Semacode

We're back! Semacode + iPhone = free QR code reader :-)

simon@semacode.com (Simon) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:25:00 GMT

We've been here since 2004 (seriously!)—long before there were many 2D barcodes around here in North America. Now Google has distributed 100,000 barcodes in their Favorite Places program. So, now seems like the perfect time to release our iPhone version of Semacode. It supports QR code and Data Matrix, of course, and it's technically equal or superior to anything out there. And best of all, it's free!

Download Semacode's free QR code reader now from the iPhone App Store

So, now you no longer have to pay to play with QR codes :-) We think that we can continue to build our business without excluding kids who don't have credit cards and charging small change on the app store.

We also provide two unique features: a completely synchronized history of your scans. We use a simple email-based login system to give you totally synchronized access from your PC as well. In addition we fully integrate maps, so you can keep track of what you've scanned and where.

We've also got some pretty interesting plans, so subscribe to our feed here or over at @Semacode on twitter. We can't reveal what we're doing yet, but it's going to be cool.

Some things about Google

simon@semacode.com (Simon) — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:01:00 GMT

The Lost Google Tapes

Somehow I missed this way back in 2006 when it came out, The Lost Google Tapes. These are tapes recorded early in google's history, well, 2000-ish, by a reporter doing a story on google. He got the founders, etc. etc on tape. The tapes got released on the net as podcasts in 2006. The recording quality is TERRIBLE, but if you denoise it and EQ using Amadeus Pro or similar software on windows or linux (Audacity?) you can hear what's going on pretty well. I'd post modified version but I'm not sure if that would be legal, let me know what you think...

Well, it's fascinating to hear these voices from the past. It's a bit like being a fly on the wall.

Tools that Google Uses Internally

Google did a webcast earlier this year about their internal tools. It was posted for a while and then unfortunately removed. But, you can still see summaries: The Tools Google Uses Internally (includes screenshots), Innovation@Google 2008 Event Notes, and A glimpse inside Google's secret sauce (also has screenshots).

Generally speaking it looks like a pretty well thought out set of collaboration tools, helping to reinforce a company wide policy of distributed intelligence and innovation.

ruby rocks, python not

simon@semacode.com (Simon) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:54:00 GMT

So I'm just doing some python programming, just a few hours, and already I'm missin' ruby.

python dictionary, is a certain key set?
if self.params['foo']:

oh no, that's won't work. Hmm... How about
if defined(self.params['foo'])

Nope... no such luck, there's NO WAY to find out if a variable is defined in python. Finally after futzking around online I find out that the ONLY way to do it reliably in any situation is to—get this—catch an exception. Except since I'm dealing with a dictionary I can use this (undocumented) method:
if self.params.has_key('foo'):

That's so lame. In ruby, you can do any of these:
if @params['foo']
if @params['foo'].nil?
if defined? @params['foo']

Speaking of which, now that I get it, the @foo syntax for an instance variable (stupidly called a "data attribute" in python) is great. So much more obvious & compact than self.foo.

Python also forces you to do some things that I have happily adapted to giving up in ruby. Like calling functions without brackets, isn't
defined? @params
so much prettier than
defined?(@params)

Yes it is. And also, I've started naming my functions with ?s if they yield a boolean and ! if they make a change in place or generally perform a destructive edit—nice.

And ruby's blocks—I love you!

      download = Download.new do |d|

        d.user = @user

        d.name = my_name

      end

And unless and the if/unless modifiers... I could go on forever. Why don't you read the insane book?

audiophile

simon@semacode.com (Simon) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 18:27:00 GMT

I've been blogging lately about things that have nothing to do with Semacode. That will change very soon. So, if you're not interested in talk about Wired, awesome video, or whatever, don't unsubscribe because pretty soon there will be some very excellent news on the subject of mobile phones, barcode scanning, and all of that. Semacode has been working behind the scenes on all kinds of nifty stuff, and we'll be revealing some of it real soon now.

Anyway, not today.

