Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
michael.dehaan (his spelling, not mine!) posted something that you can take or leave (I don’t want to start a flame war on my own blog):
michaeldehaan.net | Popularity Contests Are So Junior High School.
But what is intriguing are the ideas that develop in the comments. Please take some time and read those first, and then come back here. 
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been able to make some major- and sorely-needed-upgrades to Audio Islam. Interestingly enough, for the vast majority of people, these changes won’t really be that visible as they are all behind-the scenes.
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, my good friend Belal Khan of Leechon Films fame has started (a while back, actually) a program called Message Mastery. You should get the full explanation from the website, but the basic gist of it is that it is a training seminar focused on developing masterful messages through the medium of video.
He’s released a few videos that are freely available that are samples of what the entire program entails. I found the one entitled “Three POWER Principles of Filmmaking” to be quite refreshing in how simple, yet effective, such techniques can be. Even more beneficial is that the tips he provides, while framed around the production of video media, are general enough to be beneficial in almost any context.
Give his site a check-out and leave some comments as he’s very keen on getting & responding-to feedback from his visitors & members of his program.
Disclaimer: Belal is just my friend - I am neither associated with Message Mastery nor am I enrolled in the program…yet.
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been able to take an enormous amount of pictures during my stay here in Malaysia until now. And while the actual yield of shots with any value may be low, the sheer volume of photos means that I have plenty I would like to share.
The sheer amount of work to upload these and present them in anything close to an appealing way through WordPress has made me decide that I am going to seek an alternative method for disseminating the videos. I am hoping I can leverage my Gallery installation, in shaaʾ Allaah, but it’s support for alternative media types has not impressed me to date. And don’t even dare suggest that I use a Flash-based solution…
Read on for the feature presentation(s)! As usual, make sure to get a copy of the free-and-open-source VLC player if you don’t have it or another media player that can play Ogg Theora videos.
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, I just caught the news that Nokia is planning to buy Symbian and subsequently plans to open-source Symbian OS last this year or at the beginning of this year. If this all plays out and is true, then this is a great boon to world as a high-quality mobile operating system will be free from proprietary encumbrances.
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulilllaah, there are some outstanding opportunities for views of the downtown Kuala Lumpur skyline from the roof of our apartment here. Some of the shots are clearer than others due to the conditions at the time I took theme. These are my first attempts, as well, so keep that in mind. Click the link to see them!
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Okay, so I have an addiction. Here are some more time-lapse sequences I took this past weekend and Monday. I’m now dabbling with alternative frame rates and sizes, including, by “popular” request, HD resolution videos.
I’ve learned a few lessons from these sequences, and I’ll elaborate a bit more on each one.
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
As I’ve already alluded to in a previous post, I’ve been using the CHDK firmware supplement with my Canon PowerShot A550, which on it’s own is an outstanding camera, alhamdulillaah. This firmware add-on, though, really takes the cake!
One of the features made possible by CHDK is the ability to run scripts which take the enabled features of your camera and do interesting things with them. One such script enables one to take a sequence of images of a fixed interval over a period of time - i.e., time-lapse photography! So, over the past two days, I’ve gone-ahead and played with this feature a bit by just collecting images from my office window while I diligently “worked”.
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been playing around with CHDK, which is a free firmware add-on (note: it does not require flashing your camera’s firmware) that enables a multitude of features on your ordinary, run-of-the-mill Canon PowerShot digital camera. In short, it’s amazing. I haven’t had enough time to truly “unleash the POWER” yet, but I’m already amazingly pleased with what I can do so far that I was unable to do prior to this.
Amongst its amazing features includes the ability to save images to a RAW format, full control over shutter speed & exposure settings, fine-grained control over video quality settings, HDR photography, and an amazing BASIC-based scripting language that enables, among other things, time-lapse photography (examples in an upcoming post, in shaaʾ Allaah).
Expect myriad future posts relating to images & videos I’ve been able to capture with these new features, especially in combination with
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, I’m about to head out from work, and I’m going to have to disconnect my torrent seeds that have been running all day - at least until I get home, in shaaʾ Allaah. Here are the graphical bandwidth charts showing the stats of the seeds from all day.
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
I’ve been keeping my eye out for tapeless (e.g., hard drive or flash memory instead of tapes) HD camcorders for a while, because of the obvious flexibility of being able to transfer the recorded video directly rather than “recording” it via IEEE 1394 (i.e., “FireWwire”) - while an IEEE 1394 link is definitely fast, any tape-based camcorder usually only transfers the video at regular playing speeds by actually playing the video.
Having said that, here are a few that have caught my eye:
The important issue, of course, is how easy is it to work with the video once it’s recorded. Most of the video formats are MPEG-4-based, usually the controversial AVCHD. There are some advantages & disadvantages, of course, but ffmpeg really helps with most of the issues. I’ve been playing a lot with it (ffmpeg) this past week, and the sheer flexibility of it is astounding. I think the woes of multimedia flexibility under free operating systems is slowly going away, as even the GUI applications (avidemux, PiTiVi, Kino, etc.) are at a level of refinement I wouldn’t have expected.
