Metapost

A boring post about posting, that's what the "meta" prefix means. Some notes and nod to another blog that I recently came across.

I was (again) messing around with the embedded movies because I don't like the way they take a long time to load. Maybe it's because they're too large, maybe my net connection is too slow, or maybe there might be some software control to turn the loading behavior off. I thought maybe I should once again revise the "object" and "embed" tags that I use to stuff the videos into this blog. (On that note, how do you put in html code "verbatim" (thinking LaTeX) so that it doesn't get interpretted?) There are numerous options and I thought that either the autoplay or cache options would not pre-load the video. My intention was for the user to click the movie to load it. As it is, the movie loads automatically pretty much hogging the bandwidth in doing so. What if you've just gotten to the page today but you've seen the videos yesterday? They shouldn't have to be reloaded from the net every time. That's my thinking, but I can't seem to turn this off with either of these two options.

In trying to find the appropriate option, I found Kathy Marks' web page, where I found this nifty post on embedding windows media and quicktime video on a web page. Almost the exact phrase I used in google. I don't know who Kathy Marks is, but her blog looks nice. It's got that simple but elegant look and feel that real designers create that I envy. If it weren't for Blogger and its various templates this web page would look awful, like my own web pages do. Kathy's web page also had a link to an essay on why Microsoft is dead. I thought it was an interesting read, particularly his take on readers' reactions.

Unfortunately, the Autodesk Cleaner app didn't work that well for me. True, it did compress one of the 15M videos down to 1.5M, but it also simply cut it in half, encoding only the first portion. Maybe it's because I only downloaded the demo version or something. I'm not sure that Cleaner adds any more magic to the encoding process that iMovie doesn't have. Most of it depends on the codec. I'd have to look around to find out which codec has the highest compression ratio as well as which is supported by most players. I'm currently using mpeg4 with the H.264 codec. Maybe there's a more aggressive combination. I guess the best way would be try different combinations and then evaluate which is the smallest. But I'm just too lazy for that.

Last night I went out for pub grub at The Blarney Stone, an Irish pub. The food there wan't that great. I had a burger when what I was really looking for was bangers and mash. Then I went around peeking into different places. San Diego's expensive. I came across places that wanted $10 cover, even a $30 cover (some kind of goofball masquerade party where the $30 included a New Orleans type of face mask that I think they insisted you wear; I passed). So I ended up at the same bar I went to with some people when we held ETRA here in 2006 ($3 cover). It's a crappy little bar just off 5th street, but it had a decent blues band. Just a four piece band playing pretty standard stuff. The guy on keys was excellent. Actually they were all pretty good. I didn't bring the camera, the pic's from my cell phone, which is why it sucks. Still, look at the stage lighting. How fluorescent!

Today I'm off to register at SIGGRAPH. But first I have to find a Starbucks!