I bought a pair of AudioEngine 5 speakers last summer. Actually they were an awesome gift from my sister. I got them because I needed something to play the music from the N95 that I knew I was going to be getting. I've never owned an iPod.

Anyway, I got these speakers and I happened to mention it to this friend of mine who plays in the same wind ensemble that I play in. And it turns out that he's getting seriously into the audiophile thing. At first I thought it was a bit funny. I mean, everyone laughs at audiophiles right? They waste enormous amounts of money, like $10000 on a CD player or whatever, what a joke. Well, to start off with my buddy was not wasting a lot of money, he was actually buying a lot of used gear at very reasonable prices. And secondly, the AudioEngine speakers that I got had completely and utterly changed my perception of what good audio can sound like (at only $350!).

What happened was, I plugged them into my Airport Extreme, set the volume to what seemed like a good setting (about "7" if it had numbers) and played Spinning Wheel by Blood Sweat and Tears on my laptop. What came out was a wall of mindblowing brass. It was SO LOUD but SO PERFECT. It was like suddenly BS&T was in my living room blasting their lungs out. I was totally blown away.

So aside from the fact that a lot of people with more money than sense waste it on extremely expensive audio gear, there is actually a point to audiophile. The point is that normal audio gear, for a variety of reasons, does a really craptacular job of rendering sound.

At one end, there is (usually) a live source of music, which is carefully microphoned and mixed by a professional who has one of two goals, either to exactly reproduce the live sound, or to anyway make it sound really good.

At the other end, there is your speakers, which make reproduction. The goal of the audiophile is for the reproduction so much like the original that it's like you're really there, hearing what the professional wants you to hear. It's just the same as comparing a cheap $10 print of Van Gogh, with a $150 art print, to the real thing.

That's what you are missing. It is in fact possible, on a relatively modest budget, to be able to hear very close to what it originally sounded like. Like being at a live performance. It CAN sound that good, that loud, that quiet. Audiophiles talk about the "soundstage" which means, how well does the output match the original spatially, if a particular instrument was on the right, does it sound like it's on the right now? They also talk about resolution. How exactly does the reproduction pinpoint the source of that sound within the space. There's dynamic range—the quiets and the louds—just like video, are the blacks really black and the brights really bright. Can the reproduction hit the same volume as the original without distorting the sound. And so on.

With a good set up there's simply more there, there. You can hear more music in a recording you previously thought you already knew. A tired analogy is that you can close your eyes and imagine more easily that you're on the balcony or on the floor and pick out the locations of each of the instruments, forget you are in the living room and feeling like you're in the concert hall/club.

Well anyway, that's just a start. Digital is a huge advance (and cost savings because moving bits around without loss is dead easy). So you can forget about worrying about a lot of the stuff in the middle of the chain and focus on three important things:

1. The quality of your digital to analog conversion (DAC)

2. The quality of your amps

3. The quality of your speakers.

In my case, based on the research I've done, the DAC in the AX is supposed to be pretty decent, better than the DAC in an iPod or built-into a Mac or PC. And since the AudioEngine 5s are self-powered, they include both amps and speakers, making that easy too. I know that I can (and probably will) build a much better system, starting with the DAC, which turns out to be a lot harder to get right than you might think (analog is always such a pain in the ass you know? Why can't we have digital speakers???).

Anyway, enough for now.

the best web user experience on the planet

simon@semacode.com (Simon) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:10:00 GMT

Facebook. Oh I know, it's not multi-coloured, it's not in your face, it's not made by 37signals or anything like that. It's just GOOD. Facebook actually uses every trick in the book—including drag and drop for God's sake—but you don't even notice. There is so much information going by on the average user's screen that they manage to attain an insane information density without driving users up the wall. Their layout it simple and elegant. They manage to integrate tons of third party applications made by a variety of people with no design sense, seamlessly into the overall system. They give you tons of notices and they are visible without being spammy. They are changing and updating all the time. They let the content do the talking.

