Thomas Keller – Page 21

Exciting times

Tomorrow I’ll attend the biggest demo so far in my life – which is opposed against the so-called “Vorratsdatenspeicherung” (data retention). The demo itself starts at 2:30pm in front of the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin and stops at a couple of places before it ends again in front of the Brandenburger Tor.

I’ll travel together with other people from the local subsidiary of the AK Vorrat from Leipzig main station to Berlin tomorrow morning at 10:45am – if you want to join us last minute, this is your chance!

I’ll also give a short radio interview on 26th of September on the happenings and the demo at Radio Blau – more details about this can be found in our wiki.

Apropos radio, if you can’t attend the demo tomorrow in Berlin for some reason (I’ve heard some people are waiting for the birth of their child *wink*), you can follow everything still by listening to the livestream starting from 12pm tomorrow. Have fun!

Ist der Mann noch zu retten?

Im Zuge des Wunsches, bei “terroristischen Attacken” auch Passagiermaschinen von der Bundeswehr abschießen zu lassen, was im letzten Jahr durch das Bundesverfassungsgericht eindeutig als verfassungswidrig (“ein Leben kann nicht mit einem anderen Leben aufgewogen werden”) eingestuft wurde, plant Wolfgang Schäuble und sein treuer Gefährte, Franz-Josef Jung, weitreichende Grundgesetzänderungen:

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,506507,00.html

Herr Schäuble, wie würde es Ihnen gefallen, wenn wir Sie kurzerhand zum Abschuss freigeben? Ich denke, hierfür würde sich sogar recht bald eine parlamentarische Mehrheit finden…

OpenXML stopped – for now

Microsofts XML-based Office format failed to receive the needed votes for a fast track standardization. However, the differences have been more than marginal: Microsoft received 74% of all qualified votes, whereas 75% would have been sufficient to get it through. The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) has put out a nice graphic which visualizes the votes:

(There is a textual overview of the results available here.)

Microsoft surely won’t give up the format just now, it is far too important for their business strategies in the next years. And its likely that they try to “fix” at least some of the outstanding issues (you could also say: do even more lobbying) to get the needed 75% in March 2008 for the final voting. Microsoft itself already speaks of “Strong Global Support for Open XML” in their press release on the topic:

“Technical experts around the world have provided invaluable feedback and technical recommendations for evolving the format,” Robertson said. “The high quality of the Open XML format will be improved as a result of this process, and we take seriously our role in working within the Ecma technical committee to address the comments received. We believe that the ISO National Bodies will be pleased with the results.”

Now lets see if we are equally pleased with the results…

Playing around with iLife’s new iMovie

My wife’s new MacBook arrived a couple of weeks ago with the new iLife ’08 suite and since iMovie has been said to receive the greatest overhaul I thought it was time for some serious video editing.

To get raw material in first instance we put our two laptops in two different places in my son’s room, each with another viewport. The built-in iSight cameras did quite a good job – resolution- and color-wise – while the picture was sometimes a bit too dark or too light under some circumstances. A bit annoying was also that its quite hard to move a laptop like a portable video camera if your little son is moving quickly through the room. You have no real way then to determine if the picture is ok since there is no display on the rear of the camera / laptop screen. But hey, if you have no money for a portable one I guess you have to live with those minor issues.

Anyways, after our recording session I copied the video project from my wife’s laptop and fired up iMovie. I noticed then that you have to import iMovie HD projects into iMovie, which took quite a long time for the roughly 25 minutes of raw video we had¹. Why on earth did Apple not just simply upgrade the old HD format bundle, but decided to copy around gigabytes of raw camera output?!

After the import was finally done I found myself very pleased with the easy interface of iMovie. Stiching parts of video clips together was as easy as marking a certain video sequence with the mouse in the events view and dragging it into the project view, while adding sound from iTunes, still pictures from iPhoto (with the famous Ken Burns effect) and various transitions. You can also directly record audio and video from the built-in microphone or iSight / connected webcam like in the previous version, normalize and adapt the volume of audio tracks and even do some basic video image processing.

