disappointed in much of the way each candidate basically use every question just to push out their talking points.  It’s like Palin on steroids, and they’re both guilty.  The first question was the worst, I think, and it went downhill from there.

I’d read Dave Ramsey’s plan for ‘fixing’ the economy, without the $700 billion bailout package from last week. Dave’s plan was far simpler, but more dramatic.  Eliminate capital gains taxes was the big one.  Frankly, it seems like that might be the only that that would be needed.  That one move would (even in today’s market) flood the market with more money, especially for short term investments.  Currently capital gains taxes on short term gains might run you 25-35%.  Dropping that to 0%, perhaps even just for 2-3 years, would provide a huge *and easily understandable* benefit.  Don’t water it down with 400 pages of unrelated crap.

Obama’s on the Peace Corp topic now.  I may comment more later.  Just a depressing debate right now.

UPDATE: McCain – “we need a panel of experts, then get a recommendation, and have Congress vote it up or down”.  Wasn’t that basically the Paulsen recommendation, which got ballooned from 3 pages to 400+ pages?  And this after McCain ‘suspended his campaign’ to push it through?

UPDATE 2: “Speak softly and carry a big stick”.  Ridiculous, in that he’s trying to draw a distinction between McCain’s approach (non-committal but leave open the option of ‘big stick’ actions), and Obama’s position (we will go in to a country – Pakistan as an example – to get Bin Laden).  “I won’t be telegraphing my punches, like Obama has done” is blood-boilingly maddening disingenuousness (or stupidity, and I don’t think McCain is stupid).  McCain has basically “telegraphed” to every country on the planet that he has a big stick, and the threat of potential invasion/violence/war instigated by the US is an ever present possibility, and any country may feel the wrath of the ‘big stick’ *without warning* from a McCain administration.

Having been away from the Detroit area for some time, I got a bit homesick and started searching youtube for some old videos.  Things/people I miss, somewhat inspired by the videos, include:

• Bill Bonds
• Law office of Sam Bernstein commercials
• Ollie Fretter
• Highland Appliance
• Amyre Makupson
• Coney dogs
• Towne Club sodas
• Better Made chips
• Bob-lo Island
• Bill Kennedy at the movies
• Sir Graves Ghastly
• Count Scary (and those 3d movies he ran for a spell – get your glasses at Farmer Jack!)
• Stupid WRIF (‘BABY!’) commercials
• Tiger Stadium
• David Newman / 1270 AM
• Faygo pop selection (I get a few down here now)
• Farmer Jack
• Buscemi’s pizza
• Cruisin’ Gratiot (which I never really did, but I liked the memory of wanting to go do it)
• Mort Crim
• The channel 20 ‘kids club’ where you’d get your name on TV for your birthday
• “ON TV” (wasn’t just Detroit, apparently)
• Buddy’s pizza
• Little Caesar’s pizza
• “We’ve got art” DIA commercials
• WJR

Probably some other things will come back to me over time, but I just felt a bit nostalgic this morning.  What memories do you have of Detroit?

Just watched the first presidential debate.  I could tell McCain was trying to come off ‘strong’ and ‘authoritative’ and whatnot, but he ended up simply sounding rude most of the time.  Unfortunately, some of Obama’s “I agree with Senator McCain” comments will be used against him (ask me about this use of your own words against you some time!), but personally, I thought Obama did a better job of handling the entire affair.  He wasn’t terribly strong in the first 20 minutes or so, but stayed on an even keel the rest of the time, and came across as more ‘presidential’ than McCain.

His last big point, about how we’re viewed around the world, is one of the primary reasons I plan to vote for him.  I’ve not voted Democrat for a president before, and I’m not crazy about everything he’s proposed so far, but at this point I consider Obama a better candidate.

On a purely trivial point, I think Obama might lose because of his ears.  He’s got some Alfred E. Neuman thing going on, which I think will play against him in some small capacity.  People will claim it was race – I will say it was the ears.

I have a rather love/hate relationship with software.  I got bit by the bug back in 1982 (might have 1981 – can’t remember now!) with a ZX81 kit (from the UK no less).  Since then I’ve been writing software in a variety of languages: various BASICs, machine code (no, not assembler – straight POKEing HEX codes in to memory by hand), Pascal, Rexx, Perl, PHP, Javascript, CF, Java and lately Groovy, Actionscript and lately a dash of C#. One of the few lessons that’s stuck with me is that the act of writing software includes quite a lot of compromises – build vs buy, “cheap/fast/good” triangles, etc.  I was recently hit with some compromises on a project and it really stuck in my craw (so to speak) so I felt like sharing it here.

I was asked to build a desktop video capture client.  The original project was done as a VB6 project and had some problems, partially in the speed in which the original developer could meet deadlines (not really his fault) and some of the quirks of the system itself.  This was a Windows-only app (obviously, being VB6), and I originally looked at recreating it with C#.NET.  I’ve done a couple of small C# apps, mainly as tests for myself – things slightly above ‘hello world’, but nothing terribly practical.  So, with that in mind, I was a little anxious about it, but gave it a whirl.  After about a day of wrestling with C# Visual Studio Express, Windows Media Encoder SDK and Windows itself, I put it on a shelf.  I’d not made much headway, and if I can’t make progress quickly, I tend to drop something (either to meditate on it, or look at other options, or whatever).  In this case, I looked at building an AIR app.

In 10 hours I had a system that was *far* further along.  It was about 70% of the functionality of the original system, with working video streaming, capture, playback, program scheduling and some other features.  10 hours!  Just getting all the IDEs, SDKs and .NET runtime set up took an hour going the Windows-only route.  Sure, my lack of .NET experience was shining through, but I had *never* built an AIR application before, and had limited Flex experience before that.  To boot, the AIR streams could stream directly to a Red5 server – open source and free.

