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One of the great things about devices failing is when you’ve got other devices you depend on to keep everything synced up. In particular today I’m seeing another reason never to get an Iphone. If your computer goes down for any reason syncing between the phone and the computer is screwed up. You could, if you’re not careful lose all the apps you paid for, all the music you paid for and all other data you have on the iphone/ipod touch or other device. Do you really want a device that depends on another device, especially when either one could fail? I don’t. Happy not to be an iphone user :-)

There is a known issue with the Nvidia 8600 video card. That issue is that the card fails faster than average. There are two common problems with this video card. The first is that the screen is just messed up. That’s not the issue I have. The issue I am having with the macbook pro is that the screen just goes dead. The failure rate is around once per year. It failed a year ago. It’s failed again just 6 days ago and it’s going to fail again in a year’s time around this time. At that point it will no longer be under guarantee. I know that hardware fails I’ve had twenty or more electronic devices fail over the years. I don’t mind because most of the time the devices are cheap and replacing is not an issue. With the macbook pro it’s different. This is a professional machine. It costs 2000CHF and more per machine. When this machine fails you have a serious investment to think about. Are you going to spend another 2-4000 CHF on another machine? Yes, if the after sale service is good. No if it’s not. When the first video card failed it took over a month to get the machine fixed. No replacement machine was provided. As a result for over a month I relied on other technology. Now imagine if I had needed my machine for video projects during that period. Now we get to this year. My machine failed six days ago and I have still not had an opportunity to get it fixed. I went to the apple store this morning to see whether they could take it in and get it repaired and I was told that I have to go to the website. I know this but the website showed that option as grayed out. I was told that there was no possibility to see them until Monday. I don’t have time to go there on Monday because their bureaucracy does not adapt to my needs. The question is how many more weeks will I be without that laptop. The result of this experience is a simple one. Whilst I love spending money on hardware nothing that I have seen encourages me to buy another piece of Apple hardware. Why should I spend 4000CHF for a professional machine that could take up to a month to replace. If my primary activity was as a freelance editor then I would have no choice. As things stand I am working full time for a good company and having an Apple computer is a luxury rather than a necessity. This means I will never again buy an apple laptop again. They need to learn something about customer care before I come back.

If I had a perfect laptop it would be shaped just like the N97 but larger. I’m saying this because of how much I love having a keyboard and a touchscreen in such a small package. Now imagine if laptops did away with all that wasted space at the bottom, where the trackpad goes. Back to the matter at hand. The N97 is a great little device that can survive about a day with my use before needing a charge. What I like is the duality of control between a keyboard when you slide it from under the display, and the touch interface for those that like that. What makes this touch interface particularly interesting is that it’s designed for mobile phone users with a lot of experience with text messaging. It’s the standard number and key configuration that we’ve grown accustomed to over the past decade. There were some issues with stability, crashes display not working all the time and memory issues but those have been patched.

For the second time in a little over a year the video card on my macbook pro has failed and I am left with the black screen of death. As a result of this I will have to send the machine off for repair for a second time. Luckily the machine is still under warranty so the only challenge is finding a day off and bringing it for maintenance. It had to fail this weekend, on Saturday afternoon only once all the shops had closed. It means that getting the machine maintained will be a little more of a challenge. The second challenge of course is that I’m meant to do two days of editing on Tuesday and Wednesday and I may not have a computer. You’ve got to love trade unionists for making sure shops are closed on a Sunday. Now the question is what to do next. Do I buy a new macbook pro as the new version of finalcut pro came out or do I invest in a far cheaper computer running linux. In fact do I forget about PC and Apple and go Linux all the way. It could be quite fun, once winter comes back to build a linux based video editing system where I understand the hardware. You know I’m not going to get far with that project. On the positive end of the spectrum I’m in full time employment with three different types of work I’m asked to do so buying a new machine is no problem. It’s just a matter of whether I have the necessity right now.

Working at the Global Humanitarian Forum today, providing the live streams, was fun as some interesting conversations took place. Among the people present we had Micheline Calmy Rey, Kofi Annan, the writer of the wikonomics book (which I have as an audio book and haven’t finished yet), Nik Gowing, and a few more interesting people. Whilst I was working I didn’t have time to listen to the discussions that were taking place but they ranged from new media and communication to providing funds for organisations and the aspects to be taken into account, managing displacement, demographic dynamics and many more topics. We’ll be streaming quite a few more lives during the course of tomorrow so if you’re interested in humanitarian subjects visit Global Humanitarian Forum for more information. The live streams can be found by following the Launch Live video link provided on the site.