But all people do is complain.

remember Wired 1.1?

simon@semacode.com (Simon) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 10:41:00 GMT

OK, chances are reasonably good that you don't, because a lot of you were 8 or something when it came out. I'm talking about WIRED MAGAZINE, the most amazingly amazing thing to ever hit the newsstands. I was a teenager working at a multimedia lab at at a newspaper when it hit. It blew me away. Here it is in all its glory.

Yes, I played an "MMORPG" called MicroMUSE years before the term MMORPG was invented. I actually was messing around (believe it or not) on a VAX VMS system that I had access to because my father was a sort of associate associate professor. Then SunOS I think.

I think I shared with WIRED that I completely missed the boat on the Mosaic browser. I mean, I tried it, but there was nothing on the web to look at. Not even Yahoo! or a search engine. I didn't really get into it until Netscape came out.

But those old WIRED issues were pure magic. Mind expanding. A few years or two in they became boring and corporate, but initially reading it was like having your brain plugged directly into the heart of silicon valley & San Francisco crazy culture.

They always started out with multi-page picture spreads like this one:

What a glorious waste of pages!

How did I miss this?

simon@semacode.com (Simon) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:25:00 GMT

Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. It reads like it was written by an emu on acid, or maybe Douglas Adams's long-lost and insane brother. But anyway, it's a very enlightening (and light) book about ruby. I think it may have been intended for first-time programmers, but it's hard to say for sure. I find the pace is fine, and it's definitely expanding my mind and making me understand some of the different ruby syntax I've been seeing all last year.

Another thing that I missed somehow last year, is SCPlugin for Mac OS X. It's just like TortoiseSVN, except for Mac. Whoo hoo! I remember spending a lot of time last year looking for good SVN client for mac and not finding one (well, SmartSVN is survivable). I think at that point SCPlugin haven't quite made it to prime time yet. I looked again just now, and there it is.

By the way, I do all of my Rails work in oXygen. I realize that it's an XML editor primarily, and that everyone else uses TextMate but I don't like TextMate. It's too programmable. And the first time I installed it it took over every single file on my file system. oXygen is easy to use, has awesome XML/XHTML formatting tools, and I'm a dedicated CSS/XHTML hand coder.

How Dell makes money

simon@semacode.com (Simon) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:15:00 GMT

(Inspired by Living in Dell Time)

Dell has a very, very smart way to make money. This proves that it takes intelligence to find a good business model and to make it work. I call this business design.

Normally computer companies maintain inventory. They stock up on parts, assemble computers, and then sell them. Once you buy it, it comes off the shelf in a warehouse and gets shipped to your door.

Not Dell. They don't build, they don't even buy the parts, until AFTER you purchase. When you click the buy button, they have nothing but air in their warehouse. Only after they have your money do they supply and assemble and ship.

Think about stock, it's dead weight. As soon as you have stock, you are losing money. Stock costs money to buy, and you don't get the money back until you sell it. Even assuming that you sell all your stock, you have two problems. (1) cash flow, and (2) interest.

First you have to have to have a float of cash which you probably borrowed or raised for equity from someone. Getting that cash float and maintaining it is a pain in the ass. Secondly, you have to pay interest on the cash until you sell your stock and get it back. Imagine if you could instead invest that money at market rates for whatever your stock turnover time is. You could make maybe 5%, maybe better. If your stock is worth millions, that adds up!

So stock is expensive. Now Dell turns that around, instead, they get your money first, and pay for the goods later. In fact, as of 2004 Dell was paying for their goods something like negative 10 days after they paid for them. Most companies would be happy to be paid reliably within 30 days after.

Digital Cinema

simon@semacode.com (Simon) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 10:28:00 GMT

This is a bit more of an in-depth article than I've written before. I hope you enjoy it.

I've been researching digital video/cinema partly because I'm curious and partly because I want to build a really kick ass digital home theatre at home. Obviously it has to be 1080p HD. But there's a digital cinema company in Waterloo, Christie Digital, that donated a very high end projector to the Accelerator Centre, with more than 1080p resolution. And, I enjoy reading about how movies are made, and I started to realize that film has a higher practical resolution than 1080p.

