Category: Life

Women are like software: If you’re new to it, everything is exciting and awesome, all the fancy things, the bells and whistles you discover make you happy and feel better. As time moves on you’re getting more used to it, try to master the software f.e. by using shortcuts, customize it and so on. And there are times where you find bugs. As a free software hacker you’re of course up to fixing the bugs yourself and report the patches to upstream.

But what happens if upstream does not accept them? What if the whole patchwork you’re doing cannot fix the ground architecture of the software, so it would be better to rewrite it from scratch, or, move to another, new fancy software which apparently fixes all the issues of the old one? Maybe you don’t give up on your old, beloved fellow so fast, so you look for and hire consulting for the software to better understand the inner workings of it. But, what if you still don’t get the grasp?

Of course its not that easy to switch to another software, you’ve got very used to it over the years, even developed a particular plugin exactly for it, which would probably not fit into any other look-a-like. And you really love your plugin, since you’ve written and cared about it for endless hours, but its almost sure it would keep plugged into the old software. How would you decide?

Unfortunately, the decision to move on is incredibly harder to take in real life than with computer software:


$ apt-get install new
Warning: new conflicts with old
Deleting packages: old
Installing packages: new
Do you wish to apply these changes [y|N]?


There is a lot discussion currently going on if or if not the Peak oil (the maximum capacity in oil extraction) has been reached yet – of course caused by the sky-rocketing oil prices in these days. But even if our daily lifes pretty much depend on oil, which we use for heating, cooking, driving or plastics like toys and packaging (and the list goes on almost endlessly), we should be aware and even fear other “peaks” much more in my opinion: the upcoming peak of food, caused by a peak of drinking water.

A very interesting and well-written article on this topic has been published in the German net magazine Telepolis, called “Peak Food, Peak Water” (English version via Google translate), upon which I stumbled today:

One of the most powerful players in the global financial system, the investment bank Goldman Sachs, introduced the Top Five Risks during its risk assessment of future developments conference and invited several experts which all warned for a huge and catastrophic water shortage.

[One of them] Donald Kennedy [a Stanford biology professor and former chief editor of Nature] spoke of a climate change, initiated by an accelerating spiral of extreme droughts which alternate with “psychotic and excessive rainfalls”. The consequences are already visible: “There are already 800 million people who live with food insecurity. They can not grow enough food, or they can not afford it. This is a seismic shift in the economy,” Kennedy alerted. Goldman Sachs has even estimated that by 2025 a full third of the world’s population will have no access to “adequate drinking water”.

So with a global water problem we also get a global food problem, because agriculture demands up to 70% of the global water ressources.

In this year I certainly have no problem to acknowledge the water shortage: We’ve had a pretty warm and dry winter in Germany and after some rain in April, May started out very hot and again very dry. I’m not a meteorologist, but I bet the past six weeks or so have been the most waterless weeks for this season in a couple of years. When I go out with my little boy and my dog I see all this grass in the parks around my home withered and dead which usually was not the case before July or August in a “normal” year.

Now most people around here just enjoy the weather and don’t think about it much. But somehow I’m more in touch with the nature (after all I have a gardener background) – I feel for the plants and animals which suffer from a drought like this – and I tend to imaginate (I would say realistic, my wife would say pessimistic) agendas how the next couple of years will look like – for us, for our area, for Germany and for the rest of the world. And I get very much depressed and angry even if I follow the daily news and recognize how less the world’s biggest leaders do to solve the world’s biggest challenges, the global climate change. My wife usually tells me then that I should stay away from the news if they make me depressed or angry, but this is no solution for me either…

The stated Telepolis article now again contains one particular section which again makes me wonder what on earth should happen before people start to act and do the right things:

The “proposed solutions”, which have been hatched during this conference by one of the most influential U.S. investment banks, sound like the a declaration of bankruptcy of the late, capital-dominated economic advisers. Goldman Sachs said water to the “oil of the next century” and recommended that all investors should heavily invest in this resource, especially in the “high tech” sector of the industry. The product ‘water’ will offer “enormous rewards for investors who know how to play during the upcoming investment boom.”

No comment.

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…}