Browser Shifts

I usually use IE8 on my notebook. It's a decent browser, and much better than the dark days of IE6. Despite some unwarranted MS hate from people, it serves well for using the internet. I have all four major browsing engines on my machine (IE8, Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome for WebKit) so I can do cross-browser development, but generally I just use one for daily use. 

Lately, though, on my machine, it hasn't been serving so well for typing on the internet. Out of nowhere, and with no relation to anything I can figure out, it started randomly skipping characters as I typed. Spaces and letters would vanish and I would have to continually edit my text as I typed a lot more than I should have. I thought it was something related to my G15, but it did the same thing on the 1530's keyboard when I typed with that. I thought it was something plugin related, and turned them off, but it continued. I haven't been able to figure it out.

This started around the same time Google announced Google Chrome OS. It's built on Linux, but the Linux build of Chrome does not have all the features it needs yet, so it's still going to be a while before it releases. In the mean time, all of Google Chrome is moving forward in development continually, with constant changes to the backend Chromium project. Since they're working on an Extensions system currently, I decided to switch to the Dev branch of Google Chrome and use that more often. It's working for me, and I can type just fine, however the lack of good updated access to the Google Toolbar Favorites system doesn't help things much.

So at this point, now I'm using both Google Chrome and IE8 regularly in the day. Chrome for forum use and anything else I need to be able to type with, such as here on the blog, and IE8 for reading news sites and all my Google Toolbar bookmarks. The system works well enough for me like that.

Desereted

One of the things specific to LDS culture, and one of the things I forgot about by the time I started doing linguistic studies, was an attempt during the 1800's at creating an English script specifically designed for helping immigrants learn how to speak English. English is a horrible language, in and of itself. Because of all the different pools it has, every rule has some other counter-rule, it's just a mishmask of written and spoken chaos. "Deseret", as it was simply called, was an attempt to try and improve that.

The written language is a phonetic language, much like Russian or Japanese. It was made by a committee comprised mostly of early Mormon church leaders, based on shorthand systems. Because the early church was getting people coming to it from all around the world, they wanted a script system they could teach to explicitly show how a word was pronounced, instead of how it was written. There's a total of 40 unique sounds expressed in Deseret (80 characters total, since there's both an uppercase and a lowercase), which, although probably not enough to express all the normal sounds in English speech, it is a lot closer to being able to portray the pronounced language we speak.

Ultimately, primarily because of costs of printing in the separate script, it was not adopted and fell to the wayside. It is occasionally used nowadays among small circles, but the only place I've ever seen myself it are at actual LDS historical sites. And I had forgotten about it completely, until I stumbled upon the fact that it's included in Unicode while I was researching characters from another language.

Edited for Content

If you've looked at my YouTube channel, the first thing you see there are music video's I have made over the years. There's five total. From there, there's some other miscelaneous things, leading up to the video I've just uploaded, the second in my series of Commodore 64 videos. 

But there's only 5 AMV's, as you can see. I've wanted there to be more, but it's just five, with my last one still from many years ago. And there's a good reason for that: Adobe Premier.

I started using Adobe Premier in High School in my Advanced Multimedia class, and liked it a lot. Premier 6 was what we used then, and I liked it a lot, I did several things for that class, and that's where I started making AMV's. Because of time access to the lab I never finished my AMV projects I was working on during high school, so it wasn't until late 2004 that I finally finished one, done to I Am A Rock by Simon and Garfunkel and to the anime Saikano. Between then and late 2005 I got a total of five videos done, and, with my last one, done to Blind Guardian's The Maiden and the Minstrel Knight, I intended to do a whole chain of them to Blind Guardian in particular.

I never made another one after that. Because of Adobe Premier. In the beginning of 2006, Adobe released Premier Pro 2.0, introducing a new GPU acceleration to video. I don't know if that was the cause, or if it was some other change with 2.0, but starting from that, it's ability to handle general video clips of various formats dropped. And with each new version it dropped more. I decided to switch over to Elements instead of Premier Pro, thinking that since it was aimed towards consumers and not professions it would maybe have better support for a broader encoding format, but it didn't. I bought the Photoshop Elements 5/Premier Elements 3 combo, and another unexpected issue came up: it wasn't compatible with my system. Despite claiming Vista compatibility, it did not work with Vista x64, and it wasn't until a week after my purchase that the requirements listed on the Adobe site specified that it had to be 32-bit Vista.  

I did use it on a 32-bit installation on my notebook, though, but wasn't very pleased with performance. I was trying to work on a .hack//SIGN video, but my render was just plagued with frame jumping errors that it wasn't going to work. So I removed it. Later, when I bought my XPS, it came free with the Photoshop Elements 6/Premier Elements 4 combo, so I decided to give it another try. This version was even worse than before, and on my XPS I tried doing a Higurashi music video but couldn't get the first few seconds without a ton of errors. So I decided to abandon it for music videos, but still kept it around for other purposes.

Now we come forward to these Commodore videos. The reason I was so delayed on making another one was because I had a ton of problems trying to use Premier to cut the first one, which was really little more then sticking the two different clips together and a third audio track. I tried doing it for this new video, and it completely trashed the game footage. I've had enough of it now, I've uninstalled Premier completely. What used to work great has just become garbage. 

But that leaves me with nothing good to work with as an alternative. I want to try playing with Cinelerra but I don't have a Linux machine set up right now or the time to really sit down and play with it. That will have to wait for another time, I guess.

Small Fires

Earlier tonight, ImageShack was hacked. For several hours, all the pictures were replaced by a message from some group, with, honestly, some rather confusing goals.

When Swine Flu hit, I talked about how Twitter wet ablaze with talk and rumors about it. I decided to watch Twitter references to ImageShack for a while to see what happened. While the hack was in effect, entry after entry just rolled onto the service. I didn't get a good timestamp to compare to until after the images were reverted, but talk of the hacking continued, leaving a good 200 tweets about it in just an hour's time.

Looking at the Google Trends for the day, the top two searches are for information about this, first of all "ImageShack Hacked", followed by the name of the group, "Anti-Sec". From several links there for news posts and blog entries, there's a lot more discussion going on elsewhere too, more fires in other locations. If they had remained hacked longer I'm sure the fire would have gotten much bigger.

As it stands, it will be interesting to see if there's anything more that comes of this in the next few immediate days. From my searches this group has apparently been around for ages, but this was apparently a move to bring their existance, their goals, and perhaps most importanly, the issue at had, into the spotlght.

Virtual News

The quote of the day today on my iGoogle page is "Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one", by A. J. Liebling, a journalist for The New Yorker from the mid 30s to the mid 60s. At the time, of course, print wasn't heavily accessible to the everyman, partiularly for the amount of time needed for setup of a print. It was all lithographic, as photographic processes were just barely being introduced.

However nowadays, the nature of press itself is changing. Print is losing popularity, as more and more people turn to the internet for their news. And on the internet, everyone is the press. Everyone can make content, everyone can report their information. Blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, the list goes on and on, as the mass of everyone's press continues to grow. An explosion of information, an exponentially growing press. User generated, user run, and user approved. The freedom of press applies now to everyone, as everyone is now the press.