Category: Life

I just finished spending 6 hours designing a new website for Docks. Personally, I think the new one is better, despite it being much more image intensive.

Old website – New website

Perhaps because of the camera, perhaps because of RAM issues on my computer, and/or perhaps because Premiere has difficulty with certain containers/codecs – but all the footage I’ve taken for Docks has been virtually unimportable. Premiere will simply stall during the audio normalization process, making the end footage uneditable. Sony Vegas fares no better. Heck, even playback is just as problematic, with only VLC being able to handle it all.

So I decided to use VLC to transcode the footage into a format that Premiere would accept more readily. The way I went about it is that I converted a 20 minute sample file into a multitude of formats, seeing which fared best. I then imported it into Premiere, and saw how Premiere handled the formats. I then tweaked the settings until I was satisfied. Sounds simple enough, but that conversion process takes quite a while to complete – and most of stuff I outputed were duds. In all, this took me over two weeks to get done. The length of time required was compounded by the fact that I’ve been incredibly busy with school, work, and my thesis (big priority.)

I’ve got VLC now converting all the footage into the new editable format using a batch script. It should be done in two days, assuming the computer doesn’t crash till then.

The term “hacker” is an interesting one. If you ask what it means to someone at my local LUG, they’ll say that it’s the guy that was able to add support for 5000 cheap webcams into the Linux OS. On the other end of the spectrum are the news media outlets, which have defined it as a computer criminal, regardless of proficiency.

Somewhere in between is this small devoted contingent of people, that have come to define it as those that have been able to make computers and electronic hardware accomplish extraordinary things. In their world, someone who is able to fit a 3D game engine with textures and AI into 32KB using ASM is not belittled, but rather reigns king. In their world, digital security is a toy that is fair game to be undone, laws be damned. It’s a world where knowledge rules, and where age has become all but irrelevant.

And one graphic novel author understood that: Ed Piskor. Piskor has just released this first volume of a series called Wizzywig. It’s a tale about Kevin Phenicle, a fictitious character that draws much inspiration from real-world hacker and social engineer extraordinaire, Kevin Mitnick. Mitnick is famous for being sent into solitary confinment, by judge convinced that Kevin could do catastrophic things if granted access to a regular prison telephone. Things such as, according to the prosecutor on the case, launching a nuke by whistling in a set of tones.

I’ve ordered the book, and it’s heading towards me in the mail. Once I get it, I’ll give a full review. But from what the preview pages tell me, this guy gets it. The content is heavily inspired by real world characters and stories, which has no doubt helped in giving the overall hacking elements to the plot credence. There’s a radio show that is pretty much 2600’s “Off the Hook”, with Emmanuel Goldstein at the helm. Appropriately enough, the host in this fictional world is called Winston Smith. There’s a sgement that pays hommage to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s blue boxing beginnings, whose fictitious equivalents are named “Steve & Steve.” The book even appears to come with a “Free Kevin” sticker drawn on it’s back cover.

I can’t wait for this to get in.

PS. And if you like it enough, order three like Jason Scott.

A few years ago, I happily bought the GeForce 6800 for about $550CDN. It was brand spanking new, and the reviews promised framerates leaps and bounds beyond its predecessor. I wasn’t dissapointed.

But upon my return from a Christmas getaway at my parent’s home, I find a half-frozen computer with a defective video card. It is dead. After a good many years of service, it has died.

So I’m picking up a GeForce 7900 GS from a local guy (yay Craigslist) for $100. The performance promises to exceed those of both my 6800 and the alternative 8600, but for a fraction of the price of the latter. Funny how that works. People price the 7900 as being worth less than the 8600 purely on the basis of the series number… when in fact the former outperforms the latter, and features DX10 support just like its newer rival.

2005, 2005, 2005.  It feels like only last month it was 2005. I look at the stuff I’ve worked on in the past years – skins for Quintessential Player, web design stints, and whatnot – stuff that feels like I only did months ago, but as I look at it all more closely it turns out to be many years ago. I’ve been with a particular forum for six years already. Six years! Oh how time flies.

Now 2008 is upon us. HOPE6 was already a year and a half ago, and the next one is due up soon. Jesus. I often wonder whether this lost track of time has to do with the fact that my time in that period has been absorbed only by a few projects (namely On Piracy and Docks), or whether it’s just one of the drawbacks of getting older.

I remember at the hunting camp I went to a few months ago, a man that was in his early sixties was there.  He had worked for Bell all his life, and yet, as he explained, his first day there felt like only yesterday.

I don’t want to end up like that. When I’m sixty, I want to feel like my being twenty-two was ages ago. What a scary thought that is, to have life literally dissappear from under you. To have it gone by in the blink of an eye.