Am loving how the car is so digital!

We’ve just found out via Twitter engineer (@jeanpaul) that the cause of these outages is primarily due to internal sub-networks being over-capacity. He outlines 3 problems and 3 solutions for them. (Read the source article here)

3 PROBLEMS

1. Two critical, fast-growing, high-bandwith components were put on the same segment of the internal
2. The Twitter internal network wasn’t monitored appropriately.
3. Their internal network was temporarily misconfigured.

3 SOLUTIONS

1. Twitter has doubled the capacity of the internal network.
2. They’re improving the monitoring of the internal network.
3. Twitter is rebalancing the traffic on the internal network to redistribute the load.

In case you didn’t know, Twitter has also launched a pretty funky feature to commemorate the World Cup season. It has special pages that filter World Cup related tweets from both teams in play and display them to the audience, LIVE. You can take a look at it here. This surely increases the traffic to Twitter exponentially!

RANDOM FAIL WHALE INFO…

Some enterprising individuals have redrawn variants of the fail whale as shown below. Pretty nifty, huh?

Related articles: High Error Rate on Twitter.com, A Perfect Storm of Whales

On the street I saw a small girl cold and shivering in a thin dress, with little hope of a decent meal. I became angry and said to God; “Why did you permit this? Why don’t you do something about it?” For a while God said nothing. That night he replied, quite suddenly:

“I certainly did something about it. I made you.”

For many months, I have been silently following a website that is interestingly called InvisiblePeople.tv. It is an interesting play on how humans shun away from looking at something they wish to eradicate from their minds. All too often, we walk quickly past the people begging on the streets, stealing a glance or two from the side of our eyes.

We’re afraid – that’s the truth. Afraid of being asked for donations, afraid to be caught staring, and worst of all, afraid to care.

This project heavily invests in social media and uses it to make the invisible people, visible. Mark Horvath, the man behind this project was once known as the Lizard Man of Hollywood Boulevard, when he himself was once homeless. Mark had strong media beginnings as a Hollywood distribution executive, but lost it all to drugs and alcohol. In a nutshell, thanks to the LA Dream Center, he was set right again and freed from the bondages he once had.

Today, he goes out to the streets armed with a small camcorder, mic, laptop and iPhone. Mark posts raw unedited footage (sometimes deemed too raw) of the people he interacts with as they share their homeless stories with him.

So, how exactly does Mark use social media? Sites that are frequently updated include: his blog, Twitter, Facebook, Whrrl, MySpace, YouTube, uStream, Vimeo and Flickr. They serve as his own broadcasting channels to reach out to the public and update them on-the-go. Through the true-to-life updates, he has caught the attention of many and this has served to further propagate the message and his mission.

Is there any magic to it? From what I see, there isn’t: it’s about being true to your project and being as transparent as possible. Picking the right social platforms is probably very important too, as you would want to target the relevant audience through it. Frequent updates help too, and we can see videos are uploaded very often on the InvisiblePeople.tv site.

With so many platforms to manage, I was very curious as to how Mark manages them and sent him a couple of tweets. Here’s his down-to-earth reply.

Stats to date: CNN reports more than 1,000 videos are watched per week on the Vimeo channels and the project has more than 10,000 followers on both his Twitter accounts (@hardlynormal and @invisiblepeople). Mark has been featured on Huffington Post, CNN and loads more media as a result of him being extremely social with a fantastic mission.

He’s raised sponsorship and donations from many companies amongst which are Ford, Hanes (they give out socks to the homeless) and Virgin Mobile. Truly, it’s a powerful testimony of how one man has shared the stories of hundreds of homeless people with the world and brought smiles to those who are in need.

More importantly, via social media, an entire movement has been formed, out of people who are more aware that these problems exist. To all those who are interested in making a difference, Mark in a very practical way asks them to start helping in their own neighbourhood. There’s little point in helping out halfway across the country when the problems are prevalent in your own backyard.

May the invisible become visible, via the power of social media.

I think my favorite lines from here were with regards to how his laptop battery can last even longer, as he doesn’t even need to enable the screen to use it. Sit tight, and enjoy the show.

As with most of us, he admits to being an Internet addict.

For the iPhone 3Gs, I did use the tap-to-focus on the subject feature. All photos are not touched up, and are saved at the highest quality after adding the watermark in Photoshop.

Initial observations are that the tap-to-focus on the iPhone 3Gs also is for metering, and in certain cases, can over or underexpose images depending on where you tap. Overall, the images from the iPhone 3G pale in comparison, as the iPhone 3Gs adds vibrance and a certain warmth to the images. Gone too is the milky film that overlays the iPhone 3G images.

