entirely safe and fun

One down, 434 to go!

Primary season has been a real downer here in California’s 14^th. Not only did our serial incumbent Representative Anna Eshoo not draw a competitor within her own party, she doesn’t appear to have even drawn a Republican challenger! We don’t have a shot at either of our Senators, and all of the Presidential candidates are basically identical. Surely there must be some good news, right?

There is! Arizona Republican Representative Rick Renzi had already announced that he wouldn’t be running for re-election this year, and now we know why… and can be sure that he’ll actually keep his promise, a rare and beautiful treasure among Congressthings. He’s been indicted on charges of abusing his power as a member of the House Natural Resources Committee to secure sweetheart federal land deals for his co-conspirators, showing again how any power a government has, even something as simple as owning land, is bound to lead to corruption sooner or later.

The disgraced Congressman has appeared on the radar of many corruption NGOs over the past few years, and the group CREW has apparently featured him on their “Most Corrupt Members of Congress” list (fascinating read) for the last three years. Congressman Renzi, great job, and thank you for supporting term limits and the “Vote Freshman” campaign!

Adapted from this, and likewise made available under the GFDL

Toshiba, key player behind the HD-DVD format, announced this week that they’ve called in the priest for last rites. The conventional wisdom holds, then, that the competing Blu-Ray format “wins” the high-def format war. Honestly, I don’t buy it. It’s not clear to me that there’s anything to win. Downloaded or on-demand content is the next, and in some senses final, medium of choice for movie distribution; Blu-Ray gets to be King of Nothing for a day at best.

Consider: High-end computer monitors already offer resolutions of 1600 lines (2560×1600 glories in the entirely parody-proof name “WQXGA”) or more, compared to the 1080 lines addressed by today’s “high-def” content. Next year, there will be even more monitors with more than 1080 lines than there are this year, as an inevitable consequence of computer desktop creep. The year after that, there will be still more. At some point, it will become a selling point for high-end TVs that they are, as electronics salesthings are wont to say, “future-proof” in the same way as those computer monitors. Right around that time, some enterprising person, probably in the adult entertainment industry, will decide to sell content with 1600 or more lines of resolution, targeting the profligate. As a hard-coded standard, Blu-Ray is completely incapable of filling that many lines; it was written with VC-1 as its (arguably) highest-efficiency codec in terms of pixels/Mbit, and with Blu-Ray’s hard limit of 40Mbit/s video throughput, VC-1 can paint at most 1920×1080 at 24fps. On the other hand, a general-purpose computer, driving that same monitor, can add a new codec at any time. There is no pre-set limit on the throughput of its storage or network devices, and in fact we can expect that to remain a fast-moving target; thus, there is nearly no limit on the number of pixels per frame, or frames per second.

You will have your five-megapixel QSXGA smut, sure enough, but it is going to have to be delivered as “just data” rather than on a disc of the older, player-based kind. It may come on a BD-ROM, at least for a little while, but eventually will ship over the ever-accelerating Internet. Blu-Ray simply isn’t enough format, a problem compounded by the popularity and youth of the DVD format, and it seems likely that it’s destined for a northern winter’s day in the sun.

17 Feb ‘08, 3.26pm PST PST: by ccreitz

At the Toronado, San Francisco.

Documented here, the continuing saga of my attempt to master microfoam. Also, the awesomeness of ImageMagick. I was able to make that little montage with just a few keystrokes, by putting just the sixteen pictures I wanted in a directory by themselves, changing to that directory, and saying…
md small
for %i in (*.jpg) do convert %i -resize 100 -filter Lanczos small\%i
cd small
montage *.jpg -geometry +1+1 ..\montage.jpg
Note that “convert” and “montage” are two of the programs in the IM suite. I do have one small complaint about IM — why is it that I can’t take all the results of a batch transformation and “pipe” them into a multi-image operation like montage? The support for piping single images is incredibly handy, and it would be awesome if it could be generalized.

11 Feb ‘08, 6.31pm PST PST: by ccreitz

Dante has a theory that if you shake the box really hard, one more tissue will fall out. He has yet to publish his conclusions.

Embarrassingly, I didn’t notice that the previous/next links at the bottom of each page weren’t working, as a consequence of my changes to support the moblog. What I needed to do was query_posts($query_string . "&cat=-16");, rather than just query_posts("cat-16");. What a silly thing to miss…

fig. 1: The baby perceives the object of his desire, but discovers that it is out of reach.

fig 2: He raises his rear end as high as possible…

fig 3: …and rolls onto his back, critically, straightening his torso. Here, he is momentarily distracted by his socks.

fig 4: Dante rolls onto his tummy, having moved forward about four inches. He wins the prize.

More pix on Flickr, tagged “protocrawling”.