However, the big kick came in that the default Flash encoder algorithm is simply not that good.  The specific project this is for has to do with live streams – there’s no time to give them to a different offline encoder for later playback.  The default Flash encoder in the AIR system (and in regular browser-based Flash encoder systems) is single-pass only, and in short the client was simply not happy with the quality of the streams.  To be fair much higher bit-rates were, imo, pretty close.  Flash 450k stream quality was a bit better than a Windows Media 250k stream quality, but not much, and not in all circumstances (almost any signifiant motion – people walking – made it worse).

More investigation in to this uncovered a company called ‘On2′ which provides a plugin for the Flash player that would allow for multi-pass encoding, and the live streaming results are phenomenal.  Seeing this software running on justin.tv made us consider Flash again.  The AIR software system was further along, easier to install, cross platform, and pretty small.  Why not use it?  So we gave On2 a call for pricing.  You know when you have to call for pricing it’s going to be bad.  The price quoted was around $12k to get started.  I can’t remember if that was a yearly license fee or a one-time fee.  However, they wanted an extra 50 cents per minute of encoded video – $30 hour.  This completely priced the product – the *only* one that can provide any sort of decent quality for live streaming Flash-based systems – out of consideration.  And this meant we had no viable alternative except to go back to struggling with Windows/VS development.

Adobe seems to have wanted to open up the encoder space to allow for third parties to create their own encoder algorithms.  I’ve seen two names mentioned over and over – on2 and sorenson.  However, only on2 has anything that will run inside the Flash runtime to improve the quality directly in the capture process, rather than requiring external streaming systems.  External systems seem to either preclude liveness, or customized/branded applications, or both.

Adobe’s business decision to do this seems to be really short sighted.  Taking the one-pass quality out of the equation, building AIr or Flex apps to deal with video capture / streaming / manipulation is almost a no-brainer.  Easy to develop for, cross-platform (linux, mac, windows), a growing community and other reasons all seem to make the decision easy.  However, when you factor in the issue of quality, and the *cost* of obtaining that quality, it makes the platform unattractive, or at the very least most of the competitive edge is gone.  *Most* developers out there don’t have millions in VC-backing to afford the latest and greatest toys.  We have budgetary considerations, and from a “TCO” standpoint, right now Windows Media still seems to be the winner.

So, while we started off much further along going the Flash/Adobe route, their decisions to cripple the core encoding functionality for the sake of letting others make money in the encoder space ultimately is forcing me (and probably many others) back to the single-platform Windows world.  Had Adobe put a stronger/better encoder in the core engine, there’d be *very* little (perhaps no?) reason to develop a Windows Media application, unless you were working solely on intranet applications ina Windows-only world.  Instead, they’re sacrificing long-term dominance of this space for short-term profits (I have to assume they’re licensing some plug-in technology to on2 and whoever else wants to cough up).  In the end, they will probably end up losing out in this space (live streaming capture), and Adobe’s Flash capabilities will be sidelined to a second-choice.  Unless perhaps the encoder algorithm market gets some competitive jolt, or the money falls out of it and Adobe builds a quality one in to the base engine in the next year or so.  However, Flash Player 10 is in beta, and an improved encoding algorithm is nowhere on their list of new features.

Argh… had to capture some of those thoughts down here.  Perhaps I’ll come back and elaborate more in the future.

So much keeps happening, and yet I can’t seem to find any time to write about it!

I got to hear (but not personally meet yet) Andy Hunt, who gave a very thought provoking talk at our local TriJUG the other day.  I’m interested in learning the tech behind his ‘exocortex’ – he uses some external device to take notes (electronic) then svn syncs(?) to a main desktop, so things are always in sync.  Was it an iphone?  Does anyone know?

I have the rough content lined up for the first edition of GroovyMag – need to start getting the next few issues’ content lined up, and get the first set of content finalized from authors and layed out.  I’m doing all this out of pocket to start with which is making it all a bit more challenging

So, I have an XP image that I wanted to use Eclipse on.  I grab Eclipse (85 meg download version) and it tells me that it needs a JRE or a JDK.  That’s slightly better than error messages I remember before, but I’ll still ask now – “WHAT THE HELL IS A JDK?”.  It takes me to some Sun download site which asks what platform and language I want (can’t it guess that from the browser HTTP header info and at least prefill out the dropdown boxes?!).  It then starts to download a 105 meg file that specifically has “nojdk” in the filename.  What the hell is a JDK?

Sun doesn’t offer JDKs.  They have “Java EE SDK” files.  Perhaps just a little flag on Sun’s site that says “if you’re being told you need a JDK, you really need XXXX” and tell me what I need.  Honestly, Sun/Java has some of the worst developer setup experiences I’ve ever had (and I’ve had many).  Perhaps no one complains cause everyone’s already set up and there’s no new people coming in to this world?  Who knows???

So, let’s try to download a “JRE” – the other option it says I could get away with.  Where from?  Java.com?  No mention of a JRE there.  When you download from the big blue button there’s something about JXPINSTALL.EXE being run.  OK… what’s that?  And why isn’t it labelled JRE?  Try “java.sun.com” – which is aimed at developers.  Popular downloads area lists “java ee, java se, java me (that’s ‘popular”?!) and a few others, none of which remotely resemble “JRE”.  Three little letters that are a supposed core of Java, yet they’re nowhere to be found on either major Java site.

For the record, the “JXPINSTALL.EXE” file is now eventually installing a “Java Runtime Environment” and Eclipse now seems like it’ll run.  What a PITA.

I’m on the record (again?) as saying that this is a wholly crappy experience.  Getting a Java environment set up ranks up there with dealing with Gentoo build flags.