Seven Years Ago Seven Months Ago

Seven months ago today I started at Comcast. It's 11:37PM and I am on
the R5 passing Narbreth. Train is filled with chatty, giddy college
kids, more than a few intoxicated. I hope they get off soon at
Villanova. I guess I was that annoying 20 years ago when first
semester freshman year was a reckless abandon. This evening was
Comcast Interactive Media all hands at The Hub. My boss called out my
name while referring to overall improvements because I have been
looking through logs for errors. I am glad to have a shout-out and he
was a gentleman for making mention. Now if he had only said, "if we
fixed the errors Matt found it would increment the number on the
bottom line"...I may have had a couple of folks wanna meet me
afterwards. I am pretty sure most folks think I enjoy watching grass
grow. No booze was served. Here comes the Paoli stop...and my
Brazillian taxis driver who drives my RSX more than I do. Why she
thinks that shifting constantly is necessary to keep the engine
running ... 12:21AM I will have pretend it's still 9-11 and roll this
posting back a bit. It seems like years ago that started this new job.

Seven years ago I wouldn't have pictured myself working in a
skyscraper. I was working from home, living on West Coast hours on the
JATO engineering team. My sister woke me and had me turn on the TV.
What a terrible day. It seems like it was yesterday.

Evito Signum Ter

I didn't initially realize why I found work so tedious today. Then Gmail provided this moment of clarity. I am just bored out of my freakin skull because the novelty wore off 10 years ago to the day. I had not totally forgot that I had been consulting at IBM Interactive Media in the Fall of 1998. Same brittle Java application server issues...different "Interactive Media". If I disposition another fubar Java application server and have to spend more than a minute teaching people how uncomplicated it is . . . I will . . . I W I L L

. . . I will go into work tomorrow and explain it for the 1000th time. I just can't help myself. Java developers are not blissfully ignorant but rather innocently unburdened with what I know could have been.

From NetDynamics

Missing Vertical Swath on Comcast HD Channels

Starting about a month ago, all HD channels including HD VOD display a green sidebar on the right. Below is an picture taken with iPhone of the right side of Sunrise Earth this morning. I estimate this to be just over 1cm wide on my 52" Sharp AQUOS. There is another issue too

From 2008 Finding Momentum

On the left side of the HD picture there is a 3cm wide sidebar of pixelization which makes it look like a strip of clear packing tape is up and down the whole side of the screen. Seriously, I suspect that anyone with plasma screens would get burn in from this - certainly the green sidebar.

From 2008 Finding Momentum

When I look at it more closely it appears that its not pixelization but a missing vertical swatch of the image...about 1cm long. Perhaps what is happening is that this swatch is clipped and the whole images slides over the left causing this hairline alias 3cm in from the left and green filling in the gap on the right.

Internet Meta Grid

(note: I drafted this entry while attending the Akamai Conference in August 2008. In recent days Tom Leighton published whitepaper concerning A Perspective from the Edge of the Cloud so I thought I would complete this posting after being inspired by hearing the message I was hoping to hear and knew would come)

I need a great big httpd in the sky. I need it cheap. I am building the Media Grid. Well actually I am going to build a few grids but I need to practice on one first.

I was "in the picture" during the CEO Keynote when the Akamai anthology video was played. A highlight was shown of the Philadelphia Live8 stage outward to the city skyline and I could see my svelte figure up on the camera tower. I was also "in the picture" when a still photo was shown of me talking to Akamai engineer Vinay at the Media Technology booth in the science fair.

Akamai does 300Billion requests per day

"I am the Walrus" says the T-shirt of a guy on the streets of Boston in a video who says he won't wait any longer than 4-5 seconds for a page and has cancelled cable and watches all video online now. You are right and wrong dude. Noone will wait more than 4 seconds and most of the time you demand 1 second response time. You may be right that customers will only pay for an IP pipe and video will be satisfied with Internet devices. The Akamai CEO agrees with you. He suggests that given the speed down to the house IP TV will be competitive. Your T-shirt is mistaken though...I am the Walrus - not you.


