Interesting article in the NY Times today about how “HDTV’s Acceptance Picks Up Pace,” but, as the article addresses HDTV still has a long way to go.

The article talks a lot about which broadcasts are becoming HDTV. ESPN seems to be making the most effort to go HD. Not surprising since “…many people consider sporting events in HDTV to be perhaps the technology’s most compelling application.” I, however, could care less about sports.

To me, and many I know, movies would be the most compelling application. Many movies shot specifically for the big screen would work perfectly with a wide screen, high definition image. While it would be nice to watch 24 or Smaville or the academy awards in high definition, HDTV would have a much bigger impact with Blade Runner, Lawrence of Arabia or the Lord of the Rings. Indeed it amazes me that people spend so much money and effort to come out with high quality DVDs with 5.2 surround and still end up looking at a picture with a paltry 480 lines of resolution.

There really needs to be some kind of standard HDTV playing device with studios releasing content on it. I realize that there are already HDTV VCRS, but do they have any content? I mean there is already a consumer level HDTV Camcorder, yet there are few major movies available on HTDV.

Another problem: cable. Via the article:

Until several months ago, the cable industry was a no-show in HDTV, with many local operators complaining that they could not afford the bandwidth, or network capacity, the signals require. Roughly speaking, a single HDTV channel on cable uses the bandwidth that might otherwise go to five or more digital channels in standard definition. Last May, though, the 10 largest cable operators pledged to provide up to five HDTV services in their larger markets this year.

While the cable companies are improving, they still have a ways to go. I also expect most of their customers may prefer more channels to HD. In addition I hope they don’t compress the images beyond recognition refuting the claim of high definition.

The alternative, basically rabbit ears on one’s >$1500 set, is even more problamatic:

For the majority of Americans who still cannot receive HDTV programming via cable, picking up HDTV broadcasts has been as challenging as listening to shortwave radio stations. The broadcast networks’ digital feeds, with a few exceptions, can be received only by using old-fashioned rabbit ears or rooftop antennas.

And digital transmissions in some local markets are far from perfect. Pictures pop in and out as the signal strength falls below the viewable threshold. Shows occasionally revert to standard definition for no apparent reason. The transmission of last week’s Academy Awards show in the Los Angeles market was plagued with audio pops and the complete disappearance of the picture several times a minute, making the HDTV version of the event, for some, unwatchable.

Sure, its a ‘perfect’ digital broadcast, but all that means is that instead of getting audio and video static from bad reception, one gets blank frames or part of frames and pops in the audio.

Even worse is the potential for “broadcast flags” an other thing mandated by Hollywood limiting the way we can use our own equipment. All this new technology will be of little value, and won’t catch on, if people can’t have flexibility in how they can use it.

There doesn’t seem to be a standard connecter, but I don’t think this is nearly as much of a problem as the other issues. There are some propositions for a standard already. Besides, regular TV already has RF, composite, S-Video, and component inputs. Technically inclined people, i.e. those who are most likely to buy HTDV, can handle converters and set top boxes. As more people get HTDV, standards can be better established.

While we still want our HDTV, it has quite a few kinks to be worked out first. (Story via Slashdot.)

First he writes an article in the New Yorker about Defense Policy Board chairman and key architect of Iraqui policy Richard Perle discussing Perle’s meeting with arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and his potential conflicts of interest with Global Crossing.

Then Perle threatens to sue him for libel in England, despite the fact that both Perle and Hersh are American and the New Yorker is an American publication.

Then Perle resigns as the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, at least in part due to allegations made in that article. Although he is still on the board.

Now another Hersh article, coming out tomorrow in the New Yorker (I will post a direct link when it becomes available), shows how Donald Rumsfeld rejected advice from his top generals and left the troops in Iraq without enough personnel or equipment. Info here, via TPM.

It it too optimistic to hope Rumsfeld meets a similar fate to Perle? Probably.

Hersh apparently started his career as the first Journalist to write an account of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, which he won a Pulitzer Prize for. He has been described by Salon’s Eric Alterman as the “…simply the best investigative reporter alive.”

Athough I realize he is quite famous, I had honestly not heard of Hersh before I heard about the New Yorker article on Perle, but I am looking forward to learning more about what he has accomplished in the past and to seeing what he will continue to do in the future.

UPDATE: As promised here is the article in the New Yorker referenced above.

Sure there are plenty of browsers for OSX, but there are only two that matter.

Camino, formerly known as Chimera is a lean, fast browser based around the gecko rendering engine, the one used for Mozilla. It is quite simple and fairly robust, especially considering it is still in beta. Its most notable feature is tabbed browsing, which allows pages which are simultaneously loaded to be in different tabs in the same window, instead of spread among multiple windows.

Safari is a browser built by Apple, although it uses the opensource khtml rendering engine, orignally developed for KDE’s Konqueror. It is slightly faster than Camino and also fairly simple. The application has a brushed metal appearance similar to itunes or iphoto. Its most notable feature is its bookmark management, which uses an itunes like interface to manage one’s bookmarks.

O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter has written an interesting article comparing the two browsers. Via MacSlash.

I use both browsers extensively. My official default browser (in my system) is Camino (version 0.6, from back when it was called Chimera), but I actually use Safari more often. The speed difference isn’t huge but Safari does load much faster. I also like Safari’s bookmark management. Safari just feels cleaner and more pleasant to use. This entry is being posted via Safari.

