The power supply on my laptop was dying, so I ordered a new daughtercard and spent three hours tearing it apart and reinstalling it. Should have checked the wall wart first, boo.

Been messing around with the AppleTV again, installed samba to speed up the network transfers.

Got a HTML5 version of my movies up and running. However because of battles over royalties, implementing it will require reencoding everything to Theora, for which I do not currently have enough space on my server. A project for another day.

Moved to Los Angeles. Been writing a bunch. Gonna find out the truth, one way or another, shortly.

12:40 pm

A new coat of paint.

9:48 am

Yay.

12:32 pm

Got another hard drive, a little over 8TB now. Decided to move some data about.

One of the drives on my zfs array faulted while I was copying a few hundred gigs of stuff. Nearly had a heart attack when I noticed. I ejected the volume and reimported it. The console came up and told me it was reslivering. I came back a few hours later and it was done. Which means it not only fixed the label mismatch but then rebuilt only the data that had been changed. Color me a believer.

In other news, apple dropped zfs from the snow leopard features pages. People have been getting worried about the project being cancelled. The more probable explanation is that apple split off their leopard zfs efforts earlier this year to work primarily with the snow leopard branch. Since then, they have not released any new 10.5 bits. Meanwhile, the decision was made not to include zfs in the snow leopard release as officially supported. So, the maintainers are sitting on the new bits till snow leopard comes out.

That would be my hope. I have been wrong many, many times before.

12:13 pm

Went to Texas for my sister’s graduation. Robert Rodriguez was the speaker, which was cool. Now, he and my sister are fellow graduates of the RTF program.

Saw a movie at a DLP movie theatre. I mostly go to a local second-run theatre, so haven’t seen anything digital in a while. I’m not sure what they’ve changed, but seems like they’ve reached the quality level where to replace film for distribution.

The DVD’s arrived. They’re sitting in a box. I’m out of mailers so I’m waiting on a new batch, if you’re wondering where your copy is.

10:08 am

I have released Seven Dead Men under a creative commons license. I’ll be shipping DVD versions in a week or two. If you already have a copy, you’re most likely on the list to get another. If you’re not sure if you’re on the list, just ask.

2:02 am

Played around with the CUDA gpu-accelerated versions of distributed.net and Folding@home. RC5 runs on a core2 at ~7Mkeys/sec (* 2 cpus). A nVidia 260 hits 430Mkeys/sec, roughly thirty times faster. If only a) it could be used with my work applications and b) not periodically crash the computer.

5:03 pm

Edited a documentary-ish thing together for Carla, my neighbor, about last year’s Art Inside the Park.

9:09 pm

I know I shouldn’t get excited over every little bump, but dang.

In other news, been writing. Good for the practice if nothing else.

12:54 pm

Found some red footage on the internet, got it working with Final Cut. The workflow seems to work okay, roughly the same as the HVX with some additional wrapper files. Limited to 2k, but presumably that will come as well in the future.

Which is the real question. Apple has been pretty quiet on the pro app front the past couple of years. The updates that have come out have been bug fixes and codec tweaks for the most part. My hope is that they have been secretly rewriting everything over to 64 bit cocoa and the release is targeted for Snow Leopard. My fear is that video will never match the revenue of iPods/Phones and so the plan is simply to slap another coat of paint on and ship a new version. The first option would be my hope for the new year, but I’ve been wrong many times before.

If so, then perhaps the time has come to part with my faithful little PPC Powerbook. Getting old and behind the curve. It’s not the only one, unfortunately.

11:33 am