700 Million page views on CNN in 2004
what will happen in 2008 election (what did happen...?)

10 billion online videos per month

Bill Hensler, Dynamic Media Organization, Adobe
VP of Engineering

12 Billion online videos in May 2008

You don't go to Google to search for toothpaste and snack food. How to have a Brand Conversation with consumers is challenging. 500 billion in advertising is being challenged by the web.

Consumer wants more content and best video experience (novelity is one)
Publisher wants to monetize new and existing content and make it easy to delivery to consumer (how do you make money?)

Internet offers one major change "bi-directional communication". Word!

Suspects it will take 10 more years to understand the Medium of IP TV

Advertiser wants to reach more people and interested in interactivity with the engagement.

Content type, medium and advertising are all symbiotic and shape each other.

Try to think of the general mills - how are they going to sell pop-tarts.

I am hearing Bill talk about metadata to capture the context of the audio/video and I don't know if I agree that the metadata needs to be tightly coupled to the media. I think that the interface can just be on a simple interface based on the time domain. The YouTube video annotations is an example where the metadata and the media resource are connected by ID and discretely connected by time domain.

In the video

Flash 10 h.264 mp4 files switching between video files. Demonstrated that different bit rate flv files being switched with apparently no interuption in experience.

Why would someone want to watch video off axis?

Why would someone want to have bit filters running on the client?

Is Web Measurement Broken

Why can't we spend more money on online advertising?

Time spent online is not equivalent to time spent watching TV.

click thru rate has been both a blessing and a curse

Engagement is so ambiguous. What does it mean anyways?

Metrics that matter most is revenue and yield.

Inability of publishers to use excess inventory.

At the end of the day it's all about revenue and margin

Two Terabyte Tape Capture

This morning I wrapped up my MiniDV tape capture project. I false
started on Pinnacle Studio prior to 2008 because of the general
instability, poorly scaleable storage strategy, and general lack of
personal satisfaction in being able to do anything with the gigs of
AVIs.

With iPhone, Apple TV, YouTube and 15/15 Mbit pipe and public/private
web resources, wireless...my video is where I want it when I want it.

I restarted my efforts the weekend I installed Mac OS X Leopard in
February on my MacBook Pro Intel 4GB with 17" screen. While I was in
King of Prussia at the Apple Store buying Leopard, I grabbed a 1TB
Western Digital Home Edition drive at Costco. Since then I got a total
of 4 drives, two for backups. The prices started at $279 and came down
to $229. One grand for 4TB of storage, quiet as a mouse, and take up
as much space as a six-pack of beer.

Using Drive Utility on Mac I formatted as Extended Journaled file
system using GUID partition table. I used Drive Utility to make
duplicates.

S5 Video 001
S5 Video 002 (backup)
S5 Video 003
S5 Video 004 (backup)

I kept one drive connected and patched off drive to Sony DCR-TRV900

I used iMovie 2008. It was a champ. Absolutely great program. Along
the way we even took some time to create some YouTube videos

StevensFive.TV

Battle of the Hoth Force
(trailer)

Has 12,000 views in 3 months and is upwards 2.0 on popularity
according to YouTube InSight.

In iMovie we have almost 1000 video events over nine years. I got the
Sony TRV 900 from a video production consultant in Florida on eBay for
$1800 and he only had used it for some cut-ins on one job. I mostly
used it with a high performance wide-angle 52mm lens and sometimes
used the 9m underwater housing sledding, snorkeling and in pools waves
and rain.

During capture something wore out on the camera. I was getting frame
drops and chirps. I had to send it out and it received a new head back
in April. Pretty much okay after that.

The MacBook would get pretty warm, especially during LP 90 minute
captures. I kept a Targus dual cooling fan USB powered pad underneath
and this helped. I had a few SP 90 minute tapes from Panasonic and LP
recordings on those were going beyond two hours and over 25GB. The
MacBook froze on two occasions and iMovie core'd fairly often after
capturing more than three tapes in a row. After the iMovie and Mac
OS updates in May and June I never had problems since.

My strategy for naming events was

YYYY, Description Of Event

It probably takes about 15-20 minutes per hour of video to organize:
splitting events, renaming, cleaning up 1 second clips which often
come from the capture and realize tinestamps of TODAY. The
organization of events in iMovie is very helpful. The is one bear trap
however. You cannot select a disk or year node in the event tree
without causing that entire scope of video thumbnails to display -
kill iMovie wait a long while.

A regretable shortcoming of my technique was lack of cross referencing
back to tape. I should have labelled tapes 001-1xx and kept this
value in the event name.

I am going to turn my attention back to Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 and
what is probably tens of thousands of negatives and slides to scan.
Since Tara and I mistakenly threw away our negative box from 1988-1997
I have a ton of photos to scan on the Epson. I am hunting for my 1080p
HD camera solution.

Hopefully we can knock out some videos each couple of weeks. Here is a
list of some special events I want to get to:

Marrying Tara at Villanova in 1994

Birth of Matthew, Jack and Jillian

Delta Rocket Launch with Jack

MTV Camera Tower at Live 8 Philadelphia

Presenting with James Gosling at JavaOne 2004

My live reaction to watching World Trade Center collapse

Driving in: Big Sur, Bangalore, France, Italy, Switzerland, Russia,
Japan, Czech Republic, mountains, golf carts, bikes, jeeps, auto-
rickshaws, limos, buses, go-carts, dirt roads, autobahn

Disney, Sea World, KeyWest, South Beach, Devon Horse Show, Valley
Forge, Muir Woods, Cape Cod, Central Park

Snorkeling, water slides, sledding, wagon rides, flying, para-sailing,
deep sea fishing, boating, fireworks, air shows, museums, soccer,
baseball, skiing, crabbing, fishing, singing

Subways, Buddist Temples, beaches, parks, zoos, trains, rainbows,
flora, fauna, airplanes, helicopters, Legos, "parachute-airplanes"

Blue Angels, Thunderbirds, Ground Zero, Air Force One

Weddings, births, birthdays, baptisms, eating, sleeping, laughing,
crying, partying, cooking, barfing, working, school plays, injury

India Austrailia Test Match (cricket)

Me 30 pounds more than I should be 99-04

NetDynamic, ObjectStrategy, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Comcast

lots of people...

Ongoing Momentum

Comcast Interactive Media had a visitor today. I work with a great team who implements the Comcast.net portal and Fancast. I introduced our visitor to the technical community in a town hall meeting in CIM City.

From CIM People

"In the context of web technology how many folks have heard of TAXI?" (perhaps one person)

"How many people have heard of AJAX?" (everyone)

"A couple of years ago I was working on AJAX application architectures and JavaScript debuggers with another Sun Senior Staff Engnineer, Roberto Chinnici (Java web services lead), and I asked him whether he subscribed to this distributed MVC implementation pattern which was cropping up or a more RESTful decoupled approach. Roberto indicated the latter because his design center was 'TAXI'. He referred me to 2001 article defining TAXI."

"The foundation of strong software/systems engineering is proven architectural patterns and style. However, prior to the arrival of these patterns comes thought leadership."

"If you want to be the best engineer you can be, discover who the thought leaders are. Subscribe to their philosophy (their thinking) and most importantly resemble them. The best way to resemble thought leaders is the know them. Make it a goal to meet him or her, go to a conference or business and get connected. Question them."

"Many of you know that I promote REST style architecture and assert ATOM as our design center for read+Write web resources; I recommend systems like GData as strong examples that our implementations resemble. What you may not know that I try hard to resemble Tim Bray."

"I am happy to introduce Tim Bray, Director of Web Technology at Sun Microsystems. Tim will lead a discussion on current trends in network computing. Welcome Tim!"