View at YouTube
This guy is incredible, how does he do that?
Also worth watching, from the same guy:
Wolverine in 30 Seconds
Unemployed Hitman
Terminator Salvation in 60 Seconds
StarTrek in 47 Seconds
Oct 192009
View at YouTube
View at YouTube
Jun 132009
Safari 4 has been out for a couple of days now, and I must say I am enjoying using it. On the Mac, Safari has always had a great overall browser experience but Firefox always managed to stay my weapon of choice for viewing the Internet. This may change, Safari 4 is a very nice piece of software.
Apple is clearly wanting to make Safari an integral part of the Mac experience – Safari is very well integrated into the Mac OS (you can use Spotlight to search your history, passwords are stored in the keychain, etc), and the UI has all the polish you would expect from Apple. I particularly like the graphical Top Sites view that Safari presents when you first start it.
One thing I have always liked about Safari is the way it renders text and graphics. It always seemed to be just that little bit more polished than other browsers – correctly anti-aliasing fonts and respecting the embedded colour profiles of images. In my opinion Safari is still the best looking browser.
Apple are making a big song-and-dance about how Safari 4 is much faster than other browsers. What they mean is that they have included a very good Javascript JIT compiler which speeds up script-heavy sites by a large margin. This is excellent news, but Safari is hardly alone in focusing on Javascript performance and very recent versions of other browsers have very similar performance.
On Windows, Safari is something of an oddity. It works just as well and still renders sites better than most other Windows browsers, but its awkward neither-Mac-fish-or-Windows-fowl UI doesn’t help. The Windows version also lacks the smooth GUI animation that makes the Mac version so pleasant to use. Apple are doing their best to push Safari onto iTunes users, but I can’t see it taking off except among web developers, Safari’s built in web development tools are very cool.
There are still a few problem areas. Safari doesn’t seem to enjoy displaying animated GIFs, which often stutter before they are fully loaded. It very occasionally beachballs for a second on some pages, not all the time but enough to be annoying.
Finally, another rant about the HTML video tag (since the last one got quite a bit of attention): Safari supports the video tag but farms out the video to Quicktime. I suppose this is better than nothing, but you can tell that it is not well integrated. Videos do not show up in the list of page assets and it is clear that Quicktime is downloading the video itself, bypassing the browser’s cache. On top of this, performance is quite poor when the Javascript controls are used. The video quality is top-notch, but the experience is disappointing.
It sounds like I am dumping on Safari, but really they are minor niggles in a sea of greatness. I still think Firefox has the edge (particular Firefox3.5, which is shaping up nicely) but you could do worse.
Jun 042009
The Secret of Monkey Island consumed a lot of my time back in the day, it is one of the best (and funniest) games ever produced. I have wondered for a while now why some of the old adventure games haven’t been dusted off and republished for the new consoles – the Wii in particular seems well suited to the genre. It seems somebody has had the same idea:
That’s the second biggest monkey head I’ve ever seen!
Update: Ron Gilbert, the author of Monkey Island, has posted a very interesting “director’s commentary” for the original Monkey Island.
May 282009
Back in the day there was no standard way to publish video on the web. You could put any kind of video file you wanted on the server, but there was no guarantee that your readers would have the correct plugin required to view it. Everyone had to have a bunch of plugins installed to have any hope of viewing the majority of video files.
Flash video solve this problem. Flash was installed on nearly every computer anyway, so once they added a video decoder it seemed obvious to provide video content in Flash, even if it was in many ways not as good as the older plugins. Flash video uses massive amounts of processor time and slows down everything else on your computer. On the other hand, websites like Flash because it is easy to skin the player to fit in with the look of the site, and it makes downloading the raw video file (slightly) more difficult.
The <video> tag is supposed to replace Flash by linking to video files in the same way that the <img> tag links to images. In practice this is more complicated than it sounds because videos typically require the ability to skip and rewind content. This means that the browser must be prepared to download different parts of the file and cache things carefully to maintain performance. But these problems have long been solved.
I have been waiting for the big sites to make announcements, and today seems to be <video> day all over the internet. Both YouTube and Dailymotion have demo pages up showing <video> content:
YouTube’s HTML5 Page is designed to show how the <video> tag can replicate the functionality of their famous Flash-based player exactly. Unless you looked at the source (or your OS’s process monitor) you would never know you were using a different player.
The Dailymotion HTML5 Demo is even more impressive, using the <video> tag in combination with fancy Javascript to post-process the video and extract frames.
All this is very cool, but the two demos reveal the video tag’s fatal flaw : codecs. When the video tag was proposed, all browsers were supposed to support an unencumbered decoder named Ogg Theora (no seriously, that’s its name). There were just three problems:
- Ogg Theora’s quality was not as good as other codecs
- Although Ogg Theora was designed to be free of patent issues, it was felt that it may be a bit of a lightning rod for litigation.
- Certain companies may have a vested interest in seeing their own codecs used.
So the requirement to support Ogg Theora was dropped. This means that although all HTML5 browsers will support <video>, there is no guarantee that they will be able to play and particular file. Firefox (at least the 3.5 beta) plays Ogg Theora, but Safari plays H.264 (a superior but expensive to license codec) but not vice versa. For instance, one of the demos above plays in Firefox, the other plays in Safari. This puts us in the farcical situation of having no standard way to publish video, exactly where we started.
There is also the small point that the most widely used browser (IE) does not support the video tag, and probably won’t for years. I predict that Flash video will be around for a while yet, and I am not happy about it.
Mar 272009
Today has thrown up some examples of what strange, dark times we live in.
Firstly the trailer for the live-action version of Where the Wild Things Are is released and turns out not to be a monumental travesty.
