and I mean it
Some remarks on the Coditel digital television system that I have been using for the last two weeks:
Way too many useless channels
I could now watch channels like Nile TV, Qatar TV and Al Jazeera for Kids. But no Discovery Channel or National Geographic. On the good side: I now have Vijf TV and Vitaya, which was not the case with analog TV.
Continue reading ‘Coditel digital television’
After a conversation with Ine on HD formats (1080i vs. 1080p), I researched the topic a bit further. Let me resume some of the things I have learned up till now:
HD or ‘high definition’ as defined for screens, projectors and TV, defines 2 resolutions. The smaller one has 720 lines of each 1280 pixels, the bigger one 1080 lines of each 1920 pixels. They can be used with different frame rates: refreshed at 24 fps (a common movie standard) up to 50/60fps (often used for TV). To limit the necessary bandwidth in some cases ‘interlaced scanning’ is used: 1 frame contains all the odd lines, the next only the even lines. This effectively halves the throughput, at the cost of image quality (rapid moving lines appear jagged).
The two most common formats are:
What kind of resolution do we have now? Regular digital TV (SD or ‘Standard Definition’) consists of 480 lines of 720 pixels each. DVD, for instance, allows for 480i and 480p. So, HD delivers at least 3x that resolution.
“HD Ready“, a label that a lot of TVs/screens carry now, just indicates that:
- The minimum native resolution of the display (e.g. LCD, PDP) or display engine (e.g. DLP) is 720 physical lines in wide aspect ratio.
- The display device accepts HD input via Analogue YPbPr1, DVI or HDMI
- HD capable inputs accept the following HD video formats: 1280×720 @ 50 and 60Hz progressive (“720p”), and 1920×1080 @ 50 and 60Hz interlaced (“1080i”)
- The DVI or HDMI input supports content protection (HDCP)
from eicta.org (PDF)
Even if the display can only show 720p, and so must ‘downsample’ an incoming 1080i signal to that lower resolution, it can be called “HD Ready”.
Continue reading ‘HD – 720p, 1080i and 1080p’
Ever wondered if you needed a caching plugin for your Wordpress blog? You have the impression your blog’s homepage takes forever to load? You hate it when your friends call your blog ‘interesting, but so slow’?
Well, I did, so I wanted to find out just how slow it was. I set up an MRTG monitoring system on my Dreamhost account. First thing I did was to add 2 tests:
Let’s take a look at the CSS file first:
The green line is my 500ms treshold: everything above it is too slow.You see that most of the time my CSS file can be downloaded faster than that (actually the average is around 250ms). There is the occasional peak, which might be caused by temporary network congestion or a server busy doing other stuff – it IS a shared hosting after all.
Now compare this to the time it takes to get my homepage: Continue reading ‘WP-Cache speeds up your Wordpress!’
(post in Dutch)
Get this video and more at MySpace.com
Teruggevonden via MySpace, een filmpje van (denk ik) 2004:
Kunnen West-Vlamingen tellen? Vraag dat aan Boer Klerk, Rudolf Vanmoerkerke en Christian Dumoulin. Zij mogen niet tellen in het filmpje dat Kurt Vandemaele maakte naar aanleiding van de 1 Minuut Film and Sound Awards in Leffinge. Net zomin als Jean-Luc Dehaene, Yves Letherme of hun collega’s politici. Wie dan wel? De lijst ziet u hieronder.
Het filmpje met de 60 tellende West-Vlamingen is zaterdag voor het eerst te zien in het programma ZIETA op WTV en FOCUS. Maandag hoort u de zestig tellen in De Nieuwe Wereld bij Friedl’ Lesage. Een gelegenheid om speciaal te letten op de muziek die Piet Goddaer speciaal voor het filmpje gecomponeerd heeft. Op 18 september draait het filmpje tijdens Leffingeleuren om het uur op een groot scherm op de markt van Leffinge. Dit zijn alvast de zestig bekende West-Vlamingen die u hoort en ziet tellen:
(via Het Virtuele Perscentrum)
Five more days to go! Some more tips for those of you who are attending Barcamp Brussels on Sunday:
The SAP Lounge is located in the Arsenal complex, an old military building that is now turned into fancy offices. The address is Chaussée de Wavre 950, 1040 Etterbeek. That is on the corner of the Chaussée de Wavre and the Boulevard Général Jacques, right next to the VUB University. There is a parking for SAP Lounge visitors just before the Colruyt at the right.
Here is a map of SAP Lounge.
Like last time, most things have been paid for (thank you Skynet), but we are still going to need some sponsors for drinks. If you or your company would like to contribute (I will of course mention this kind gesture), please contact me on the day itself.
It used to be that when you installed Wordpress on Dreamhost, you only got 3 standard themes installed. Now you get a whopping 50: 2exquisite, 534, Abstrakt3c, Almost-spring, Artsemerging, Barthelme, Blue Kino, Classic, Connections-reloaded, Craving4green, Dapit_hapon, Darknight2.0, Daydream, Default, Disconnected, Durable, Fasttrack, Fluidityrs, Fspring_widgets, Greening, Hemmednoajax, Leone, Lush, Milc3, Modern, Newzen_2.0_build_105, Nineshadesgreen, Nolimits, Ocadia, Orchids, Phoenixblue, Plaintxtblog, Pressrow, Qwilm!, Rounded-v2, Roundflow, Rusty, Shadedgrey, Simply-vic, Sirius, Stripedplus, Tbs-blue, Thirteen, Tiga, Typoxp, Unsleepable, Veryplaintxt, Vslider2, Wpandreas03, Wpglass, Wpjeriko01.
Continue reading ‘Fancy Wordpress themes on Dreamhost’
RIM, the maker of the fancy Blackberry devices, has filed a patent application for a technique that allows devices to ‘guess’ in what kind of environment they are:
The new Blackberrys would occasionally and very briefly vibrate. This should be too short to be mistaken for a message alert but just long enough for an accelerometer inside the device to measure how much it moves. This tells the Blackberry whether it is on top of a flat table, in a person’s hand or stuffed inside a pocket.
On a table, the Blackberry rings loudly to announce a call. Inside a pocket, it shuts off the screen to save power. And while in the palm of a hand, it leaves the screen lit but switches to vibrate when it has a message to deliver.
(newscientist.com)
But that is only one way to guess the situation it’s in. If we call the above vibrate-and-sense method a kind of ‘feeling’, what if we took a look at all five senses?
Watch out, at some point we all will give names to our mobile devices, and have actual conversations with them.
(If you don’t work with HTML, this next post will be of no interest to you.)
Rant: the way external CSS stylesheets are included in HTML now is not logical nor convenient.
So:<linktype="test/css"href="(...).css" rel="stylesheet" />is wrong,
it should be<style type="text/css" src="(...).css" />.
Why?
Because src is for now, href is for later
In a HTML page, there are a number of files (URLs) that have to be fetched to display:
There are also links to other URLs that are not for now: maybe one click away, maybe just there to be interpreted by the web browser:
So: you need the src="" referenced files immediately, and the href="" ones not. The way stylesheets are referenced now breaks this logic.
Because <style> is for stylesheets
Why can you embed in-line CSS style information within <style> tags, but not external stylesheets? Compare that to Javascript:
Inline JS: <script>...</script> and
External JS: <script src="" />
That makes sense. The same should be possible for <style>. The way it works now is counter-intuitive and antiquated. So please add it to XHTML 1.1.
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