The free flow of information has been greatly facilitated by the development of modern tools such as the smartphone, more common laptops and data plans. As a result of all these tools the control of public opinion has become more of a challenge. It’s easy to block sites, but the problem is you need to be more aware of the communications systems than the users themselves. In particular I’m thinking of Iran, and another revolution before it. People are now saying that twitter is a great revolutionary tool to get information from one person to another quickly. Of course this might be true but there’s a more interesting trend in progress today. This trend is how modern telecommunications tools such as the mobile phone and laptop are affecting social change. In particular think of the printing press and the role it has spread, the role of coded radio messages as well. Today it’s up to the World Wide Web and it’s backbone the Internet to provide a cheap, easy to hide telecommunications platform by which to keep the people informed about what is happening. Remember Thomas from the Unbearable Lightness of Being. He wrote that article and never agreed to a retraction. Now you don’t need mainstream media or even a physical copy of what you’re trying to distribute. Radiowaves carry these messages almost simultaneously to thousands, even millions of people at once. As a result controlling public opinion is a major challenge. Every website that has a mobile interface has potential as a revolutionary tool. Today it’s twitter, because the site is not blocked by totalitarian states yet, but if that site is blocked then you’ve got other sites that could be used. Plurk, Jaiku and Orkut are examples of websites that have a mobile interface. The simpler the mobile website interface the more accessible the information becomes. Herein lies the real revolution. It’s platform agnostic. It’s that ability to create, share and distribute information on the move that is most interesting because it has built in redundancy. Within minutes of one service being blocked a clone can be put up. How do you want to stop the free flow of information in such circumstances? By being flavour of the month twitter, just like facebook, google and youtube may be blocked. The platform style however will remain and this is the most interesting aspect of the new era in electronic conversation.

The Worldcommunity grid is a datagrid style project where almost half a million people are offering computer cycles to help advance scientific research in a number of fields such as health, nutrition and more. One of the most recent projects to be added to the collection is the one for Influenza. If you so chose you can help speed up the process of finding a solution to the influenza problem. There is an interesting documentary on History HD called The Virus empire which uses a number of interviews with WHO officials and actors to demonstrate why over-hyping a new virus is the smart thing to do. One interviewee in particular said “If you went back to an army doctor in 1918 and told him that whilst 170 people had died already up to 50 million could die within the year from the Spanish Flu then he would have told you to go back to the 21st century.” What was poignant with this statement is the blasé nature that some people showed towards Swine Flu in certain circumstances. Two or three weeks ago they said that it may take up to four months to find a solution to the Swine Flu virus. Now take into account the WHO’s effort to get a number of research labs to work in collaboration against the SARS virus and it’s interesting. Apparently it took four days to learn everything there was to know about the nature of the virus but not how to cure it. That’s where the World Community grid Influenza project comes in. The more computers are used to run models to see which are the best solutions to research the quicker we may have a way of dealing with this new virus. The project is free and here are the projects you can currently help with; Help Fight Childhood Cancer Influenza Antiviral Drug Search Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy - Phase 2 FightAIDS@Home Human Proteome Folding - Phase 2 Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together Help Conquer Cancer Nutritious Rice for the World The Clean Energy Project

jonmaim - 6th of May, 2009

Thank you a lot Richard for the work you did on this interview !!! I’m so not used to see me talking on video

Is there a way to embed the video on the minsh blog ?

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If you’re learning about editing but don’t want to spend much money then Quicktime pro is a cheap and easy straight cut editor. It’s quick and easy to use. With the short cut apple+c apple+N and apple+v you have a very simple editor. Using J to play backwards, k to pause and L to play normally you control how the video plays. With the I key for marking in points and the O key for out points you’ve got everything you need. Find a video clip that is recognised by Quicktime and play the video. Find the footage you want to keep with the J,K,L keys and mark your in and out points. Once this is done cut the video with apple+C and open a new player with apple+n. Paste the video segment in your new player and you’ve got the first shot. Repeat this process with the source video and you’ve got a simple straight cuts editor. There was some footage I wanted to process quickly, without opening finalcut pro and it worked fine. It’s more intuitive than imovie (for me at least) and it’s very affordable.