Ben Galbraith’s Blog

UPDATE: iMovie ‘08 now supports AVCHD.

Just in time for the holidays, our old JVC miniDV camcorder broke. We used it just a handful of times in the years since we purchased it, but we’re convinced that now we’re finally ready to start recording all those home movies that friends and relatives love to watch.

As we pondered a replacement, I noticed that Amazon is selling Sony’s new HDR-UX1 HD camcorder for an amazing 44% off: $850, a steep discount off the $1,500 retail price.

Wow. I did some research and found that this camera uses the brand-new AVCHD file format, currently unsupported by nearly every application on every platform. Only a couple of Windows programs — Sony’s viewer and PowerDVD 7 — can even play it back. However, the camera doubles as an SD camcorder — but recording in an MPEG2 format that’s also not compatible with iMovie. And, iMovie and other Mac programs can’t use the camcorder for video input like they can with miniDV. Hmm…

We took the leap and bought it. The quality of the HD video recorded by this device is astounding. I’m not a videophile, but it seems to rival equipment in the $3,000 range. However, using the HD video footage on the Mac is painful. You currently have to down-size it to SD sizes through a multi-step process (down-convert to MPEG2 on the PC using Sony’s tools, convert to DV format using the free MPEG Streamclip on the Mac, import into iMovie manually), but we’ve found that the quality of the final product in iMovie is just as good as any other DV / SD device (some find Sony’s downsizing algorithm too crude for their tastes). Of course, you can skip HD entirely and just record in SD with the device, but you still have to convert the output files using MPEG Streamclip for iMovie to use them (and Final Cut, too).

Since AVCHD is just H.264 in a different format than Quicktime’s H.264 movies, and given its use by both Sony and Panasonic, I’m hoping support for AVCHD by Apple is just around the corner. Regardless, I’m sure as AVCHD devices gain more traction in the marketplace, an easy workflow that converts this stuff to HDV footage for use with iMovie (as opposed to down-converting it to SD res) is around the corner. In fact, some folks report already doing it by a combination of custom C code and command-line video file format converters.

So the pain of the current editing process notwithstanding, we’re very happy with the HDR-UX1 and have given it quite a workout over the holiday season. It’s twin, the SD1, has a built-in hard-drive, but it goes for something like $1,400 on Amazon.

It’s election time. I’m increasingly frustrated by the often binary decision facing American voters: Republican or Democrat. The policy-making decisions of the world’s largest economy and largest democracy are complex, multi-dimensional, and of course, very controversial. Yet, I just get to choose “blue” or “red”.

The notion of choosing proxies to represent voters was necessary for all of the Republics of the past, but with the advent of modern technology, perhaps in my lifetime we’ll see a system that empowers the people to participate more deeply in the political process. Put the issues to the people and let us decide. Money can corrupt the individual representatives; who’s going to buy the majority of an entire country? (Of course, there are efforts to tie money to voting in recent states, but that’s another very scary story).

It’s a long shot, but maybe someday we can all participate more fully in the policy-making process.

Two days after trying Amazon Unbox, I fired up the new iTunes 7 to buy a movie for the kiddies. I trust Apple enough to tell my two young girls that I’m about to put a movie on for them — before I ever try the service out and on the new store’s first day of offering movies.

Sure enough, literally three minutes later, they started watching The Great Mouse Detective.

Twelve minutes later, they tell me it’s too scary. So, I pause The Great Mouse Detective in the new download manager, and three minutes later, they’re watching the Aristocats. All without a hitch. And, pausing, rewinding, fast-forwarding, and random seeking not only works, it’s all smooth as silk.

I love being a Mac user. Of course, iTunes is available for the PC, but my point is that generally, all my Mac software experiences are this smooth (whereas my PC experiences are generally just like Amazon Unbox — klunky, frustrating, and often broken).

I’ve been using DOS/Windows PCs since I was six or seven years old. It’s in my blood. Of course, I flirted with the Mac over the years, but she would be for me the rich, good-looking girl across the street; she smiled at me from time to time but we both knew I didn’t have a shot.

