Categories
People

Inattention

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The folks of St. Louis are still talking about the massive freeway crash that occurred Tuesday afternoon during rush hour. Three people have now died, and several are still in the hospital.

For those not from our area, the interchange between our Highway 40 (Interstate 64) and southbound I270 is incredibly busy in the afternoon rush hour. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for people to be forced to slow or even stop in the rightmost lane. Tuesday afternoon, a semi-truck hauling scrap aluminum hit, and literally ran over ten cars. Two people died immediately, and a third died today. Two of the three who died were Amish, traveling in a hired van heading to a funeral.

All the facts aren’t in and the police haven’t issued a report yet, but one thing is known: the truck driver was not paying attention before he hit the cars. A person driving besides the truck, who ended up getting hit by one of the cars knocked over the truck, estimated it was going 75 MPH when it hit the cars, and with no slowing down.

No charges have been filed yet. The driver has a clean record, and is emotionally wrecked, as you can imagine.

Tonight, one of the local news stations reported that the driver was distracted by a cellphone call just before the accident. I don’t think any of us are surprised.

The biggest cause of accidents, in this area and most likely elsewhere, is people not paying attention. They talk on the phone, they eat, try to read the newspaper while waiting at lights, check their email, and probably send Twitter updates. We travel in vehicles weighing thousands of pounds, traveling at high speeds, surrounded by other big, fast moving vehicles, and seem to think it’s perfectly acceptable to have a phone conversation with Joe, or quickly check that email from Jane—not to mention drinking hot coffee, smoking cigarettes that drop hot ash, or fiddling with the in-dash GPS, iPod, or radio.

Needless to say, the accident has awakened the call to make cellphone use while driving illegal. We shouldn’t need a law, though. We have something between our ears called a brain.

Categories
Critters

Squid Friday: too much squid

I love giant squid stories as much or more than most people, but I’ll pass on watching the 90 minute video of a giant squid dissection filmed in Melbourne, Australia.

However, I wouldn’t want to deprive the rest of you by not mentioning the story. How am I to know how you all get your jollies. Have fun.

(I need live squid movies. Send me live squid movies.)

Categories
Burningbird

More simplifications and Atom feed issues

The recent small Drupal upgrade convinced me to simplifying my site structure. It only took me about ten minutes, all total, but having to do the same thing with five sites becomes a bit of a bore. I’m creating shell scripts that will manage updates for Drupal minor releases and Drupal modules, but you still have to run updates. So, one more site bites the dust: Painting the Web.

I originally split Painting the Web off because I wanted to use the site to hopefully market the book. I also wanted to separate the site from my more opinionated writings, so I don’t lose sales. However, book sites rarely help sales, and if people aren’t going to buy a book because of my opinions, they probably wouldn’t like the book, anyway.

This won’t impact on any of you because I don’t think anyone has subscribed to the site directly. However, I may be moving some of the writings over to this weblog, so forgive the duplications in your feeds.

Speaking of feeds, since the Drupal upgrade, my Atom feed seems to be marking old posts as newly updated, and it looks like my feeds are being refreshed so they show up as active in readers again. When I have the time after the first of August, I’ll look through the code and see if I can figure out what’s happening. In the meantime, I’ll try to minimize the feed pinging as much as possible.

Categories
Internet

Streaming video from Amazon and Roku: a perfect match?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Amazon is releasing an upgrade on its video delivery system today. Unlike its previous offering, you’re not limited to a Windows only box in order to stream video to your computer. You also don’t have to completely download the video in order to start watching (similar to what’s offered in iTunes and AppleTV, as well as Netflix WatchNow).

An interesting twist on Amazon’s offering, which is going to make it attractive over Apple’s offering is it’s cloud-based support for videos. If you purchase a movie, you don’t have to keep a copy on your computer or backup storage. Instead, the video will be available at Amazon, ready to stream at the click of a link.

Amazon isn’t looking just to win within the computer desktop market, it’s also looking to connect this service to hardware devices, including Sony’s high-end Bravia line. Currently, you have to purchase an optional tower in order to access the video (and at $300.00, the offering isn’t cheap). Eventually, though, the web video service will be built into the television.

Another possible hardware partner for Amazon’s new streaming service is Roku’s new Netflix device, the small, video streaming device that currently streams Netflix’s WatchNow offerings. Roku recently announced that it is looking for additional content providers—with Netflix’s blessing, as Netflix is looking to place its service in other devices.

What Roku’s box needs from a service is streaming video, as well as cloud-based storage as the device has no storage of its own. The talk in the Roku forums is that the device will be streaming YouTube videos, but these videos typically don’t look every good on a larger monitor, like a TV; especially an HD TV.

Another strong Roku possibility is Hulu, the online video streaming service by NBC and a consortium of other companies. CBS now has new HD quality video streaming services that would also be excellent source for the Roku box.

However, what Amazon’s new service would provide would be a way to stream new movies. The Roku device is also capable of streaming HD quality video, which would provide an outlet for HD quality material from Amazon. The Roku box is also cheap, which can’t help but make it attractive to Amazon. In fact, the Roku’s price could be the key that enables mainstream switching to online video.

If Amazon does stream its offerings through Roku’s video box, the device could become the Amazon equivalent version of AppleTV, only cheaper, smaller, and with access to 10,000 free movies and TV shows in addition to pay-to-play newer offerings.

(Also see NewTeeVee, which wonders at a Amazon/Roku mashup)


Update I updated the text to reflect that iTunes does have the video watching capability as AppleTV. In addition, I adjusted the comments so that you can now leave your contact information.

Categories
Copyright Writing

Painting the Web now DRM free and on the Kindle

I had no idea that my book Painting the Web was going to be one of O’Reilly’s first batch of DRM-free eBooks. I was stunned to see it as one of the first 12 Kindle books O’Reilly has released.

Painting the Web does make a nice ebook. I think the graphics are better in a digital format rather than in print. I’m not quite sure, though, how the graphics will translate to a Kindle. I’ll probably buy a copy for my own Kindle, just to see what the book looks like on the device.

There was a group of us authors who had a discussion in the Kindle forums several months back, about books with figures. My suggestion at the time was that companies who publish books with lots of figures to the Kindle, should also provide a PDF or some other online copy of the book, or at least the figures, so that people have both—the Kindle for the text, and the other format to better see the figures. It sounds like O’Reilly is using this approach with the company’s ebook bundles: pay one price, and get the book in PDF, EPUB, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket. So now, you can now read Painting the Web in Kindle, Sony’s ebook reader, on your computer, and yes, even on paper.

In addition to being able to read these books in about every environment known to humanity, the digital formats make it simple to add corrections to an existing book and have those corrections reflected immediately in the digital copy. This is the way of the future. I’m not saying paper books are going away, but I know I certainly don’t miss paper with my Kindle.

The DRM-free nature of the books is a gamble. Other publishers have started to put out DRM free books, too, such as some of the Sci-Fi houses like Tor and Baen. My being able to buy food and pay rent next year depends on how well this gamble pays off.

I’m pleased to see Painting the Web on both lists. This is a book I’m very fond of, and I like that it’s taking part in O’Reilly’s new venture. I was surprised, though, as I hadn’t been in any discussion with O’Reilly about the book being included.