home about photos phd v1.0

The duduk is a double reed wind instrument from Armenia, first thought to have appeared around 3000 years ago. Notoriously difficult to play, the duduk has a beautiful haunting sound and has been growing in popularity with Western film composers. A few months back you may recall my interest in purchasing a duduk.

Well yesterday morning my duduk arrived. Crafted by hand from aged apricot wood, I picked up one in the diatonic scale of A from duduk.com. I've decided to create a video diary of my progress, with the first instalment coming after my first day of practise. Never having played a reed instrument before, I found the first few minutes rather challenging.

This clip crossed my desk a few minutes ago, I rate it "hilarious".

A couple of weeks ago I came across a glorious recording of Jascha Heifetz playing the Chaconne from J.S. Bach's Partita no. 2 for Solo Violin in D minor; parts 1 & 2. The playing is superb, perhaps the best I've ever heard. This recording was made when Heifetz was in his prime, and is superior to his later performances. Remember that you can also download YouTube clips.

Yet another row has broken out between Scientology and its critics, this time over the BBC documentary, "Scientology and Me". You can watch the Panorama documentary online at the BBC for the next seven days, or on YouTube [parts 1, 2, 3]. In his program, Sweeney investigated the disturbing practise known as family disconnects.

The row surrounds presenter John Sweeney. During the preparation of the documentary, and after months of harassment by The Church of Scientology, Sweeney lost his temper and unloaded verbally on one of his interviewees. In his defence, Sweeney said that "I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a "bigot" by star Scientologists and been chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers. Back in Britain strangers have called on my neighbours, my mother-in-law's house and someone spied on my wedding and fled the moment he was challenged." The church hit back against the documentary with the above clip and Internet propaganda, which I won't dignify by linking to (bbcpanorama-exposed & freedommag).

Almost a year ago I first reported on Scientology; last time it was for their attempts to stifle free speech on the Internet. The most damaging and salient response to that campaign was "The Unfunny Truth About Scientology". It's still a potent reminder.

 In 1975, a high court judge ruled that Scientology was "corrupt, sinister, and dangerous". After watching the documentary, it would be hard to argue anything has changed. You can find out more information about Scientology here 1, 2, 3, 4.

Forget those Firefox extensions [1], viddownloader.com will save any YouTube (Dailymotion, Myspace, ...) clip to a .avi file. Simply paste in the URL of the video, and in a couple minutes the site will give you the converted file to download. If you're looking for a desktop solution, check out TubeSucker.

Microsoft partner and renowned antivirus company Kaspersky stated last week that Vista could end up being less secure for user's than XP SP2. The problem revolves around Vista's new user privileges system: User Access Control. The company claims that the incessant prompts thrown up by the new system will cause the average user to disable it, thereby making Vista insecure.

Complaints about Vista's new UAC began surfacing with the beta trials, and while progress has been made in making the security measure "less annoying", the problem persists. Capitalising on this, Apple has released another "Get a mac" ad, entitled security, which pokes fun at this latest Vista woe.

It has been noted that while OS X shares a similar security model, Apple has made theirs much less intrusive. However, Vista's model is somewhat superior, with programs running in a virtual "sandbox".

The bad press surrounding Vista is unprecedented in the computing industry. What effects this will have on the rise of console gaming and Mac is unclear. Earlier this month Id software's CEO declared that they had begun to look at consoles as a way to combat piracy on the PC. With users hesitant to switch to Vista, and the continual escalation of hardware requirements for PC games, consoles become a more attractive option. With a decoupling of gaming from the PC, long the Mac's weak point, Apple may stand to pick up additional share in the desktop computing market.

*Update - Ars Technica has just penned an excellent article which takes a look under the hood of Microsoft's latest offering. While a technical read, it does serve as an excellent introduction to the technical innovations behind Vista. 

Yesterday I uploaded another small clip of the latest Brisbane city parkour jam. This is my first attempt at using Windows Movie Maker, and the first clip created with my new camera, a Canon PowerShot A710 IS [2].

The quality of the movie produced by the camera is outstanding, and about the best you will get in the compact, non-camcorder range. Unfortunately the quality of the clip on YouTube is terrible, even though I followed the advice of a tutorial on selecting the best bitrate for Windows Movie Maker clips on YouTube.

