12.09.08
Posted in Technology at 4:03 pm by wfrantz
First, an example, what do these things have in common?
- Microsoft in Seattle, WA
- Apple in Cupertino, CA
- LAME, the open source project on SourceForge
Answer: all of them offer a MP3 audio encoder.
Likewise…
- DivX Inc. in San Diego, CA
- Xvid Solutions in Hof, Germany
- XviD, the open source project on SourceForge
All of them offer an MPEG4 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP) video encoder. The Xvid Solutions encoder is the same as the XviD open-source encoder and often appears in free software. The DivX encoder is proprietary and only appears in DivX Certified software such as the free DivX Converter.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
10.08.07
Posted in Life, Technology at 11:03 am by wfrantz
The RIAA won a $222,000 lawsuit against an individual woman in Minnesota who was using a peer-to-peer network. As absurd as that sounds, it didn’t alarm me much until I read more of the details. Apparently, the woman wasn’t found guilty of downloading copyright music. She was guilt of making copyright music available for download.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
01.12.07
Posted in Life, Technology at 3:18 pm by wfrantz
If you were excited by the iPhone announcement, you may have missed photos of the LG wide-screen smartphone,LG KE850
The Sony w880 also looks promising.
The OpenMoko FIC Neo1973 Smartphone was announced several months ago and will be available in February, 2007.
As I’ve pointed out in previous postings, I’m not a big fan of all-in-one devices. Yes, the iPhone includes a camera, a music player, and PDA functionality. However, the 2 Megapixel camera isn’t likely to replace my 10 Megapixel Pentax, the 8 Gig music player won’t replace my 30 Gig iPod, and iPhone lacks the applications available on the iPaq. I expect my PDA to include Word, Excel, handwriting recognition, DivX Mobile Player, removable memory cards, IRDA, and maybe most importantly, the ability to install 3rd party applications.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
10.03.06
Posted in Technology at 7:24 am by wfrantz
Here’s an interesting post from a Microsoft employee called “Zune Sharing explained”
http://www.zunester.com/2006/09/zune-sharing-explained.html
I still have a few questions.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
09.18.06
Posted in Software, Technology at 11:10 pm by wfrantz
This started as a simple task. I wanted to convert some cassette tapes into MP3 files. I have a shiny new iMac that I thought would be perfect for the task. Then I ran into lots of problems.
I used GarageBand to record the audio. I thought I could simply save it as an MP3 file but that would be too simple, wouldn’t it? GarageBand only creates AAC encoded audio in M4A files. Unbelievable! Eventually I got a solution.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
08.04.06
Posted in Technology at 12:25 pm by wfrantz
binocular222 at experts-exchange.com asked
How do I know the rank of my site?
It seems that there’re some tips to make one webpage get high rank in google search where can I have reference?
I use the Google toolbar to find the PageRank of my site. When installed, the toolbar indicates the PageRank of each URL you visit. BTW, “PageRank” is not the same as your search result number. Let’s look at an example…
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
05.18.06
Posted in Software, Technology at 8:59 am by wfrantz
Tools, Tools (Ad Nausium) [sic.]
“There are problems with the many-tools-hacked-together approach that adds an odd balance to it.”
Bruce Alderson and I have a common vision. I wish that there was a stable platform for PHP applications that provided all the common stuff like database abstraction, user login and account management. I just want to seamlessly combine the best of MediaWiki, WordPress, Gallery and PHPbb. I don’t want to have 4 different logins and spend weeks trying to make templates for each so that they all look alike. Somehow these Open Source packages need to cleanly separate the functional engine from the application presentation layer. Then I could mix and match them.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
05.17.06
Posted in Technology at 1:34 pm by wfrantz
Ashlee Vance wrote an anti-subscription rant for The Register
Customers do not, as Napster suggests, pay $10,000 to fill their iPods with 10,000 songs just because the capacity is there. They take their existing music, CDs and MP3s, and put that onto the device first, then later add iTunes songs as they go along.
This is a narrow point of view. OK, Ashlee might have a pile of CDs and the patience to collect over years, but my 14 year old little brother has about a dozen CD’s and the attention span of Rain Man. Now, he could go buy another disk for $14, or he could buy 2 months of Yahoo Music for the same price. What is the better value for his dollar? 10 songs or 1 million songs?
If you ask me, a $60 subscription to Yahoo Music is a much better graduation gift than 4 new CDs. Here little brother, for $240 I will buy you an entire high-school lifetime of music. You can worry about starting a CD collection after you graduate.
Why does everyone think that consumers care about the long-term value of their purchasing dollar? Has anyone seen the national credit card debt statistics? People buy on impulse and worry about the consequences later.
As I said before, looking at my collection of about 300 disks, I could have bought 60 years of Yahoo Music for less! Am I still listening to Cindy Lauper when I’m 75? What was the point of owning all this plastic?
What’s the advantage in paying for all of the tethered music on the planet? That’s pointless gluttony and nothing more.
Well, it’s cheaper than buying 300 disks I like.
Permalink
12.02.05
Posted in Technology at 4:02 pm by wfrantz
I had a disagreement with Russ Beattie and Jim Hughes a while back about camera-phones. It went something like this:
William: Camera phones are a solution looking for a problem. Camera phones are like sofa beds. They aren’t very good beds or sofas. They just take up less space. I’d rather have a seperate camera, PDA, and phone; each optimized for their primary task. The other problem is security. Many companies are banning camera phones yet it’s becoming impossible to buy a high-end phone without a camera! The carriers are going back to the OEMs and asking them to remove the cameras from some business oriented phones! My wife has a Treo 600 PDA/camera/phone. The phone has lousy reception, the camera takes lo-res pictures, and the PDA is slow with a tiny display. My T608 gets great reception. My iPAQ 1945 is fast with a beautiful display. My Canon SD110 is 3.2 Megapixel. I can take photos on my Cannon, drop the card in my iPAQ, and e-mail them through my bluetooth T608. All the devices are pocket sized and far better than any converged device I’ve seen.
Jim:… sure your phone, pda and camera are all pocket sized. But, that’s three devices, three pockets. A smartphone with camera does all this (and more) whilst filling just one pocket.
The three step process to shuffle your pictures from device to device might be technically possible, but that’s a pretty tedious process for a bunch of quick snaps.
William: A smartphone cannot do more than I can do with my separate camera, PDA, and phone. I believe it does significantly less. In particular it’s not a very capable camera, PDA, or phone! Maybe it’s “good enough” at those functions to satisfy most people. Maybe I’m just a “power user” that expects more. A bagel only takes up one pocket but I wouldn’t use it to take pictures either.
It’s not all that difficult to shuffle pictures from device to device. If my camera had Bluetooth then I would barely even realize the shuffling was taking place. The most tedious step right now is moving the memory card from the camera to the PDA. After that everything is pretty similar to sending photos from my Treo. In less than 20 seconds, I pick a recipient, add a note, attach the photo and hit “Send”. With Bluetooth I don’t even have to take my phone out of my pocket. Some custom PocketPC software could make it even quicker.
I believe connectivity (ala. Bluetooth) is far more valuable than convergence.
I decided to come back now and revisit the issue.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
09.21.05
Posted in Technology at 10:13 am by wfrantz
Bill Humpries at A List Apart wrote a short article on using mod_rewrite to create nice URLs. This is some highly useful information. You can see how I use the technique at this site to change ugly URLs like http://www.williamfrantz.com/bin/wp/index.php?article=50 into pretty URLs like http://williamfrantz.com/wp/61.
Of course my .htaccess file is pretty ugly and I don’t understand half the regular expressions and RewriteRules in there, but it works nicely.
Permalink
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »