Blog - stephen gentle dot com

Seriously. It’s just plain annoying, and it’s bad practice. Time and time again, I go and read an article, which has a few little pictures. Now, when we click a link, we expect it to open in the window (or tab) that we’re currently on. So instead of clicking an image, I’ll middle click it to open it in a new tab for viewing after I’m finished reading the page.

What should happen is that I have a few tabs showing the full image in them. What often does happen though is that instead, I have four or five tabs with blank pages and javascript:show_image_popup(…) or something in the address bar. It’s now very irritating to have to go back and find the article if I want to actually see the pictures.

So don’t ever do this:
<a href="javascript:show_image_popup('lolcat.jpg')"> ... </a>

The right way

<a href="lolcat.jpg" onclick="show_image_popup('lolcat.jpg')"> ... </a>
Notice that the link actually points to the picture now? This way, when I open the link in a new window, or a new tab, I actually see what I want to see – the picture. If I just normally click it though, the javascript runs and you can pop up your annoying image window. Now, I hear you asking “but won’t the browser navigate away from this page if the link is set to the picture?”. The answer is no, as long as you make sure your javascript function returns false.

Trying to plan my next road trip, I turned to the ever powerful Google Maps. I picked a destination (New York City), and asked Google Maps how I would go about driving there. It responded with some absolutely brilliant advice:

I just have to drive through three countries, with three short kayaking trips across the Pacific ocean. Sounds great! And, it will only take fifty-five days.

I just thought that I’d add to my last post on HDMI cables with an analogy I thought of. To put it simply, the notion that there will be any difference in picture quality between a $5 HDMI cable and a $400 Monster cable is exactly the same as saying that putting your videos on a more expensive USB drive will make them look and sound better, or that a more expensive memory card in your digital camera would make you photos higher resolution – that is, completely ridiculous, and completely wrong, for obvious reasons.

Simply put, all of these mediums are just moving a bunch of ones and zeros. Given that describing a one or a zero from a wave is far less prone to error than an analog signal (I’ll put up a diagram of this soon), you can be pretty much assured that your cable, USB drive or memory card will transfer the data exactly as transmitted.

So to sum up, Monster Cables are a downright scam, (as are any other company that sells pointlessly expensive digital cables to consumers), and essentially all the claims that they make on their packaging (like better quality picture, richer sound) are all false. Of course, if you ask the salesperson at the local department store, they’ll try to flog the most expensive cable to you, and make up implausible (and wrong) reasons about why you should buy the more expensive one. But remember that they are just out to get the commission, and most of them will tell lies to sell it to you – unless they are genuinely taken in by the scam.

I whipped together a quick little application which counts down until Christmas tonight – but it is quite unlike most that you see around the place. I’ve dispensed with the needless and imprecise method of showing the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds, and just display the important stuff – the exact number of seconds until 12:00 AM on Christmas morning.

Download ChristmasCountdown
Requires .Net Framework 2.0 or Mono

Well, Jim’s up to it again, saying once again that “Everything has changed“, and on their previous massive announcement: “The 13th was insignificant…“.

Well, it now it looks like December 3 will bring another big change to the DSMC system, but I doubt it could possibly be as huge as their last one!

I was quite appalled to go into Harvey Norman yesterday and to see that they are selling HDMI cables at anything from one hundred and fifty to six hundred dollars! The cables aren’t even that long – they had four metre ones for about $400, with a 10 metre one for a shocking $599. They are covered with the normal marketing stuff – how it guarantees a ‘better home theatre experience’ and general junk like that. The worst offender for outrageously (and needlessly) expensive HDMI cables is a brand called ‘Monster Cables’, but there are others like ‘Gecko’ and ‘PureAV’. Some of these companies even sell expensive optical cables with gold plated connectors! But why are these cables such a rip off? First, there’s the fundamental fact that they are digital cables.

An analogue signal, which is used to carry video and audio in the older Composite, S-Video and Component video standards, can be degraded with a low quality cable, long cable lengths, and possibly interference from other cables (like power cables). It is worth spending a little more on these cables, like the $60 component cable we bought with our DVD player. A digital signal that these HDMI cables carry, on the other hand, is not affected by cable quality. Generally, unless the cable is broken, it will deliver a perfect signal, which means a perfect picture. Basically, a $12 dollar cable from Monoprice, or even the $3 cable that came with my monitor will always give just as good a picture as the $500 Monster cable. Furthermore, all cables that carry the HDMI logo must be certified to deliver an essentially perfect picture (HDMI certification requires less than one in every million pixels be lost, or something like that. A human would have trouble picking up one in five hundred.).

Clearly these Monster Cables are very high quality – but the only thing that means is that they won’t break as easily. And it’s not even like HDMI cables are often in a position where damage would ever be a problem, and even if a cheap cable did break, you could still buy twenty or thirty new ones for the price of getting a single Monster cable!

Monster cables do not ever give you a better picture, sound quality, or any other benefits than the cheapest $5 bargain bin HDMI cables. If you don’t get a perfect picture with an HDMI cable, then it is broken – nothing to do with the quality of the cable. I would advise everyone to never buy Monster brand cables, or any HDMI cable over $100 – unless it’s 30 or 40 metres long or something.

