Paul's Comments

I currently rent a room in a house with two other people. The landlord has decided not to renew the lease, and has basically given me and everyone else a little over 30 days, e.g. until the 30th of April. So now I have to go through all the trouble and misery involved in finding a new place to live.

Oh well, such is life. I'm wondering if I should solicit information from people who might have ideas of places in the DC metro area where they are looking for a roommate. Then again, I doubt there are that many people who read this blog. I'll go back and check out Craigslist, it's where I found the current place. I might also start a subscription to the Washington Post in order to check out roommate listings there too.

There may be some corrollary here. I lived at one place in California for maybe 15 years. Moved to Washington, DC and stayed there a year. Moved to Maryland and stayed there for about eight years. Moved to another location in Maryland and stayed there nine months, then moved to Virginia, stayed there for about eight years, and now I've been here seven months, so maybe it turns out that every other move is short term, and the next one will be long term. Maybe I'll find a place closer to the Washington Metro area or some other metropolitan area where I can live near a bus line, as opposed to living out here in the sticks in Loudoun County.

So I'll see what happens. I'll keep my fingers crossed and I'm going to keep busy because 30 days isn't a lot of time.

[Update 4/16/2008] The landlord has given us an extension, my understanding we're extended until June 4. We shall see.

I have posted a video on You Tube where I spend about three minutes describing my new 30-frames-per-second video camera, but the video is done with my old 15-frames-per-second one. Why? Well, I don't want to reiterate the entire video including the rant of about four minutes I make on why, but the simple fact is that the new camera won't work as a web cam, and the files it creates on its memory card are AVI files. (I have an error in the video; Microsoft Windows Movie Maker creates WMV files; I said it makes Quicktime MOV files.) Despite that it supposedly will allow AVI files, Windows Movie Maker crashes if you try to feed it AVI files.

And I can't find any open-source tools that will allow me to do video editing with AVI files. I do not want to spend a fortune on a video editing program. But apparently video editing is one of the functions that is lacking in open source.

If you want to edit audio, there's no question: Audacity is the premiere tool for that purpose. I use it regularly and it's at least as good if not better in both functionality and in ease-of-use as any proprietary application for audio editing. When I want to develop a raster-based image (which is what SVG files are) because you can scale the image up or down and keep it sharp, I use Inkscape. But if I need to edit a bitmap image, I'm usually using Microsoft Paint or an older version of Paint Shop Pro because the learning curve for The Gimp is too high and its user interface is very difficult.

But I can find nothing in open source that is available for the purpose of doing editing of video files. Maybe there is, but I can't find it. As I say in the video - and I'll focus on this again in a moment - I would set up a Linux partition on one of my computers and space to do this if Linux had the tools to do this as opposed to having them on Windows if they weren't available.

And so, as I (partially) point out in my video above, for those who want to really encourage people to turn to open source, good quality video editing tools available in open source, probably for Linux, would be a serious "Killer Application" that could get people to move. If they're not there, we (as in programmers who do this) need to work on them.

The camera I have came with a video editing tool, but it apparently won't work the the videos the camera creates. I hand it a 15-second clip and it says it can't work with video longer than 5 minutes!

If there are tools for video editing in open source, they have to be usable; they can't be junk or hard to use or they are worthless. The tools have to be at least the equivalent of what is available in proprietary applications, such as the (free as in beer) Microsoft Windows Movie Maker. That means non-linear video editing in a graphical user interface. A timeline. Ability to cut video at either any frame or for compressed video, at any key frame. Ability to insert audio, snapshots, video clips, to mute audio on a clip, to delete clips or to cut clips so I can remove things like excessive pauses, speech disfluencies (a fancy phrase I had to look up meaning use of "uh" in conversation), and errors. (I may do a gag reel containing all of my mistakes; it would definitely be Not Safe For Work. I am extremely polite in writing this blog; I can be extremely profane when I get mad when something goes wrong.)