It goes to prove that geeks are cool (most of us anyway…) and we have varied interests. There were sessions on how to Salsa, Espresso appreciation, sharing of holiday experiences, Kufi art and also a little about coding standards. Overall it’s just a gathering to network and meet others. A few interesting observations:

1. Everyone is on Twitter – am I correct? (Seems that way, ‘coz people were Tweeting from each session) – Follow me?
2. Many techies use Apple Macs – it’s rare to see so many Macs in one location!
3. Typical staple geek food is pizza – well, it ended that way yesterday…
4. Live streaming seems to be the in thing now

I found it interesting to “guess” and try to associate Twitter usernames to faces – very often, the little avatars don’t do a good job at all. Anyhow, the funniest incident was sending @thechannelc a Tweet saying, I’m behind you, the guy with the camcorder, to which she turned around several seconds later and shook my hand. Indeed, we’re all a connected bunch.

We also had live updates on the #barcampkl hashtag going on here. Great use of technology there.

I had a video camcorder with me, and recorded bits and pieces from the day, and put them together here. Enjoy! Are you in the video? If you are, add an annotation on YouTube with your Twitter / Facebook username by clicking here.

Music credit: Steve ALLEN (Robert Pieculewicz)

The thingy at the end is called a cat tail

Roles in the Audio world

Boom Operator – holds the mic in such a way that it picks up sound

Sound Recordist – monitors the sound that is picked up by the mic. Usually the head for location sound.

Sound assistants help connect and set up different mics on the set or talent

Slate boy is usually a sound assistant that slates the scene. (Usually for a double system used mainly in film)

Respect

• Allow time for the on location sound team to set up – don’t hurry or ignore their requests. Don’t think the video team are more important than sound.
• Block / rehearse the scene so that the boom operator and sound recorder know how to set up. This is important so they know where exactly to set up, or whether the boom will be blocked by obstacles.
• Check with the sound recordist in between scenes to make sure there are no errors. Don’t get angry if you need to reshoot scenes, they can make mistakes too.

Sound Theory

Frequency – voice frequencies are between 300-3400Hz. Important to know as some recorders cannot capture certain frequencies.
Sound loudness are measured in decibels and the range of quietness to loudness is called dynamic range. Different pieces of equipment have varying dynamic ranges.
A higher signal to noise ratio is good. Soundbooth from Adobe is a software that has good noise reduction features.

Types of mics - dynamic (can be used for more daily use / rough handling), condenser (usually need batteries to power them)

Directionality in mics have different pickup patterns – we have to speak within the pattern.

Mixers are used practically to allow the sound recordist to be further away from the camera. It also allows for more inputs rather than 2 inputs only.

This is how you hold a boom pole

Choosing a mic

Factors:
Scene – if they move, you might want a wireless over a boom mic. If it is a tight location, a wireless might be good. Wide shots cannot have a boom operator
Budget – wireless mics cost more
Camera mic – last resort as it picks up everything

Lavalier mics – small sized – user for television or theatre – often taped to the body, or clipped to the shirt, preferably near the button for stability.
Shotgun mics – highly directional. Do beware that it does pick up a little bit of sound from the back of the mic.

Boom – a long pole where the shotgun mic is attached to.

Sound recordists

• Come early for the rehearsal, set up, equipment check and watch the blocking
• It’s usually acceptable when sounds to not overlap dialogue (dog barking, motorcycles passing)
• If there is a problem with sound of the scene, alert the director immediately
• Before changing location, do record the ambient sound – about 2-5 mins. We can add the ambient sound in post to have consistency for the scenes.

When I first “heard” about the concept of this comic, it totally cracked me up and I knew I had to hunt it down and share it. It’s such an awesome idea! Kudos, Nitrozac and Snaggy (aka Liza Schmalcel and Bruce Evans) from geekculture.com.

However, iPhoto is not without faults – after all, even humans do get mixed up with names and people! As reported on Zestful Contemplation, iPhoto tried to associate a plastic halloween light-up skull and a tour guide as the same person!

He speaks on the Googles, YouTubes and Facebooks of the world and how they are the rare breed of today. Realistically, he focuses on making $1,000,000 first, and retaining your life – rather than selling out and losing everything. Some billionaires really aren’t that happy at all… true?

Makes me self-actualize and think about where I’ve come over the last 9 years of building Integricity as a digital interactive agency and where I’d like to go from here. Perhaps you should take some time out, sit beneath a coconut tree and restrategize the next part of your business-life.

David goes on to calculate that a million dollars can be derived in a year from 2,000 customers x $40 x 12 months. (He’s a little short on $1 mil in his calculations, but I’ll overlook that). It’s far easier to accomplish this feat, than to build a single Facebook sized web property.

So, you don’t have to be a superhuman to earn a decent wage.

(It take about 30 minutes to go through this, but it’s a good watch)

What do Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird have that Gmail doesn’t?

The ability to read and write your email offline while on a flight!

Not anymore… perhaps.

Google for all its strength has wised up to the fact that business users NEED to be able to have their email with them when they travel to the desert of Bahariya (which I was at recently, while in Egypt) or on a flight between Singapore and New York. As such, they are trialling the ability to read, write and search through messages when not connected to any networks.

Another application in the Google Apps suite that is slated to go offline (not canned!) is the Google Calendar which is definitely handy to have.

However, it seems that these features might be coupled with their Google Chrome browser, of which I am not a fan of at all. Their mediocre launch left me remembering their comic strips over the browser experience.

Read more about their offline initiatives here