Colin Harrington

The other night, my wife left to attend a church event after I got home from work.  This particular night she took Kari with her and left Lucas at home with me.

We are in the process of potty training our three year old son named Lucas.  Since he still has accidents we are having him use the potty hourly.  The rule of thumb is that he has to at least try to go every hour.  When it came time for Lucas to use the potty, I led him into the bathroom and had him sit down to go potty.  To give him some privacy, I shut the door to the bathroom and sat down at my desk (right next to the bathroom). 

After a minute went by, I suddenly heard a commotion from the bathroom.  Frankly it startled me since my desk shares a wall with our bathroom.  As I quickly went to open the bathroom door, I wondered what in the world it could be.  As I started to opening the door our cat immediately ran to the door prying to get out.  The poor cat was wet!  His velvety black fir had glistening shine over the breadth of his back.  Puzzled by these circumstances I quickly discerned the source of the chaos.  I promptly asked "Lucas, did you pee on the cat?" to which he happily responded "I just shooted him" with the ecstatic grin of a three year old on his face.

After hearing his enthusiasm, I had to duck behind the door for a moment to make sure I didn’t let out a laugh.  After I made sure I had my composure, I went in and sat him back down on the potty.  I quickly rescued the cat before he could go roll all over fresh sheets or any similar deed. 

Once I had given the cat a shower in a plastic laundry basket, complete with Duck Tape latch (so I didn’t have to deal with the whole cats + water + claws issue), I was able to teach him all about how we aren’t supposed to pee on cats.

I ran across a good article explaining HE-AAC encoding.  Written by Fabio Sonnati (yea, he’s italian) on January 18th 2008

I was impressed on how he broke it down, and even went into HE-AAC v2.  Earlier he posted a sample HD clip encoded with FFMPEG (with h264 and AAC) http://www.flashvideofactory.com/test/demofullscreen345.html.  I didn’t have enough bandwidth to play it during the day, I’ll have to check it out when I get home.

http://flashvideo.progettosinergia.com/

And don’t forget to snag some tools from Real Eyes Media – located …. here

In researching Flash Media encoders, I came across a company called KulaByte.

I was impressed with their solution — A live two pass Variable Bit Rate (2 pass VBR) encoder!!  They have definitely accomplished an incredible feat.  The two pass encoder basically splits the video into segments and utilizes multi-core systems to execute a 2 pass encoding before bringing them all back together.  I can imagine the complexity of doing this with a GOP based codec.  All in all, they told me that it introduced around 15-25 seconds of lag time on the encoder.   Realistically that is Acceptable in the Broadcast market.

They gave me a demo of their Xstream solution (not to market yet).  The Video quality was excellent.  It was what I expected from a 2 pass VP6 encode.  It was hard to see the artifacts at 900kbps, although I did occasionally see some non-traditional artifacts.  I am a videophile and am super picky about video quality.  I’ve seen artifacts like these using Windows Media Encoder’s live preview.  To best describe them, its like a set of pixels (box, group, etc) can’t decide whether to be up 1 pixel or down 1 pixel so it just flops back and forth a few times.  I’m not too concerned with the artifacts, but I’d like to learn what to call them.  Maybe it was just the source video, I don’t know.

The Video Quality was second to none in terms of a Live broadcast.  I was thouroughly impressed.  Because of the multi-pass situation, their software requires some awesome Multi-core hardware.  They even have a portable package that includes a 4 core laptop!!!

All in all, I am very impressed by their work!!  I might utilize their systems in the future.  Keep up the good work KulaByte!!

I love impersonating Milton from Office Space.  

I need this Shirt… Seriously.  Someone go to Thinkgeek and buy it for me.

Donate now!!!

Thank you Jason for pointing this out

http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/generic/9644/

I’m in the process of putting together a presentation for the Twin Cities Code Camp on April 5th 2008.

I am going to focus on Silverlight media (video), and SOA.
Standard asmx web service
WCF Services
JSON based Services (via Grails or PHP)

I may do some page interaction Javascript events etc. Maybe even loading Data from a small EXTJs App.

I’ll have fun with this.  I’ll try to do some live video along with it.

What do you think?

On my Desktop, I’ve used a tool called RK Launcher, its a handy Mac Dock wanna-be, and its slick!  I got fed up with looking at bad icons, so I decided to replace some of them.

There are many free icon packs that you can download, I particularly like ones that have large PNGs.

I ended up making a Windows Media Encoder Icon that looks pretty snazzy.  I adapted it from a large Windows Media Player icon.

I’m working on putting together a little logo for myself.

Here is what I have so far. or

Previously I’ve done a little logo work for my parents farm Called "Pegasus Circle Farm"

This may be a little premature, But I’m finally getting around to updating colinharrington.net

Yay for updates!!!  Any ideas for cool plugins to use?

I’ve already started with an FCKeditor plugin, a Google reader plugin, and maybe I’ll look into using wp-cache.

I’ll look into a geomap or a flash video embedder, photo gallery? Idk, For now this works until we get a version our next gen CMS going (Web Mentality)