A review of Curse of the Were Rabbit in American Cinematographer mentions that they scanned their film at "6K" resolution. That's 6000 pixels wide, three times the width of 1080p, equivalent to an 18 megapixel camera photo for each frame. But can you go higher? Apparently, yes. According to this article filmmakers consider 16K to be adequate. 16K! Awesome!

To put in perspective, the storage required to store that is 21GB per second. It kind of starts to sound like gigapixel imaging, although realistically (a) your eyes can't possibly see all the detail in a gigapixel image anyway and (b) film cannot possibly get the same detail level as a proper gigapixel image.

To go to the perfect digital cinema system, though, resolution alone is not enough. You also need to be able to reproduce, in each pixel, the full dynamic range of light that exists in the real world.

HDR photography is a lame attempt to achieve this. It works like this: you take several photos at different f-stops, recording the brights, the mids, and the darks onto separate digital photos. Then, you use software to selectively compose these multiple photos into a single image. What you get is something that looks completely artificial but allows you to see details in the brights and the shadows that would otherwise be washed out.

More advanced HDR capture uses a single sensor that can simultaneously capture the wide dynamic range of the human eye. Normal digital sensors only record at a bit depth of 8 bits of luminescence per pixel. Waterloo digital cinema company Dalsa has a 4K "Origin" camera that records at 16 bits per pixel depth. That's much closer to the actual perceptive capabilities of the human eye.

You could fix the lame-ness if you could find a way to then display at that bit depth. But no commercial displays can do that yet. Even hyped products like Sony's 1 million to 1 ratio OLED cannot actually come close to the brightness of the real world, because the maximum brightness of the display is only about 600 nits (cd/m²).

Comparatively speaking, maximum direct sunlight is 100,000 lux. Lux and nits are related (oddly enough) by a factor of pi, so 1 nit is equal to 3.14 lux, if the surface being illuminated is perfectly white. (Lux is light cast on something, nits are light cast by something.) 600 nits is nowhere near bright enough to match the daylight it's trying to represent.

Dolby recently bought some interesting technology called BrightSide which can display at 3000 nits, equivalent to decent daylight. You can see the effect in photos that show the old vs. new technology on a side by side basis. There's an image below with an LCD TV on the left and a BrightSide demo on the right from an article by Geoff Richards.

To conclude. 1080p is pretty damned good for now, equivalent to 2K cinema. I'm probably going to aim for whatever is the brightest screen I can get, but I'll definitely be looking forward to seeing something like BrightSide display technology to be available as soon as possible, because I think it will make a huge difference to the viewing experience—make the picture much more like the real world.

[Update: I was thinking that 16K might not actually be enough to ultimately satisfy the human eye. 16K = about 100 megapixels. But these calculations about the human eye make me think that would probably be enough actually. It would really be a question about how much field of vision you want to fill, and the more you fill, the more the eye has to move around to see it all. So 16K would probably be satisfactory for a movie where you would expect to have a reasonably focused field of attention.]

[Update 2: Good god, I've just discovered that there's also a framerate issue. What happens if you are showing a "24p" (24 frames per second) movie on a display that always has to work at 30ftp, like any NTSC TV? They do something called "pulldown" (repeat some frames) or play other tricks. I don't completely understand what these tricks accomplish (3:2 or 5:5 pulldown?) or what exactly the "film look" is (something to do with shutters?), but it seems to me that if you want to have a proper home cinema you should display what the moviemaker intended you to see. It would appear that I'll need to pay attention to frame rate issues to make sure I get that.]

8 Ways to drive a Graphic Designer mad

simon@semacode.com (Simon) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:31:00 GMT

8 Ways to drive a Graphic Designer mad. Oh wow, this is funny. Some people I know might benefit from reading this articles. Others might see their lives scarily reflected back at them.

Via The Cartoonist.

Uh oh, I've been tagged. Now I have to think of 8 things you don't know about me. There's the number 8 again. That's synchronicity.