While this makes a good overall picture, I found some things annoying, difficult to accomplish or even impossible (please give me a pointer if it was really just my dumbness ;):

The amount of transitions is very limited. If your video should not look too amateurish, you can probably only use two or three (cross-fade, fade to black, fade to white)
Its not obvious to change the length of a transition, i.e. you can’t just drag them bigger or smaller like you can do with video clips, and I somehow managed to overlook the context menu item “change duration” in first instance… maybe this was inserted just after I globally edited the project settings and raised the default length from 0.5 seconds to 1 second… I don’t know.
The only way I found to create moving text for a short credits section was the pre-defined text template. How do I do horizontally scrolling text there? How do I change the length of the credits display after I set it initially? (It managed to occupate half or everything of the length of the clip on which I dragged it.)
I found no way to create some “blackness” on which I could display text like f.e. the credits at the end – am I supposed to create a 1x1px^2 black image, place it into my project and display text on it?
There seems to be no way to do advanced audio editing f.e. to adapt the volume of certain parts of a bigger background audio track or fade it in/out at certain positions if the foreground/video audio should be understood better.
I dislike the track views which break like text lines if the space is up on the right. They make it kind of hard to select sequences which span multiple lines. Surely Apple’s developers invested quite a lot time to get it “flowing” nicely that way, but I’m not sure if that served the usability very well.

Anyways, here is the result of the work. Please be gentle if you vote on it 😉

^{1 You ask why I recorded in the older iMovie HD, and not directly in iMovie? Well, the first time I tried to fire up iMovie, Quicksilver gave me an error similar to “wrong version of Quartz composer installed” so I thought – at first – my iMovie installation was broken somehow and decided to go for the older iMovie HD to record the video, just to find out a little later that Quicksilver was the real issue and not iMovie…}

OpenXML: A journey through the blogosphere

Whoever thought that Microsoft would not be up to every trick to push their document format, should read some of these blog postings. To quote one of the blog, in which a blogger writes about the standardization process in Portugal:

Let me remark the fact that representatives of Sun and IBM [obviously against OOXML] didn’t attend to [a decision meeting] because there were no chairs for them. […] Microsoft alone wasted three seats. ASSOFT wasted two more, business partners of Microsoft wasted a few more spots. [There were a total of 30 seats]

[…]
The President, Microsoft representative, tried to shut me up twice. At the second attempt I accomplished my promise of speaking louder if I had to in order to be heard, refusing to be cut off.

Nothing more to say here.

And I was pointed to another excellent blog post which outlines the technical difficulties to actually modify OOXML Excel documents outside of the Office 2007 suite. An eye opener, in my opinion.

Leipziger Ortsgruppe des AK-Vorratsdatenspeicherung gegründet!

Nach dem initialen Treffen gestern Abend einiger Mitglieder des Chaostreffs und einer Vertreterin der Leipziger Kamera ist nun offiziell der AKVL gegründet. Die Wiki-Seite des AKVL fasst die Beschlüsse und das weitere Vorgehen für die nächsten Wochen zusammen. Falls sich noch Mitstreiter finden sollten, sind sie natürlich herzlich eingeladen, sich an den Aktivitäten zu beteiligen!

Konzentriert werden soll sich nun vor allem auf die Mobilmachung im Vorfeld des 22. September, an dem vom AK Vorrat in Berlin die Demonstration “Freiheit statt Angst”. Hierzu sind verschiedene Aktionen geplant. Näheres erfahrt Ihr auf der bereits genannten Wiki-Seite.

guitone 0.6.4 released

This is mainly a compatibility release so that guitone 0.6.x keeps working with newer monotone versions like the recently released 0.36. There are no new features or bug fixes included.

Please note that it won’t be possible to use monotone 0.34 or monotone 0.35 with this version of guitone due to a incompatible change in the monotone interface. Use guitone 0.6.3 or earlier for that purpose.

Grab your copy of guitone 0.6.4 here.

The work on 0.7 still goes slowly after having decided to completly redo the internals with QThread support. However I’m always open for help ;).

Microsoft’s Office Open XML an ISO standard? Hell, no!

I’m sure most of the techies out there already know about the effort of Microsoft to push their XML-based file format “Office Open XML” (OOXML in short) of the Office 2007 Suite as open standard. The problem with it is though, that the whole format description is way too bloated (more than 7000 pages; ODF not even has 1000), doesn’t honor other, existing ISO standards (f.e. date and time formats in ISO 8601) and is spicked with references to proprietary attributes like “useWord97LineBreakRules” or “autoSpaceLikeWord95”.