It also needs to be able to insert titles, it probably should have effects (like various wipes and dissolves), and it would be nice if, in addition to titles, had proper captioning. I'm not deaf, but I caption all my videos. It actually takes a lot longer to add the captions (primarily because Windows Movie Maker doesn't really support them directly, I fake it with a title superimposed on the film) but I do it because it is the right thing to do: it allows those who can't hear to know what I have to say, and in case I slur my words (which sometimes when I get excited I do sometimes talk fast) someone can still understand what I'm saying.

Now if someone knows of good World Class Open Source video editing tools which are at least the equal of, say Windows Movie Maker I'd like to hear about them. I have had to disable comments because of spammers, so if you know of some, either send me an e-mail (paul at paul-robinson.us) or post a reply on Slashdot where I'm going to place a copy of this article.

Again, as I said in a previous article, the original Napster would have been a "Killer App" that would have driven people to Linux in droves. And I suspect that if there were easy-to-use video editing tools it could also be the sort of thing that gives people a reason to take up that system, and if you can get your foot in the door you've got the chance to win people over.

A dear friend of mine by the name of Ben, whom I've known more than 10 years, asked me what I wrote that got me banned by Yahoo Answers. I found it, and mailed him the notice for which I was written up.

He then pointed to a line in my message. I broke one of the rules; I changed my answer in such a way to allow me to use a word that Yahoo would have censored. As a result, someone else saw it, didn't like it and reported it, and thus I got caught.

What can I say, I did wrong, I got caught. I don't know if anyone's interested, but what I was talking about in my answer was the double standard between men and women, about the hypocracy of men who would want a virgin when they get married, but something else when they have a girlfriend. And the word I used, by putting dashes between the letters - to get around Yahoo's "bad words" filter - was "slut".

And for putting it in my answer as "s-l-u-t" I got banned. And, I have to admit, I broke the rules. Thank you, Ben, for allowing me to learn something about myself.

I'll weasel out of what I said a little bit by pointing out I was using it perjoratively in the sense of how other people - some men - think of women who are "less than parsimonius" with their favors. I personally find nothing wrong with a woman who chooses to have sex with men on her terms, even if that means multiple partners or casual sex. As I see it, as long as you have standards and you don't allow yourself to be abused or mistreated there's nothing wrong with whatever way you choose to express yourself sexually with others.

What really bothered me the most about being banned by Yahoo - although being banned was bad enough - was that when I asked why, nobody would tell me. Okay, I made the mistake, but if someone had said something I would have felt better about it. It was not that I got punished that bothered me so much, and now that I know why I have to admit that I deserved getting punished, although I think having my Yahoo Answers account cancelled was a little stiff, what bothered me most was that I could not find out why. Nobody there would tell me, and every time I tried to look up the terms of service, I kept getting a "this page is busy" error.

Oh well, I may go back to Yahoo Answers at some time in the future, or I may never go back. I was up to like level 7 and had over 5,000 points, and hundreds of questions answered, lots indicated as "best answers." All gone. I've found something else fun to try. I'm answering questions as one of the people who respond for the Internet Oracle.

Apparently something I wrote in response to a question on Yahoo answers was unacceptable. So unacceptable, in fact, that my account was canceled and I was banned. (When I questioned about it, I get a BS response basically that they think my banishment was valid, and apparently can't tell me what I did wrong.)

But they did invite me to create a new ID and start over. Oh great.

What bothered me most was that whenever I tried to find out what I did wrong, it kept telling me the pages where the Terms of Service and Community Guidelines were are unavailable.

I still don't understand what I did wrong, as far as I can tell, I don't think I've said anything in my responses that wasn't acceptable to be read by anyone who was of age 13 or older. But apparently something I said was. Even though it's been deleted, once one's account is canceled they can't bring it back.

But they still can't seem to inform me as to exactly why whatever I said was so bad it deserves banishment. I do not know.