As it is, people are having enough trouble doing post production with 4K digital video from the RED ONE. But RED Digital Cinema don’t seem to care, announcing a slew of bigger and far better cameras just an hour ago. Now you can build a camera with a 3K, 5K, 6K, 9K or 28K sensor! For those who don’t know, the nK measurement is a way of expressing digital cinema resolutions, with n being the number of pixels horizontally. This means that 2K is a little more than full HD video.

The new RED DSMC system (that’s Digital Still and Motion) is based around the idea of ‘making obsolescence obsolete’ – meaning that your camera is built up of multiple modules, all which can be switched out to upgrade the system. The center of the system is the ‘brain’, which includes the sensor module, lens mount and processing circuitry. There are seven different ‘brains’ available – from a 3K Scarlet with a fixed lens (much like the originally announced Scarlet), a 3K Scarlet with a B4, C or proprietary Mini-Red mount, and 5K and 6K Scarlets with Nikon, Canon or PL mounts and an S35 or full frame 35mm sensor respectively. On the Epic side, there are 5K, 6K and 9K versions with various mounts, and the incredible (and completely ridiculous) 28K Epic.

The ‘brain’ can then be coupled with any of a large number of optional extra modules, from break out boxes, to flash and hard drive recording modules, a module containing two extra batteries, remote controls, electronic view finders, LCD displays, and so on. You can build the camera to be as big, or as small as you want, and even swap out lens mounts and sensor modules in the field!

This is really a great system – and even though the price can add up pretty quickly, it is still quite incredibly cheap compared to cameras even in the prosumer market (let alone the professional market that this system directly competes with!). This is a very exciting camera system, and I expect that we will certainly buy a small Scarlet system – maybe with the fixed lens, or with the Mini-Red mount. While some of the prices are already posted over at Reduser, the prices for much of the system remains to be seen.

Check out the full anouncement, with pricing information over at RedUser. Some of the new equipment is really quite incredible.

Well, there’s still about eight hours to go until the big announcement, but RED’s Jim Jannard has posted some new pictures of both the RED Scarlet 3K camera, and the 5K RED Epic. Like all the images posted since the redesign, they are small, really close up, and probably just leading speculation away from the truth. Some of these look like parts of the new cameras, but the first one looks like it could be of a new lens – possibly indicating that Scarlet has interchangeable lenses?

Still, it remains to be seen what RED come up with, and I, like most people who have been constantly refreshing REDUser and ScarletUser for weeks, can’t wait!

All images in this post are copyright © Red Digital Cinema Company. Full size images can be seen at Jim’s post on RedUser
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In less than 24 hours, on Thursday the 13th of November, RED Digital Cinema will release new information about their upcoming Scarlet and Epic cameras. These new cameras were announced at NAB 2008 to suit the higher and lower ends of the digital cinema market. Their existing camera, the RED ONE, is already becoming very popular for use in both big budget and independent movies, music videos, high end video production. It will continue to service most of the market, while the big budget movies will move to Epic, which boasts higher frame rates and resolution. Scarlet, however, is the real revolution, and we’ll be buying at least one.

As it was announced, Scarlet was going to have a 3K resolution sensor (that’s more than two and a half times the size of Full HD!), shoot frame rates of up to 120 frames per second, with the ability to do very short bursts of 180 (where one second of motion becomes seven and a half seconds of video – think ultra-slow, ultra-smooth video), and record onto compact flash cards or an external hard drive using RED’s very efficient and high quality REDCODE codec. And, all of this for just US$3000! But in August, Jim Jannard, owner of RED Digital Cinema, dropped a bombshell:

We have changed everything about Scarlet because the market has changed and we have discovered a lot of things in the process. We have a new vision.

Wipe you minds of the past announced Scarlet. Forget the design and forget the price. It is all different now. We think you will be surprised. Glad we didn’t take any deposits…

Well, after two months of wild speculation, with the only information about the new design being gathered from a few very close up, disorienting shots, RED have announced that they will be releasing the new specifications and prices tomorrow. I’m certain that we will see new renders, and possibly prototypes of the cameras. Whether we’ll see any images or video shot with the camera remains to be seen.

Jim was very optimistic about the announcement, saying on Sunday that “We are so excited that we can hardly stand it. The whole RED team has been working more than I could have ever imagined on this. Probably because we are so motivated by the program.”

Whatever they announce, there will be some disappointed people – as some were even disappointed with the original Scarlet’s amazing specifications. But for those with realistic expectations, and, judging by Jim’s posts, those who are expecting the impossible, Thursday is going to be very exciting indeed.

I recently made a new website for my operating system project, Symmetry. The old site I was using for it was basically just the default Wordpress theme with a slightly different header image. The new site is a completely custom theme that I made, and I think it is a lot simpler and cleaner.

I also did a bit of re-branding as well. Although the project has retained its logo, I made up a new name for it – Symmetry. I had been wanting to change the name for a while, but never got around to it until I decided to sign up for free Git hosting at Gitorious. It was a bit of a spur of the moment thing – I needed to put in a project name, so I thought for a few seconds and came up with Symmetry. It fits in with the old logo, and the old name can be used as an abbreviation – Symmetry Operating System (sos).