Naturally, I am loath to use nonfree versus free solutions, so I am pleased to let you know that there are many free software codecs available through ffmpeg - that is the topic for another article, perhaps.
Obviously, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but I’m really excited to dive into open-source content creation!
Updated with relevant linking and a few spelling fixes.
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, a few months back, I successfully wrapped-up the audio recording & production project for the Texas Dawah Convention 2007. This was clearly one of the most ambitious projects in which I’ve been involved in my life, especially given the degree of responsibility I was given and the amount of work I had to do.
The project for me was a great learning experience on numerous fronts - management, business, technology, work ethic, and team work are amongst a few of them. If it weren’t for the great support I received from my partner & friend (I’ll only mention him if he wants me to - knowing him, he probably would prefer I don’t by default), then the work would have never happened and would have ended-up a terrible flop.
Please read on if you’re interested in knowing the history of how I became involved with this project, how it was executed, some of the challenges I faced during it, and finally, and a part of which I am very proud, how I completed almost exclusively using free (as in freedom) software, particular that which comes with Fedora.
After the end of The Code of Scholars, when I came home and returned my laptop back to its natural position next to my couch (which is where I also sleep), I found this frighteningly intriguing little thing:
Those that know me well know that there is one device in my possession that I hold high above all others – namely, my iRiver iHP-120 (renamed to the H100 later). When I purchased it in the Summer of 2004, it was one of the few products that had the features that I desperately sought in a portable audio device (PAD™). Roughly in order of priority, they are:
Procomm Plus Terminal *beeeeeeee-tshshhhhhhh-khkhkhkkhkhkh* Connected at 9600 bps to Pyro VBBS
I can only wonder how many times the above (or whatever the equivalent was…my memory is fuzzy, at best) information flashed on my family’s Casper 14-inch monitor in the early 1990s (of course, back then, it would have just been “90s”, when we were young & ignorant of such vile truths as Y2K). ANSI art was the height of graphics technology. Our Hayes 9600 baud modem allowed us to look down at those peasants that would dare connect with a lowly 2400 baud no-name brand (probably some upstart company like USRobotics or something…). Indeed, those were the days. Downloads over the zmodem protocol (much better than that xmodem fluf that had been around for so long) brought me my 300kB ARJ archive faster than I could get up, go to the bathroom, make a sandwich, grab a can of pop from the fridge, come back and…find it half-way through. Could things get better? Signs point to “no”. Continue Reading »
I’m sure many others have already editorized about the issue, Anti-userism is a constant & growing problem facing consumers & users the world over. What I mean by anti-userism is the trait that software, hardware, & service companies have of putting the user or consumer last when it comes to priorities, in particular, in relation to their bottom line. Continue Reading »
My supervisor (both he and my officemate use Macs - my supervisor has one of the newer Core-based iMacs) informed me about the WWDC conference going on today. The MacRumors site is also featuring some spiffy web-tech related improvements to handle the surge in traffic they normally get during these kinds of presentations. I guess I just felt the need to share this since my own browser has one tab “tuned-in” to the Ajax-based update page. Kinda spiffy…
What’s even more interesting is how they’ve described how they had to ramp-up their site to handle the increased traffic. It’s not a particularly tech-heavy description, but it’s always nice to see a description of the techniques used on real sites.
I’ve ordered 4 case fans from Newegg, because ever since I’ve closed-up my case (a gift from an old friend), the noise level is actually higher as the CPU fan is spinning faster to keep it cool now that it’s closed. I figure adding a few larger fans will help keep the internal temperature lower and keep that (hopefully noisier) CPU fan running more quitely. We’ll just have to see. Until I get the camera I want, you’ll just have to imagine what all this looks like.
Currently, the CPU idles around 46°C with a case temperature of 46°C, likewise. This peaks at almost 60°C when running a fill CPU load (runs Prime95 for a short while…) 61°C CPU, 46°C case. The CPU fan also runs at 6250 RPM at this temperature. Once I’ve installed the new fans (I might do them one at a time to measure their individual contributions), I’ll report back.
While reading blog posts while I should have been working, I came across something that, to me, was funnier than anything I’ve read for the past 2 or 3 months, mostly because of my own experiences. Continue Reading »
Gnome.org has a brief summary of the new features coming up with their version 2.14 release of the Gnome Desktop Environment (read more about Gnome itself here). I love the new features they have coming up for it, and I am consistently impressed at how clean & elegant-looking its interface is. I just recently installed Fedora Core 4 on my desktop in a dual-boot system, and I found it to be so refreshing after using Windows XP for the past several years. The Linux desktop has so many features, widgets, & tools that simply blow away Windows, thanks to the open-source nature of Linux and its related tools.
On a similar note, I picked up some interesting news off of Slashdot regarding Fedora Core’s AIGLX, which is, more-or-less, an integration between the X window system & the OpenGL 3D rendering language. What’s even more interesting is that it will first become available in the upcoming Fedora Core 5 release. I am looking forward to see what some clever developers can do with the new features enabled by this synergy.
(Those two news bits are not exactly related - I just read about both of them today, so I wanted to blog about both in one post.)