I've been doing some practice videos on You Tube, and for anyone interested, they can go to my "channel" at http://youtube.com/rfc1394. This blog software will not allow embedding. I'll have to find how to correct that. In the mean time, the video is at http://youtube.com/watch?v=FIINEh0UI4w and as soon as I can figure out how to allow embedding the video will also appear here. I've installed the YouTube plugin, so supposedly it should be visible below.

The following is the text for the above video, which is called "When the Internet is Unavailable". Additional comments I thought about after I did the video appear in brackets [like this].

I'm not sure if I'm going to call this a "Rant", complaint, or a number of different things but,you're going to be watching this a considerable time after I have made it. Because, quite frankly, I am unable to upload it at this time because my Internet connection is not working. And that is a big problem.

I can't upload my material, but more importantly there are a number of things that I'd like to use that happen to be, for one reason or another, dependent upon the Internet possibly because the company is so afraid of being "ripped off" by people not paying.

They require you to be connected to the Internet to use their product. Now, I'm not referring to programs that like, Second Life, for example, that require you to have Internet connectivity to use the program. That's not what I'm referring to. What I am referring to, specifically, is the "Half-Life 2" series of programs, that is, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Episode One, Half-Life 2 Episode Two, Portal, and the third-party add-in, "Garry's Mod." Now, I am specifically excluding Team Fortress 2, because that is a program that does require the Internet to be able to use it.

But the other programs, none of which require the Internet to operate, and none of which will operate, without an Internet connection. For whatever reason. I could understand if the programs required an Internet connection to operate. But they don't. Because you use them as single-player programs. In fact, you don't play them with other people the way you would with other games such as say, "Doom" or "Duke Nukem" which you can play with other people.

Okay, I'll admit you can play Half-Life 2, in Multi-player mode if you are running a custom map you've made for the game, or someone else has made. You could do the same thing with Half-Life 1. I've seen them, I've actually run them. But, in general, when you're playing Half-Life 2, usually you're playing it in single-player mode.

When I'm running Half-Life 2, or Half-Life 2 Episode One or Two, or especially Portal, I am intending to run the game as a single-player game. But I can't run the game on my computer if I don't have an Internet connection. Which is kind of stupid. But I guess they are so afraid that someone is going to play the game without paying for it they've in effect, instituted, a draconian method of protecting their program. I don't know.

I don't like the idea. Because I can't use my program, that I paid for, when my Internet connection is down, or unavailable. Now, I can understand in the case of "Team Fortress 2" which is a "cooperatiive first-person shooter" requiring an Internet connection, since you're going to play it that way. But it doesn't make any sense for the others to, and for some reason, you can't use any of them if your Internet connection doesn't work.

And this is... a thing I'm thinking about... I'm wondering, whatever happens if Valve goes out of business?

I mean, seriously, the Internet connection that these programs need isn't so that you can connect to other people or for other purposes. It's so that it can "phone home" to Valve's servers, wherever they are, to obtain updates to the program, or whatever. But if for some reason, Valve ceases operations (could be any number of reasons), they get out of the business, they go broke, the Internet goes down, something happens, you get into an area where the Internet isn't available. Whatever the reason. If you can't get to their servers, your game is wasted, it's gone. Same as if, your money's been taken and you no longer have use of the program you bought.

Yes, yes, I know, technically when you "buy" a computer program in the store you don't really buy it, you're only "licensing" it. Which is a whole another issue to get into. But, in general when you buy a program effectively you own that copy. For all intents and purposes. But this is one of the reasons why people do not like the idea of "D.R.M.", "Digital Restrictions Management" or, "Draconian Restrictions Management" as this video is indicating.

Because, simply enough, if something goes wrong with the method of these protection systems, whatever you own [that is protected by a DRM system that fails], you lose it. If either it can't "phone home" to the manufacturer, or for some reason the keys no longer work, or you lose your keys, you're stuck.

You buy a DVD, okay, you can still play that even if the movie manufacturer goes out of business. [The inability to do this is probably one of the reasons that killed the DIVX system that Circuit City offered.] But, if you have an electronic program like this, that requires you have an Internet connection and for some reason you can't reach them - or they're no longer available - you're hosed!