leŭksman

I spent some time last night playing with my parents’ shiny new HDTV, which puts my 2005-vintage 26″ set to shame.

Pretty nice set; 40-something inch, 1080p, 120 Hz whatchamahooie, and you can plug in a USB stick full of JPEGs and force your family to watch your vacation photos. Nice!

It seems to be all the rage on new sets to have motion interpolation which can take 24-frame-sourced content (feature films and most US drama and sitcom TV shows) and smooth out the frame-to-frame motion, making it look more like 60-field video. Lots of higher-end sets advertise 120 Hz or even 240 Hz, which honestly seems excessive to me — the human eye can’t distinguish much more than 60 frames per second.

I’m a bit torn; on the one hand, the faster frame rate makes motion look much more vivid and realistic from any objective point of view. On the other hand, audiences have been trained over the last few decades to associate the video look with “cheesier” programming — soaps, reality shows, etc — while “serious” programs are shot on film at 24fps, making them feel more like a big-budget feature film… even to the point that lots of money was spent developing HD video cameras that could shoot at the slower, less realistic 24fps instead of HD’s native 60!

We stumbled into Harold and Kumar escape from Guantanamo of all things on HBO, and ran it for a while just to get a feel for the set. At first it drove me nuts seeing a movie I’d already seen on film looking distinctly like HD video, but after a half hour I got quite used to it and rather grew to like it. Of course as a former cinema-television student I’m extra-sensitized to this stuff — my wife immediately took to the more vivid display and commented on how much better it looked than when we’d seen it in the theater!

Looks like the mass audiences are happy to embrace high-motion video… I wonder if the long-standing holdover of the “film look” over the last decade was driven more by the oversensitized film geeks in the industry than any actual audience comparison…

Let’s learn a lesson here with our software development as well — those of us who’ve been nose-deep in web sites and software UI for years aren’t necessarily the most qualified to tell what our actual users are going to be most comfortable with.

In the last few weeks:

• got married to my awesome lady Marti
• saw Fleetwood Mac concert
• took two weeks vacation in Chicago area (still sorting and uploading gajillions of pictures)
• dragged 11-13-year old nieces & nephews all over Chicago
• hit wacky science-fiction/fantasy cons in California and Illinois
• sold my soul to Apple & AT&T again for a new iPhone 3G S on order (mmmm, delicious gilded cage)

Whew! Ok, now I need a vacation from my vacation, and that means… back to work!

I’m generally appalled at the state of compound documents…

In the Apple world, Mac apps like Keynote love to use bundled directories which look like flat files at the UI level. Cute, but Thunderbird gleefully destroys them as attachments… Apple’s Mail.app transparently packages them into .zip archives for you, but Thunderbird just gives you a file with a directory listing, which naturally enough fails to open when you download it. Nice!

OpenOffice and the latest greatest MS Office stick their XML documents into a .zip archive and package image files, etc into that archive. These actually do act like flat files, so attachments and uploads work. But it makes file type detection and validation a little harder; verifying which file type your zip thingy is and whether it contains extra files slipped in…

And then you get fun packages like Scribus, which just give you an XML file referencing all your external image files by path, leaving no way to transfer your entire document without manually managing a directory structure and sending around or archiving multiple files manually.

We had a request for allowing Scribus uploads to Wikimedia sites for things like PR materials… sounds great, except for how any actually relevant document will need image files packed into the same directory which you can’t do. D’oh!

I’m putting together a talk proposal for SVG Open 2009, which will be in early October at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA.

I’ve got plenty of background I can pull in on the challenges and benefits of SVG on the web and the tradeoffs we’ve made in our usage and implementation, but I know lots of you folks out there have been more active on the ‘content-generation’ end of things and can point out some things I wouldn’t think of.

If anybody’s got any particularly interesting issues, examples, problems, or idea prototypes relating to usage of SVG on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites, I’d love to see how much I can pack in.

Pointers to cool feature proposals like Nikola’s localization presentation at Wikimania last year, or bulk anaylsis like benchmarks and compatibility tests on images in actual use would be of particular interest.

Preparing for the upcoming Wikimania in Buenos Aires, I’ve been attempting to practice my Español in part by switching my computer’s user interface into Spanish.

OpenOffice 3.1 was released today, so of course I went and grabbed the Spanish-language Mac download and fired it up. ¡Bueno! Except…. while editing a document, cmd+A brought up an “open” dialog instead of selecting all. Um?

Ok, “A” for “Abrir”, sounds good right? Except for the part where the entire rest of the operating system maintains the same keyboard shortcuts regardless of my language setting, and I would go completely mad if common shortcut keys randomly gave me different features in just one application.

A little googling turned up complaints about this sort of behavior going back years, but not a lot of good solutions. After some poking around, I did finally discover the configuration dialog for the keyboard shortcuts — under Tools/Customize… (Herramientas/Personalizar…) instead of, say, oh, in the preferences dialog.

I was able to — component by component — export the English keyboard settings to a file (saved conveniently with a “.*” extension) and — component by component — load my “customized” settings back up after relaunching in Spanish.

It seems to work now — cmd+A selects all, cmd+O brings up an open dialog — but it was a bit of a pain getting there. Let’s hope they don’t spontaneously revert…

Update: I’ve added a note on this to a bug on OOo’s bug tracker. Trying to track down some Spanish-speaking Windows users to check the standard platform behavior of Windows apps localized in Spanish… is Ctrl+A for Open and Ctrl+G for Save normal there?

I probably don’t need these files anymore…

Did a quick pass squishing my at-event notes onto wiki… May be more tomorrow.

A couple items have already hit announcements over at the tech blog:

• Wikimedia Deutschland offering short term contracts
• OpenStreetMap maps will be added to Wikimedia projects

And of course, my photos from the trip so far.

Blogging and microblogging tend to get disrespect from folks who “just don’t get” the purpose for them and consider them at best mindless entertainment and at worst an attention-sapping pest.

As a second-generation programmer, I found that I “got” them pretty quickly.

My dad programs for embedded and industrial-control systems; I grew up watching him bring home stacks of trade magazines — not to read every article in detail, but to skim through as an environmental scan, updating his awareness of the state of the art. If anything the ads and editorials were far more useful to him than the articles!

As a web developer in the 2000s, I started to use blogs and microblogs much the same way: little bits of information here and there which fill in my background map of what’s current among my peers (say, everything awesome in web browser work).