cloak media

photokina summary 2002

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much has happened in two months since the german digital photography tradeshow photokina. finally, but only in japan, the sigma SD9 is shipping, the greatest imaging camera on the planet, including all 35 mm cameras. if you shoot medium format, you don’t have to worry yet.

kodak and olympus announced a new DSLR standard initiative. they realize that the large 35 mm film plane is too great for future CMOS development, and companies know how to cram more transistors into smaller spaces, not larger spaces, so yes you’ll have to buy all new lenses, but at least they should work across multiple digital bodies (nikon, canon, pentax, etc.) so you can work similarly to 35 mm today. i like it. read about how in 2001 these two imaging companies announced that they will share patents, and in 2002 how they will make the new standard. i like kodak E100VS and E100SW ektachrome film very much. i still have a few rolls left, just enough to get me to the foveon or i hope the 4/3 system of kodak/olympus/fuji. still shoot good old film until august 2003!

ACN & WWJD

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i signed up! i’m an online apple consultant. this is no guarantee that i can actually do anything, but it does give me the imprimatur of apple to market my skills. i even rebranded greenconcepts.com to accommodate semiconductor technology. i have a new mandate, not just information exchange for resource and energy efficient home building, but also digital hub and web lifestyle management. i wonder if anyone other than a friend in dallas, TX actually reads this, but just like prayer, writing is a release of emotion and leads to good mental health.

i reveal a lot of my trade secrets in the blog, so don’t share it with too many. in the coming weeks, i will have to password protect this site, but it will be an easy password, like wwjd, or hero. have you never heard of wwjd, it stands for “what would jesus drive?” it’s a new movement by evangelical christian environmentalists.

2003 planning

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it’s the start of a new month, and all is well over here. i’m looking forward to january, as my life schedule will explode. new year’s day is a japanese film festival (asahi homecast) and new english subtitled programming. then the epiphany comes on the 6th, followed by a two day macworld SF 2003 blitz, and then directly after the CES show. next comes the building show in las vegas.

i just made my roundtrip train reservations taking me from van nuys to moscone center in san francisco. to take an airplane and BART would cost around $100, i’m going for $38.50 roundtrip. i leave at 2 AM on the 7th, and come back on the 9th on the starlight express. now i need to find out if i’m staying with cousin tim or finding a cheap room.

looking for a server

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it’s a shame that i’m running out of time to include thoughts to my blog. it seems i’ve always been ahead of the curve when it come to adoption of technology. i was first out of the box in 1997 to go to handheld computers. if apple.com had not hired steve jobs, i might be using the latest messagepad right now, but instead i’m still lugging around a newton 120 with OS 2.0, until something equivalent comes out.

at comdex, i saw the tablet PC’s and smart displays, which might rival the legendary newton platform. one of my newtons did give up the ghost, not cracked or totally gone, but the handwriting recognition has failed, and you have to use brute force to navigate the interface. i’m the first one out of the box with an online presence with greenconcepts.com and now my blog. i’ll be hosting the blog on my very on webDAV server in the coming weeks. right now i’m looking for a server.

i thought i should use my legacy machine (powermacintosh 7600), but i’ve kind of set it up as ruth’s primary system, i’ll be using a SE/30 with 4 GB SCSI internal drive, but i want not only to server web pages, but e-mail, DNS, quicktime content, and other services that a 13 year old machine with a 25 MHz processor just can’t handle. i think as a DNS or backup unit, the SE/30 is good, but not as a “big iron” server. if you have any suggestions on which server to get (under $3000), drop me a line.

best time to buy hardware

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it has just come to me what i need to do in regards to apple hardware. i already have a 450 MHz G4 with 100 MHz bus and 1 MB L2 cache. it would be nice to have dual processors and a faster bus, but with the 120 GB internal, and external firewire devices in the future, i’ll be fine when it comes to storage. all i need is a firewire and USB hub to power all my devices.

what i need instead of a new CPU is a firewire DV camcorder or VCR! what i want to do on my new machine is serve webpages. what better “big iron” than the xserve? i want the generation two box, not the current 93 degrees hot box, but the optimized G5 box. i can never buy a machine that is compromised in such a fashion. i got my cube nine months after the new york 2000 announcement, just five months before it was discontinued. that’s the best time to get new hardware, unless you need raw crunching power. that time in almost near, as i want to deliver DVD on MPEG-2, a very processor intensive activity.

i’m hoping apple.com releases all new hardware across the entire product line so nothing will boot into classic. my solution is to get an exclusive OS X box in the future. of my list of equipment that will break next month, most important is the nikon film scanner. it would be nice to use my auroravideosys fuse again, but it’s been supplanted by DV firewire. now include in that progressive scan DV, and i can never go back to interlace. i’m very disappointed that all my audio rig is gone (value $1000), but with two programs and one device, i can get it all back. i need to get apple emagic logic audio anyway, along with either a USB or firewire audio interface. so no real loss. the programs i’ll miss the most are microsoft excel 4 and dantz retrospect. those i’ll be forced to upgrade. i’m waiting for photosphop 8 with foveon native editing (RAW) and final cut pro with progressive scan DV import. life is good. you have to make your own decisions when classic goes away. if you have enough computing power to take you through to the next hardware leap, with firewire 2, USB 2, and the G5, wait.