After reading a couple forums, it seems that YouTube only allots a certain amount of memory (disk space) per frame. As you may already know, compressed video often uses an algorithm that employs interframe compression, i.e. it stores the difference between two frames. If there's not much going on, where the two frames are similar, each frame requires little disk space. However, if there is a lot of detail or movement, it requires more memory/frame. Here in lies the problem with action movies on YouTube. Because YouTube sets a low value for disk space/frame, it has to then seriously downsample the video; the more movement, the more it lowers the quality. The result is that high-movement video often turns out looking pixelated, washed out, with frequent ghosting.

It may also be that YouTube doesn't like the .WMV format, with the YouTube guide recommending MPEG-4 DivX/Xvid, this is despite .WMV being a branch of MPEG-4. Below is a comparison between the various file formats and quality settings and how they appear on YouTube.

1. .WMV - The original one-second clip encoded by Windows Movie Maker as "video for broad band" (512kbs, 25fps, 320x240), then re-encoded to MPEG-2 (2376kbs, 29.97fps, 320x240).
2. .AVI MPEG-2 - Clip encoded by Windows Movie Maker as "video for broad band" (512kbs, 25fps, 320x240), then re-encoded with Boilsoft's ASF converter to MPEG-2 (2376kbs, 29.97fps, 320x240).
3. .AVI MPEG-4 - Clip encoded by Windows Movie Maker as "video for local playback" (2.1Mbs, 25fps, 720x576). It was then re-encoded with VirtualDub using DivX 3.11 ;) (avi), 720x576, 25fps, 44100 KHz stereo. I followed the Doom9 tutorial for this.

As you can see, the final encode is quite a bit better than the first two, but still pretty poor. From this it's pretty clear that file format and quality settings do have some effect on how YouTube re-encodes video, but that there's clearly something else going on. Technically I should provide a fourth comparison in which the last option was originally encoded by Windows Movie Maker as "video for broadband" before being re-encoded by VirtualDub with similar settings, but it's unlikely to make any difference.

So what else could be the problem here? Returning now to my original video, compare this to that of my friend's The Toxorpion, who also used Windows Movie Maker .WMV. You'll notice straight away that Tox's clip is of a much higher quality. The difference? Tox is using a tripod; this significantly reduces the interframe motion caused by handshake.

Conclusion

If you're going to film video, especially high-motion subjects, use a tripod or rest the camera on a flat surface. This will reduce the amount of motion, restricting it to the subject only. This will lower the overall disk space/frame => higher quality YouTube clips. 

I found this clip to be absolutely hilarious, enjoy.

In this clip Stephen Colbert interviews Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple computers. I don't think Colbert knows quite what to make of the geek humour, but you can tell he loves it on the inside.

Nintendo have released a humorous commercial comparing the Wii to the PS3. It's a spoof of the recent "Hi I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC" Apple ads. It's funny and just a little bit racy, a sure-fire Internet hit.

It's too stupid not to be funny.

I've never seen art quite like this before, rather exquisite. Personally I hate embedding flash directly into web posts, but I thought I'd give it a shot just once.

Since it is a Sunday, I'll begin with a touch of levity by sharing this humorous little gem "The Daily Show on Scientology". Over the last month Scientology has been the focus of intense criticism in the blogging world. The saga really began after Anthony Walter, a journalism student, posted an article entitled "Scientology is not Science" to his site www.codebot.org.

Highly critical of the church, the article also linked repeatedly to the now infamous ytmnd clip "The Un-Funny Truth About Scientology". The article became an Internet sensation after being posted to the popular technology site digg.com [2]. Within days though, swift legal manoeuvring by the church saw the closure of codebot.org (now back online). Ytmnd followed up with "The Un-funny sequel", which provides a great animated history of the affair.

The Internet is now awash with articles (a very clever dissection official Scientology materials) and media clips regarding the church, but for a complete history check out the wiki article which chronicles this Internet obsession.

For today only (29/06/06) Google video is offerring up the classic Rocky and Bullwinkle series for free. Remember kids, if you've never dropped a subtle R&B reference, you're just not cool.

PBS's Frontline has an online feature that examines Dick Cheney, the most powerful vice-president in US history, and his influence on post September 11 foreign policy (90 minutes). The feature discusses Cheney's role as the chief architect of the War on Terror and the internal conflict between himself and the intelligence community.