So when some folks try out the Mac and come back scratching their heads wondering what all the hubbub is about, I start to wonder… am I really more productive on the Mac, or am I just a sucker for good looks?

And then, I go back to the PC world for a few minutes and realize, oh, man, am I ever more productive on the Mac. For example, let’s examine Amazon Unbox, the PC’s answer to the iTunes Music Store.

For a long time now, if I’ve watched any TV, it’s been shows that I download to my Mac from the iTunes Store. While the content is calibrated to an iPod’s resolution, in practice it looks fine on a big screen from across the room (not wonderful, but fine). From the first day I tried it, it’s been a seamless experience: click, download, watch.

Amazon Unbox, on the otherhand, was the single worst consumer media experience I’ve ever had with a PC. It started out innocently enough. I clicked around on Amazon’s website, found the Unbox store, and downloaded Napoleon Dynamite, which I hadn’t seen yet. Before downloading, I was informed that I had to download:

- the Unbox player
- the .NET 2.0 framework
- Windows Media Player 10

Fair enough. They downloaded, and that was rather smooth. Then, the player launched. Let’s look past the crap interface and get to the user experience. The movie started downloading. Unfortunately, the estimated download time was completely random, jumping from 1 hour 50 minutes to 3 hours and everywhere in-between, never really getting any lower. Not sure what the deal there was.

Finally, about thirty minutes after starting the download, I could start watching. But, apparently the buffer calculation messed up, because it stopped about 1/4 of the way through. The UI wouldn’t let me do anything as intuitive as start over from where I left off, and I couldn’t jump to where I left off, but with some futzing around I was able to fast-forward at something like a 2-3x normal frame rate to where it left off.

And I watched the second forth of the movie, until it stopped again.

And then, it never went any further. I skipped back to that point, and it stopped again. I waited an hour, and tried again. Stopped in the same place. Tried it again the next day after it finished the download. And this was the best part: once the movie was fully downloaded, it no longer let me fast-forward, rewind, or skip around in the movie.

I fully appreciated this when I watched ten minutes of the beginning again, went to adjust the volume, accidentally hit the stop button (right next to the volume bar) and I had to start watching from the beginning all over again. What kind of nonsense is this?

So I played the movie again until I got to the half-way point when… it stopped the movie once again, despite saying it had completely downloaded the whole movie.

To add insult to injury, Amazon Unbox automatically downloads a 400 MB “portable” version of the movie, which the UI doesn’t give me the option to delete (I suppose I can do this through the file system). There doesn’t seem to be a way to turn off this “feature.” I guess we’re meant to feel that we can part with an extra 400 MB just in case we have a portable movie player.

If this is the PC world’s answer to the iTunes media ecosystem, I’m going to stay firmly put in Mac-land for some time to come.

I finally found my dream cell phone. I’ve gone through so many phones, from my first gray clunky Moto flip phone in 1995 to my trusty T-Mobile branded Sony Ericsson T610 (and a lot of Nokia in-between), and I’ve never had one I really liked. Every few years, when I go to buy a phone, I’m always so baffled that I can’t find something that really impresses me. Here’s a market segment that people for years have been predicting is the future and will outsell any other computing platform, and no one can truly get it right?

I recently set about upgrading my T610. My first try was the black Moto Razr first, but it drove me nuts! My main complaints are that its UI was very poorly designed and its Bluetooth sync didn’t interface well with my car. So, I returned the Razr.

In its place, I just bought an unlocked Sony Ericsson K750i. Oh man, what a phone! My two big complaints with the T610 were poor reception and slow UI. Smallish memory is also a problem, but I worked around it.

The 750i resolves those problems and much, much more. The reception on this phone is the best I’ve had for a cell phone; works great! The UI? Its the most intuitive, handy, responsive, and good-looking UI I’ve yet seen in a cell phone — the recent calls menu and event viewer screen are particular standouts. It has a built-in MP3/MP4/WAV player and plays videos too (MP4 and other formats). The Bluetooth (1.2 I think) is much faster than the Razr and the T610 and supports a “remote control” profile that lets me control OS X in some interesting ways (but I still prefer Salling Clicker for that). When syncing or transferring data, it displays granular progress indicators rather than the opaque “doing something” indicators on other phones I’ve used.