ACTC dreams

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by becoming apple certified, if nothing else, i will be able to get 90% off apple software like final cut pro, dvd studio pro, logic audio, webobjects, OS X server, and nothing real shake. the small $495 investment, nets me $4000 in savings.

from the keynotes, especially the SUN one, all of us need to develop our projects to open standards. microsoft has an integrated welded box approach, IBM has a “don’t try this by yourself” approach. and SUN offers an integrateable solution, so when you need to run apache server or veritas, you can, but you might break the elegant development over decades and billions of dollars the package that is solaris. my action points have to be:

    secure my computer facility with smart cards
    secure with biometrics
    secure with a lock and key
    secure with power backup
    secure with redundancy
    secure with location disparity
    run on java, UNIX, linux, or open source
    go MPEG-4
    the network is the machine
    metcalf’s law of growing networks holds
    rock’s law of rising semiconductor price holds true
    moore’s law of semiconductor performance hold true
    look for 64 bit architecture
    run fit clients with a dedicated server (netboot)
    simplify the network with fewer computers
    fire everyone
    use oracle database on big iron

comdex 2002

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i’m back from comdex 2002, las vegas NV. here are some interesting links from the show:

now some reflections from the show on monday and tuesday. this year, due to the economic collapse, terrorist attacks, and the republican administration, the IT sector is flat or down horribly. this made it possible to come out to comdex much earlier than normal, to hear the keynotes live. last night bill gates, chief software architect shared his vision of the future. what did gates and a 6 billion dollar research budget get him and microsoft? gates showed and stunned the world with a web enabled alarm clock. with this fantastic device, you can tell the time. you can set an alarm to wake up, and like some mystical omen, check the weather and driving conditions. is this an innovation, or just a small laptop with an embedded OS? i felt sorry for the 3 years of research. next up was the future of web services.

how could disparate systems communicate with legacy systems, ecommerce engines, and harness the power of 30 years on the ARPA NET? gates showed us the remote printing of a two page document to kinko’s. like some transcendency, the microsoft team showed us a print dialog box that looked like a print dialog box. instead of printing locally, the order moved over the web to a kinko’s printer. i could do this seven years ago with a PDF workflow. again gates had egg on his face. the few good nuggets he did show were smart displays, a LCD panel connected wirelessly via 802.11 network back to the main CPU, which allows the user to take her work away from the desk and onto the couch. using as simple stylus as a mouse, and a wireless keyboard, the knowledge worker has a new flexibility to share info. imagine a imac screen that not only swivels, but you can take off the G4 tower. so maybe the 6 billion was well spent, but not really.

in every show, the hope is to make strategic business decisions. the theme for the show keynotes, was nothing is impossible and do the solutions of today, instead of dream of technologies of tomorrow. for the last five years, i’ve been dreaming of ubiquitous heterogeneous wired and wireless networks, but as soon as my opportunity came around, the rug would be pulled from under me, as northpoint communications, rhythms network, sprint ion, @home, and other connectivity companies went belly up. i was the face of disaster, as my business ideas circulated around web services, so no broadband internet, no company. i’ll be concentrating on more mature technologies of today, and utilize and leverage over a large fulcrum my web experience, to create DVD’s, and on the side become an apple certified digital hub specialist.

patio repair & OS X

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if all goes well today, i should finish the patio, having already made it weather tight with a fortifiber membrane. i now want to cover all the material with hardiplanks, a fiber cement siding product with a 50 year guaranty. then i pack for a three day run to comdex in las vegas. maybe after that a trip to philadelphia, but this is too far into the future to plan. i’m preparing to become an apple certified technical coordinator, by passing a simple 56 question test. by the end of the year, i’ll be a real apple OS X engineer!

foveon SD9

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the future is now. reading a press release from tomorrow, foveon along with sigma finally announce the availability of the SD9 digital camera. this is the first device of it’s kind using the X3 pro sensor. if you’ve seen the foveon technology, i hope you realized that this is the most significant introduction in 15 years, as the CCD chip is dead, and the CMOS sensor is the state of the art. this chip can both process still photography, and by grouping pixels together, also support video photography. imagine a dual support chipset for HDTV or SDTV along with fantastic stills. this is not the future. this is happening today (well 17 november 2002). while at comdex i hope to take some foveon images of myself to share with you. read a review at imaging resource.

now an even better comparison of foveon technology, take a look a side by side comparisons under controlled lighting.

adobe and foveon

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good news from adobe.com! not only will adobe.com photoshop support foveon X3 native file formats, much like it does kodak.com photoCD, but they just announced in a future version, raw CCD capability! this means those fortunate souls to have a nikon or canon CCD based still camera with RAW format, can now process the original data using the awesome filters of photoshop, instead of the compromised internal solid state hardware you find inside the D1, EOS1, or D60. good going photoshop!