Matrix 3 – Revolutions trailer

The trailer is out there.
Downloaded the TGF version from alt.binaries.multimedia tonight, sick quality, looked like a hi quality dvd on my xbox.

Heres the nfo which came with it. If you can find it download it because its actually better quality than the version you get from the matrix site plus its damm 5.1 digital surround sound. I love Dolby Digital…Humm

TGF Proudly Presents
              ----------------------

               Movie: Matrix Revolutions
                IMBD: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0319969/
               Title: Theatrical Trailer
              Format: WMV9 VCM + AC3 DD 5.1 wrapped in AVI
   Format Resolution: 1280x720p FILM Progressive
       Video Bitrate: 6.4 Mbit/sec Average
                      20.0 Mbit/burst 2-pass VBR
       Audio Bitrate: Remastered 224 kbps AC3 DD 2.0
                Size: 127,406,080 bytes	(127.4MB)
        Release Date: 29/09/2003


                    Synopsis
             ----------------------

        Quite simply, I'm releasing this
        version of the theatrical trailer
       for HTPC users lucky enough to have
       DLP PJ's which are 1280x720 native
        or higher. Play this on your 100"
       screen and let me know how good it
             makes your system look.

   Or heck. Anyone with an HTPC hooked up to
             an HDTV set or monitor.


                  Release Notes
             ----------------------

       This requires WM9 Video Codec and a
     DirectShow AC3 filter (e.g. ac3filter).
          ZoomPlayer is recommended for
     playback but WMP 6.4 or WMP9 will work.

         P4 2.4 GHz class or higher with
      DXVA AGP 4X/8X Video card recommended
                  for playback.


                   Group News
             ----------------------

                    *INTRO*

   I'm not a group. I'm an independent releaser.
  I strive for quality over speed above anything
     else. It's all about pushing technology
              and the envelope.

                    *HDTV*

   People have yearn for more true HDTV content.
        WMV9 and XviD @ HDTV resolutions.
            Flames about choosing an
    M$ codec will be sent straight to /dev/null.

                    *DVD5*

      My DVD5's are my masterpiece. Carefully
    mastered from TRUE HDTV raw MPEG-2 sources
   giving you studio quality DVD releases. Who
    else can claim untouched AC3 streams, and
   beautifully remastered HDTV to DVD content.

Looking forward to seeing Matrix 3 in Berlin, Germany now. Hoping to see it on a really large screen maybe imax?

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Office 2003 will ‘protect Microsoft’s monopoly’

Interesting news story about a internal document from Sun. Laurie Wong argue's that Microsoft Office 2003's document rights management system will turn the office market into a monopoly. I kinda of agree, that the whole office 2003 is open message is very mixed but you need to buy into the whole microsoft suite to take advantage of there DRM. So its not a big deal i feel, but i take the point about using PGP. I would ideally say DRM should be seperate from the program. Office 2003 surely does take us into dangerious teritory.

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Category changes ahead

I'm going to make some serious changes to my cubicgarden blog categorys. At the moment I have too many and the information archtecture has been bugging me for months now. Specially now I'm using the same archtecture for my feeds. So please update any links you may have soon as I make the changes and I will try to do the same to internal links.

Oh note, I've upgraded to Blojsom 2.02, so you search via xpath, try out the Trackback Auto-discovery and post in privicy knowing your email is obfuscated.
Great stuff from David Czarnecki, two thumbs up.

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Educational blogging updated

Oh my goodness, I've been so slack its unreal.
I keep quoting bits from my blogging experienment last acdemic year, but never really published the final results.
And unfortually I never did, but I can represent what I already have. So here is the opml file and the converted html version.