The phone works wonderfully with my car — much faster than the T610 and just as functional. Much better than the Razr. It works very well with my Motorola H500 bluetooth headset (discovers it quickly every time and gracefully disconnects). And wow! Salling Clicker works so well. I’ve never had a phone that is able to use the Salling Clicker Java client, and on this phone it rocks. Much better than the pure Bluetooth cilent the T610 used (I never tried with the Razr).

And, it has a built-in 2 megapixel camera that also works very well, and a memory card slot (Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick… grrr….).

But rambling about features, that’s not really the point. The phone reminds me so much of my Apple products: its well-designed, polished, slick, and Just Works, usually exactly the way I want it to. Its the first cell phone I’ve been truly satisfied with. I highly recommend it.

(I am aware that Sony’s new models, including a replacement for the K750i, are right around the corner, but I just can’t wait for them. Besides, with a whole new Bluetooth stack, I’m worried that it won’t work with iSync, Salling Clicker, and my car out of the box — and that’s a show-stopper for me.)

Ahhh… no more KVM switching and PC using, no more waity waity whenever I do work on the Mac, much less alt-tabby-tabby… hog heaven, my friends, hog heaven. Sadly, my Perfect Chair will be retired for a bit until I figure out a good way to mount the 30 inch LCD to work reclined. But that MacBook Pro 2.0 GHz with 2 GB RAM? That’s the good stuff. Been using it for nearly a month now and as so many before me have said, it’s the ultimate notebook experience. Spare battery just arrived earlier this week; this road warrior’s computing life just got a whole lot better.

And so, after months of dormancy, I resurrect this blog.

Why did it die?

Pragmatic Ajax. I can assure you, all of us involved in authoring that little piece of sh^H^H, err, high-quality-Ajax-reference-material-available-soon-at-a-bookstore-near-you (did I just make a ^H joke?) have made blood oaths to talk each other out of authoring another book. Ever.

Why am I reviving it?

Shamless self-promotion, my friends. What’s a blog if not self-serving? I want to tell you (that’s right, you — the one guy still hanging on to my feed) about The Ajax Experience, the upcoming conference that we Ajaxians over at Ajaxian.com are putting on in a few months.

I’m amazed at the speaker line-up that we were able to put together, from the compulsory keynote by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path to the founders/maintainers of such key frameworks as Dojo, Prototype, Scriptaculous, and more. Other big names, such as Zimbra CTO Scott Dietzen and Adobe/Macromedia Software Architect Kevin Lynch, willl there. This will be a technical event full of incredible content.

I also want to mention that we’ve got some interesting ideas for making the conference experience distinct and enjoyable. My fellow Ajaxian Dion Almaer and I attend way too many shows each year, and believe me, we’re as excited as anyone at making The Ajax Experience unique and entertaining. I don’t want to spoil too many of the surprises, but I will say that we’ll be giving away a MacBook Pro (whatever is the latest and fastest model, fully loaded) at the show — and that’s not the giveaway that I think will generate the most buzz. (Hint, hint.)

The show takes place in San Francisco from the night of Wednesday May 10 to the night of Friday May 12. As you may notice, that’s right before JavaOne, which takes place the following week. Since we’re holding the show four blocks away from JavaOne’s venue at the Moscone Center, in the lovely Westin St. Francis hotel, we hope a lot of folks travelling to JavaOne from out of town can simply adjust their travel plans to fly in and check in to their hotel a few days early and attend The Ajax Experience as well. How convenient!

I hope you can make it.

It’s great to be alive and blogging again (without having to rename this blog “Separated… with children” as a certain third-party may have threatened — ah, the many rewards of moonlight book authoring). I can’t promise that future entries won’t be self-serving, but I can promise: no more ^H jokes.

There are two experiences in my life that caused me such embarassment that though years have passed, when I reflect back upon them for more than a few seconds, I find myself subconciously curling up into the fetal position with a pained expression burned into my face.

These are not those experiences. But, they are experiences that were embarassing at the time.