To make a long story short, if people were enthusiastic in first place on Microsoft’s step towards an open, XML-based format, away from the proprietary binary format they used earlier versions, this enthusiasm soon ebbed away when it became obvious that the whole action is just window-dressing. In its current state, OOXML will not allow any third-party software developer to fully support the format, because of all the undefined holes in it. Rob Weir, a software architect from IBM, gives a good insight of what this format is actually about in his personal blog, if you like to read on.

Now since ISO standardization seems to be a global process where every country must cast a vote, it seems that Microsoft has done a good job lobbying for their format in many of them (f.e. Australia, which is said to vote positive), while having a hard time in others: Yesterday was announced, that Microsoft failed to get the needed 9 votes in the USA, which is a very good signal. The deadline, however, is September 2nd, 2007. Until then, a lot of stuff can happen. There is a petition going on on noooxml.org, which has been signed by more than 33.000 people already. I’d strongly encourage you to sign that as well, and, if you get the chance, write your local ISO standards body to vote against OOXML in your country. For Germany this is the “Deutsches Institut für Normung” , in short DIN, which seems to review the format since May this year already.

Lets see where Germany and the other, yet undecided countries, are heading. Its already a farce that OOXML made it through ECMA and is now a standard after ECMA-376 (though the process leading to this is highly debatable).

However, what disappoints me the most as of now is, that Apple voted “Yes” in the aforementioned US ballot. I was always thinking, Job’s company is a bit smarter than the rest and not just follow the leader, but I guess business considerations were more important in this particular case. If Apple looses Microsoft as developer on the Mac, they loose the Mac Office Suite and also one important selling factor in business environments: Compatibility with Microsoft Office.

Pussies. They could do better. And they partially did better already, by launching the new iWork ’08 with Office Open XML support now, before Office for Mac 2008 arrives in January next year – now if they’d just include ODF support as well…

EDIT 2007-08-22: It seems that the German standards body voted PRO Office OpenXML (German source) – imho a very sad day. I hope the other countries will not follow Microsofts approach equally blind.

No longer a Carpet Crawler

Since August 1st, when my son Vincent (13½ months old) decided to take his first own steps without holding the hand of mommy or daddy, the times have been very exciting. Its very cute to see how his skills evolve from day to day, and while he usually felt more safe in the past by crawling around, today was the first day on which he actually walked more than he crawled! He even managed to stand up all alone several times – man, I’m just a happy dad! Here are some obligatory “evidence” pictures:

My son Vincent (2007-08-11)

For all the relatives and other interested people we’ve set up a webpage solely dedicated to Vincent’s pictures – though the titles and comments are in German, the photos should speak for themselves ;).

“Freiheit statt Angst”-Demo in Berlin

Der Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung (kurz AK Vorrat) macht Mobil!

Der Arbeitskreis ist gegen die geplante Einführung der Aufzeichnung und Speicherung von Telekommunikations-Verbindungsdaten (Handy, Internet) aller Bundesbürger zum Zwecke der Abwehr und Aufklärung von Straftaten (mehr Informationen hierzu auf der Webseite).

Aus diesem Grund findet am 22. September 2007 ab 14:30 in Berlin eine Demo unter dem Motto “Freiheit statt Angst” statt (Infos), zu der ebenfalls einige Mitglieder des Chaostreffs Leipzig anwesend sein werden.

Der Chaostreff Leipzig, zu dessen Mitgliedern ich seit kurzem gehöre, plant die Gründung einer lokalen Ortsgruppe des Arbeitskreises Vorratsdatenspeicherung. Wir möchten auf diesen Weg die weitere Aufklärung in der Bevölkerung in Leipzig durch Aktionen und Demonstrationen weiter vorantreiben, neue Mitstreiter gewinnen und politisch etwas bewegen – kampflos möchte niemand von uns in “1984” landen!

Wenn Du Lust hast, mit zur Demo zu kommen oder generell an unserer Ortsgruppe Interesse hast, melde Dich! Du kannst uns jederzeit per IRC kontaktieren (mein Nick ist tommyd) – E-Mail funktioniert natürlich auch.