Some background on the experiement,
I wanted to see how many hoops students would be willing to jump through to blog there work. A few students wrote a xml document which was handed out to the rest of the class in the summer term. The xml document was very long and overkill for a blog, but it was proposed as a blog and cv for a student through out there 2-3 years in Ravensbourne college. Work was done on it by Harry, Miles, Vanessa and Jc – All 1st year students with little to no experience of xml.
The blog was put up under cubicgarden.com and was done without any blogware. So all updates were sent to me over email where i could read them and then put them up on the site. So as you can see its quite a world away from the blog systems you see now. However I choose to make things difficult to test the barrier for entry.

In the end I moved all the blogs to blojsom under the /messaging/blogging/music video catergory. There all there for reading.

Some highlights from the experience

Students form a bond with the blog through what they write.
Vanessa complains about a kidney infection
Poil talks about the project and whole lot more

Students voice there real concerns and thoughts.
Julie vents her built up frustration
and before that
Harry bitches
kelvin tells me the truth without too much fear

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Cleaning up, Bloglines vs Flock

In my post during August I looked at the service bloglines. And honestly I have been checking out bloglines over the last month, and I like it but its not for someone like me. I have flock and I use it for reading feeds plus more. Bloglines is perfect for someone who just wants to read there feeds and thats all. I thought avantgo would beable to read my bloglines and display it on my ipaq, but it wasnt to be. Actually Flock did a better job at that.

I havent yet messed with the flock *.war file yet, but i will soon because the javascript open thingy is a pain in the arse. Would also be nice to intergrate the flock css into the cubicgarden one. Obvioulsy all this isnt possible with bloglines. I will be interested in seeing what other services popup and if bloglines will stay up with the massive server and bandwidth requirements needed with every single rss feed added by a user. I mean flock works hard and eats a lot of memory and thats only one user.

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Consumer electronic itch, needs scratching

Its been along time since i bought anything in the consumer electronics category. And worst than that, i haven't done much with my existing setup.

I keep looking for a another freeview box but cant find one going cheap enough to add to my current setup. remember i only need it for recording digital tv completely independent of my old freeview box. saying that i haven't looked through loot or ebay recently.

I have this itch for buying, and it might have something to do with the stuff show today. Seems I'm mistaken about the prices of Freeview boxes, because I looked on ebay again. Maybe I will treat myself to a box very soon

I finally had a real try out on panasonic's sdav20, better known for its role in tomb raider as d-snap. and the believe it or not the quality is better than i expected. I put the d-snap sd card in my ipaq and tried to play it in philips platform 4 player. but nothing came up! so i went to file explorer and it had windows media icons. so after clicking on it, windows media 9 started and played it. i thought nothing more about it.

Till on the tube home from olympia exhibition hall, i analyzed the mpeg4 file i had copied off there sd card. It turned out to be a *.asf file.
Yes that means the dsnap doesn't do real standard mpeg4 at all. it does the mpeg4 codec inside the windows media advanced streaming format container. What a con! how dare panasonic sell this fantastic device, which even i was thinking of buying on the fact it does mpeg4 when it doesn't. i'm going to investigate more into this.

But if its true, Panasonic may be laughing but I'm not!

Another interesing thing I saw at the stuff show, well actually it was the What hifi 2003 show, which is usually in the Bristol Broadmead Marriot hotel around Febuary time. Toshiba are launching a projector for the budget end of the home cinema market. Yep sub one grand! 999 pounds. No details on the web as of yet, I kind of wish I took down the model number of the projector. All I kind of remember is that its round, white and contains speaks and scart, which is very odd for a projector.


All the details I can find about it right now.
Toshiba's new Home Cinema projector created the biggest impact at this years IFA. It's show-time! Toshiba presents its new, outstanding, visually unmistakable home-cinema projector. This innovative projector does not just impress by its design, but particularly by its technical features, geared mainly for home use. Thus a Faroudja video-scaler, integrated into the LCD-projector, allows for outstanding picture quality. Three different video modes (standard, movie, and sport) round off the picture presentation (in genuine 16:9 format, of course). The ET1 projector is extreme quiet: ventilation produces merely 28 db, further reduceable by means of a bulb-saving ECO mode. Additionally, the ET1 excels with user-friendly controls and numerous plug-ins, like a scart connection, for instance. Due to its excellent price-performance-ratio, the ET1 is the perfect projector for the first-time buyer.