Now that JavaOne is half-way upon us, I couldn’t help but think back to an experience at both JavaOne 2003 and JavaOne 2004.

At the JavaOne 2003 show, I attended a Birds-of-Feather (BoF) session given by Kohsuke Kawaguchi, one of Sun’s XML wizards. He was talking about his interesting JARV project, which incidentally was a strong inspiration for the new Validation framework in JAXP 1.3 (the JAXP bundled with Java 5). As the time to start his talk drew near, it became apparent that something was wrong. He was tinkering with his notebook in desperation, and soon that heart-dropping expression crossed his face that we all innately recognize — and it was clear that his notebook just wouldn’t boot. It was some PC notebook running some Linux install. Now, you have to understand, I’ve sat through a lot of presentations in my life. Mostly, they’re accompanied by a Windows laptop running PowerPoint, and it always inevitably runs without problem. But, on the rare occasion that a presenter brings a Linux laptop, in my experience the speaker inevitably has problems getting the presentation to work. Nearly without exception.

So when this happened to Kohsuke, I found myself thinking, almost a little smugly, “This would never happen to me.”

Kohsuke saved the day by whiteboarding his presentation live in front of all of us. And, it went pretty well! At least, I learned a lot about JARV and wound up using it quite a bit thanks to the excellent presentation. Great job, Kohsuke, on both the talk and the software.

Fast-forward to JavaOne 2004. I’m presenting a BoF in the same hotel just a few rooms away from Kohsuke’s presentation. It’s a multimedia presentation explaining how the GlooLabs Java-powered WiFi MP3 player works. I’ve got a great PowerPoint presentation, some multimedia demos, and live code examples all queued up.

And, just before the time to start, I take the AC adapter, already plugged into my trusty Windows laptop (IBM ThinkPad), and plug it into the hotel’s cheap, dingy little power strip. And, you guessed it, bye-bye laptop. The LCD instantly turned off. I didn’t panic, I just rebooted. I can’t tell you how relieved I was as everything came up normally. The blood flowed back into my extremities and… the video died after about two minutes. And it died again after I rebooted. And again. In fact, I was able to reproduce that behavior for the rest of the laptop’s (short) life. Plugging in an external monitor (e.g., the LCD projector) made no difference. The video card, my friends, was fried.

Ahhh, life’s little ironies. I followed Kohsuke’s example and whiteboarded my talk to a crowd of folks who came expecting to see the MP3 player in action. Folks were complimentary, but I felt really, really stupid. The happy coda to the story is that right after my talk, I crossed the street (both figuratively and literally) and bought my replacement notebook* at the Apple Store and have enjoyed being a serf in Steve’s little Cult of Mac ever since.

While I’m talking about embarassing conference moments, I have to throw in one I had at OSCON 2004. I presented there too, though I don’t think I did anything embarassing while delivering my talk. No, the moment came for me when I listened to Jim Hugunin talk about IronPython. So, I admit, at this point in my life, hating Microsoft was a personal hobby. And if there’s any group that despises Microsoft more than the Scott McNealy of this era, it was the Open Source crowd.

So when Jim announced in his talk that he had accepted a job at Microsoft, I shouted out a playful “Boo!”, expecting others to snicker or join in. Instead, everyone in the section of the room I was in turned around and stared at me, all effectively communicating, “What kind of moronic freak are you?” I sat pretty silent for the rest of the talk.

You know, while I’m at it, I have a near miss from JavaOne 2005 I’d like to share. I delivered two talks at that show; my “almost-embarassing-moment” comes from the Ajax BoF that Dion Almaer and I gave together. Our talk submission completely pre-dated the Ajax phenomenom — we submitted it even before Google Maps came out, but just after folks were starting to notice XMLHttpRequest.

Of course, in the months that followed after the talk was submitted, the Ajax movement caught on and was incredibly popular around the time we presented at JavaOne. In the meantime, Dion and I had started Ajaxian.com, and we spent a lot of energy tracking the Ajax evolution. When it came time for our JavaOne talk, we treated the talk as an opportunity to teach folks about Ajax, and didn’t pay much attention to the BoF abstract we submitted (with BoFs, you bring your own slide deck and do your own thing).