Then John Banks is quoted in the Herald saying something that I kinda-sortof-maybe actually agree with.
Has the world gone totally mad?
I am in a fragile state. If my expectations are shattered just once more today I may explode. All it would take is for me to find that the latest TV series from Japan is not incomprehensibly insane.
View at youtube.com
Phew! That was a close one!
Dec 132008
I am actually supposed to be doing some work at the moment, but as usual I need a diversion. You are probably in the same situation yourself – why else would you be reading this page?
Continue reading »
Dec 122008
I like Robocop. I like it a lot. But not as much as this man, who sounds a bit like the guy from The Streets, but probably isn’t.
Super secret bonus: The Predator Rap
Nov 232008
I was talking with a co-worker a few days ago about Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-sharp minor – everybody’s favourite piece of overwrought classical piano. I am no piano player, but looking at the sheet music it seems almost impossible to play.
These guys have found a solution:
Sep 102008
I have just finished rereading the comic book graphic novel Watchmen. It’s a cracking read, filled with Big Ideas and it uses the comic graphic medium to great advantage – telling the story in a way that really wouldn’t work in a traditional written novel. The artwork is visually stunning with many pages containing no dialog, content to just let the pictures tell the story.
The producers of the upcoming movie will have had some hard choices to make. It is the density of little details that makes Watchmen so interesting, and any film will have to cut a lot out. I find filmed adaptions of novels interesting for their own sake so I have decided to take a stab taking note of what I would change if I were in charge of production (the following paragraphs contain both plot information and uninformed speculation – avert your eyes now if you don’t want to be spoilt and/or bored.)
Continue reading »
Aug 262008
Typical! No sooner do I post an excellent Doctor Who retrospective video than my attention is alerted to an even better one. For your consideration:
And that’s the last one, I promise.
Aug 222008
Not feeling nerdy enough? The following video should fix that right up, it’s 45 years(!) of Doctor Who stories edited into 8 minutes.
What? Thats not enough Doctor Who? Perhaps you need one of the almost 300 remixes of the awesome theme music. That should hold you over until the new series starts next year.
May 092008
I was about 15 when I first read The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll, and it left a pretty big impression on me. Something about Stoll’s endearingly rambling tale of ingenuity in the face of what turned out to be a case of major international espionage really opened my eyes, and I think the book should be required reading for anyone considering a career in programming.
TED talks are something I have only recently been introduced to, but it turns out they have been around forever. Consisting basically of some dudes asking some other guys to give some short talks on stuff at a conference, TED has managed to attract some big names speaking about the big issues, with the odd juggler thrown in for good measure. Over 200(!) of the TED talks are available online, either through YouTube or as a podcast, and I highly recommend them.
Being a fan of both Clifford Stoll and TED Talks, imagine my delight when a podcast of Stoll giving a talk at TED showed up in iTunes. Here he is talking about – well he talks about a lot of things…
By the way, I strongly agree with his views on the roll of computers in education.
May 212007
Of course you are!
See also the Ray Harryhausen Creature List.
Mar 222007
I am going to assume that we all liked Star Trek:The Next Generation when it was on. However only the most ardent fan would refuse to concede that there were some problems with the show. It was fairly cheesy (even for the late eighties) and its oh-so-earnest attitude made the future look like a fairly dull place to live. Also, I think it will take longer than 400 years for skin tight uniforms to be adopted by any organisation that wants the galaxy to take it seriously.
Over a decade later (has it been that long already?), ST:TNG is ready for a face lift. Have you ever wondered what the show would look like if revisited with the most powerful post-production technique known to man; the laugh track? Me neither, but someone has:
Feb 212007
Like your IQ, everybody has a CQ, or Cool Quotient – a single figure that can be easily calculated and gives an overall rating of how cool you are. However, CQ differs from IQ in two important ways, as shown by the following examples.
Firstly, unlike IQ the average CQ is zero and can be negative. Take me for instance; my CQ can be calculated like this:
- starting score 0
- IT professional (sadly misunderstood) -5
- Owns an iPod (just like those beautiful people on TV) +8
- Tendency to drop pretentious French phrases into writing -1
- Drives a manual car (just like James Bond) +2
- Keeps a blog (luckily I never read it, that would be even worse) -5
- Over 30 (never trust anyone over 30, they are uncool) -4
Thus my CQ is -5. I am the first to admit that -5 isn’t very cool, in fact it is very slightly uncool but well within the normal variation seen in the general population.
The second difference between IQ and CQ is that although the former measurement gives a simple linear scale, CQ actually wraps around in certain situations. Rare aggregations of uncool factors can combine in a perfect storm of uncool that can be cool in its own right. Take another example:
- starting score 0
- musician (automatically slightly cool) +15
- flutist (very uncool instrument) -33
- busker (has a certain je ne sais quoi) +8
- Beatboxing (anything cool 20 years ago is automatically uncool now) -18
- Plays theme tunes from children’s TV shows (lame) -12
- Plays theme tunes from video games (lame) -45
- Appears in a video on youtube (anything on the Internet that was cool 6 months ago is automatically uncool now) -19
Total CQ: -104. However, due to the wrap around at the low end of the CQ scale, this is equivalent to a positive CQ of 49, the same as Brad Pitt*!
Some links where you can verify this for yourself:
Beatboxing Flutist plays Sesame Street
Beatboxing Flutist plays Mario Brothers Theme
Beatboxing Flutist plays Inspector Gadget/Axel F Medley
* Brad Pitt would actually have a higher CQ, what with being an international movie star and all, the relatively low CQ of 49 is caused mainly by being named Bradley Pitt, a very uncool name.