If I could understand German language, the word document would be useful. Did get some specs out of the word doc though.

  • Widescreen 858 x 480
  • Format: 16:9
  • Contrast ratio: 600:1
  • 130 Watt lamp
  • Intergrated surround sound (2 x 5W)
  • 32,0 width x 13,1 height x 32,0 length
  • Supports 16.7 million colours
  • VGA, SVGA / XGA-emulated i guess
  • Supports RGB ( D-sub15 x 1 ), Component (YPbPr) Video, S-Video, Composite Video (RCA x 1), SCART, Audio (RCA x 2 (L/R)
  • 3.4 Kilograms

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Pirate radio in your pocket

I found this great device today while reading T3 magazine.
It basicly feeds music from any source which has a 3.5 headphone socket out into the local area as FM radio waves. So what this basicly means you can listen to the music on a ipaq via any radio tuned to the right frequency.

I've also been thinking of ways of abusing this device like taking over someones radio by tuning the device to match there current frequency. This would be great when you get some Kevin in there supa'ed car with loud music playing from a radio station. Because you could replace there music with something of your own choosing. The same would work when your noisy neighbour is playing there radio too loud. Change it to something of your choosing. Excellent, I love the smell of hacked hardware.

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AMD 64 now in stock

I went to the computer fair on totterham court road last saturday just to get some more blank cd-r's. And finally saw people selling parts for the Athlon 64. One guy was selling the Asus K8V Deluxe for a silly price of 120 pounds. Not bad for AMD64, Hypertransport AGP 8x, Firewire, Gigabit ethernet and Serial ATA Raid.

But it got better, MSI have a package for there motherboard. All for 435 pounds. Now I would say yes thats expensive but the 3200 Athlon64 and MSI K8 in a package is very attractive. Dont like the Live update feature of this motherboard though.

The big question though is what os would you run on this chip? Because at this moment its a pretty simple choice, I would say.
Microsoft?
Microsoft unwraps Windows XP 64-bit beta. While I say Linux is the only option worth thinking about. 64-bit Linux: Ready for prime time? and 64 reasons to opt for Linux

Slashdot Athlon 64 debuts
Athlon 64 FX-51 reviews deluge begins
AMD prepares for Athlon64 launch
Is Prescott 64-bit? by slashdot
AMD fires up 64-bit chips

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Xforms revisited



I've beening having serious difficulties installing infopath 2003 on my wife's laptop. Keep on getting some error about install server not responding. So I've been trawling around the web looking for a answer. I was looking around the infopath newsgroup and hit across this site. And read this post about xforms.

Xml.com has a great review of some xform engines. Its making me think again about reconmending microsoft infopath 2003. I need to try these other solutions. And look at the xforms spec once again.

Chibacon Chiba = open source and java based, sounds great. might give it shot on my development server.

MobiForm SVGView Plus = SVG and XForms, the perfect combination I would say.

Mozquito DENG = Uses flash but could be worth checking out.

Orbeon Open XML Framework = It uses XForms along with XSLT, XQuery, SQL, and web services interfaces as building blocks that together can compose an entire application. Looks good but maybe not right for us.

Cant believe I forgot Xsmiles. Also very good to see xport have there interests in the right place. Also spied this Post about Adobe getting involved using acrobat for forms – nothing new i guess. But I kinda of forgot about Adobe. Some stiring words to end.
The only missing InfoPath ingredient is a forms designer that nonprogrammers can use to map between schema elements and form fields. Thats just what the recently announced Adobe Forms Designer intends to be. I like where Adobe is going. The familiarity of paper forms matters to lots of people. And unless Microsofts strategy changes radically, those folks are far likelier to have an Adobe reader than an InfoPath client.

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