As it turned out, Dion and I had a few hours of spare time before we gave the talk. So we thought we’d have some fun. The first thing we did was code up a Google Maps engine from scratch. For months we’d been telling people it was easy and that they could do it in a few hours; we thought it was high time we walked the walk. And, as it turned out, we finished it in a couple of hours**. In the thirty minutes before the BoF started, as we were relaxing with Howard Lewis Ship, we thought, “Hey, why don’t we add off-line capabilities to that Ajax RSS Reader we made?” So, about two minutes before the BoF started, we finished the off-line mode feature, which lets you download feeds by consuming Blogline’s Web Services API and save the results of the feed to disk (yes, using JavaScript) so that even if you clear the cache and quit the browser, you can relaunch the browser and read your feeds, even if you’re off-line.

The near-miss embarassing moment came when, as we presented the talk, more than a few people asked, “When are we going to see the off-line mode?” That caught us completely by surprise, because to us, we were talking about Ajax, but, of course, in the abstract, that particular aspect of the presentation was given prominent mention. We were happy to demo the off-line mode that we had just barely finished coding, but man, that would have really looked bad if we had said, “Err, yeah, no off-line mode, but what do you think of this neat Ajax effect?”

Ahh, memories. I wonder what JavaOne 2006 will hold in store?

* The change of term from “laptop” to “notebook” here is more than stylistic. Those PowerBooks run HOT! In fact, if you read the manual, Apple clearly states that — get this — it’s not designed to be used for extended periods of time ON YOUR LAP. Which is why, if you study their materials, you will never, ever see Apple refer to their PowerBook notebooks as “laptops.” They’re not.

** If you’re interested, our upcoming Pragmatic Ajax book has the code from that experience, demonstrating how you too can build your own Google Maps style UI.

I think the very same day that Justin, Dion, and I released a beta version of our new book, Pragmatic Ajax, Google integrated their maps engine with Google Local. Because one of our chapters teaches you how to write your own version of Google Maps from the ground up, including generating a JPG map from an SVG source, spliting that map into tiles, and writing all of the Ajax UI magic, this change instantly made many of the screenshots in the chapter and other related content in our book a little dated. While this particular example isn’t terribly troubling (minor UI changes; functionality is the same), it illustrates a real problem with books: It’s just too darn hard for the printed word to keep up with hypertext.

By allowing us to release our book significantly earlier in the process, the Pragmatic Press’ Beta Book program lets us get our material into your hands when its fresh. We’ll still kill trees and distribute the legacy format and consider the book “done” at some point, too — so in fact, the beta program is the best of both worlds: early access and finalized printed output, with ebooks all along the way.

Another key advantage: reader involvement early on. Shortly after the beta book got into people’s hands, one of the loudest voices we heard was from the PHP community: why no Ajax/PHP chapter? A few days later, and we’ve got a PHP chapter checked into the book’s Subversion repository. It’ll make it into another release of the beta book real soon now. For the readers who wanted it, and for us authors who want to meet readers’ needs, this was a big win.

Something you want to see in the book? Buy the beta, check out what we have, and let us know what you think is missing and how you think we should improve the book before our final release to press a little later this year.

Sometimes the “new Microsoft” (what with their neat programming language features, wicked cool user-interface eye candy, rock-star evangelists, and so forth) makes me forget why I used to have such a dim view of that vendor- of- a- word- processor- that- failed- to- change- significantly- over- 13- years- and- five- major- revisions.

Yesterday, I uninstalled a trial copy of Microsoft Money 2006. (You guessed it; didn’t sport a single significant revision.) The uninstaller corrupts my Money 2003 install and causes Windows to display these dialogs every time I try to access Windows Explorer (to browse my hard drive, network, etc.), Internet Explorer (to run Windows Update), etc.:

I have no idea where my original CD is.

And then, I remember why I had such a dim view.

I have no idea how non-techies can live with this stuff. I really hope Vista makes sense of Microsoft’s screwy application deployment model.