Safari, however doesn’t handle weird pages or situations as well. I use Camino for reading my webmail (which requires entering a username and password) and for obtaining a daily pass and browsing Salon. Safari can’t handle either task.

I also love Camino’s tabs. However Safari may be coming out with tabs soon. An internal beta of Safari, which was leaked to the public (including myself) has tabs.

Both browsers also block popup windows, a necessary feature these days. I occasionally use Internet Explorer and I am amazed at how many popups I encounter.

Both browsers are still in beta, and so there is still plenty of development which will be done. For betas both are quite stable and capable.

Of course both browsers can, and should, be expanded using 3rd party software. My absolute favorite is Cocoa Gestures, which can be used by both browsers (or any Cocoa program). This allows you to make “mouse gestures” by pressing a button (usually the right mouse button) an moving the mouse. These gestures can be mapped to commands such as going back or opening a new window. It is similar to mouse gestures found on Opera

Another necessity is blocking images (mostly ads) from certain servers. PithHelmet brings this functionality to Safari. To get it on Camino, you need to do a few things to the application package (its not hard though).

Did I mention that both applications are free and should continue to be free for some time?

I am very happy about the state of OS X browser development an look forward to even better things in the near future.

There is no question the war is starting to get ugly. What is open to some debate is how the public will react.

We have certianlly been promised a quick and easy war by many in the administration. Many hawks have reasonably said that they didn’t expect this war to be easy or simple, but that was certainly not how it was presented to the public.

Of course all wars get ugly at some point. And all governments trying to go to war project risks and underplay the risks and deliver optimistic projections to the public. A lot of the impressions we have had about how this war will go come from the first gulf war, which was comparatively easy and yielded few American casualties. From the times article liked to above:

As this form of warfare[guerrilla war and similar tactics] has unfolded, the real surprise is why anyone should have been surprised at all. But people have been, among them many who planned the war, many who are fighting it and a large percentage of the general population.

Why? Partly because of Iraq’s poor performance in the 1991 gulf war, which caused many to underestimate Iraqi willingness to fight, while overlooking the distinction between retreating from conquered territory and defending one’s native soil. And partly because protection of civilians has become such an important part of military training. But mostly, because the notion of fierce resistance cut against the grain of how this war was justified to the American people.

There were doubts even in the first gulf war. From Colin Powell’s book, My American Journey, via the New York Times:

In this age of instant information, people tended to expect instant results. Over the next few days, the mood shifted quickly from euphoria to a funk. Why hadn’t we won yet? Was something wrong?

However, the first gulf war was relatively easy and had a narrower scope. We were only trying to get Iraq out of Kuwait, not take over an entire country.

Kos points out a something we have already lost in this ugliness: The impression that the US military is an “invincible juggernaut.” This is something the Bush administration clearly wanted the world to believe.

The troops clearly encountered more resistance then they expected. Whether this is the beginning of a quagmire or just a bump in the road remains to be seen.

I would love to see a product that could read several CDs into a computer with no human intervention. One could process data on several CDs without having to load each one manually.

This would be useful for anyone with a large collection of CDs which they want to backup or catalog. At work we have hundreds of CD-Rs burned with images and other files. They are in various states of organization (mostly disorganized). I could easily write a script that would read the data off of each one and catalog it using Extensis Portfolio or something similar. The problem is that I would have to manually change each one and wait for it to read; probably a full day or two of excruciatingly boring work, which would be difficult to get anyone to do, since they don’t know the system the way I do.

It would also be useful for backing up an entire music collection. One could put all of their CDs in one night and come back with many gigabytes of mp3 or ogg music files. One could then burn that onto DVDs or some other backup medium.

I have not seen a product like this anywhere on the internet. I have seen plenty of automated CD writers but no readers. I assume this device would be fairly expensive since it would be an niche product and would have to incorporate an expensive mechanism for changing the CDs. However, it would be a great product to rent. One could use it to catalog a large collection for a day or two and then rent it again when their collection increased.

Code Red could curtail many activities so you should probably Stay home, await word.

Via freepie, via Cursor.

The house has passed a resolution “designating a day for humility, prayer, and fasting for all people of the United States.” They even said we should “seek guidance from God.” The day will be apparently be declared by Bush.

Reports here, here, and here. Via Atrios.

I know this is fairly minor, but stuff like this really pisses me off. It sounds like a loyalty oath so they can see who is behind the president and who isn’t. As a bonus it also has congress legislating religion.

This apparently has precedents in 1774, 1776, 1787, and 1863. I would like to think this is the kind of thing we would like to leave in the past.

You can view the bill by doing a search for HRES 153 IH at thomas.loc.gov. No permanent link.

One of the sites I have built recently exploded on me. I was supposed to get this:

Instead I got this:

This only happened in IE for the mac. I fixed it by copying some code I had originally created for the site on my hard drive. It seems to work fine now.

The real weird thing is that it just seemed to happen suddenly. The page was generated from Adobe Imageready and used a simple table and images. That is usually quite consistent across any browsers that have mastered even the basics of javascript. It’s very weird.

It seems that Dick Cheeney is going to Amman, Jordan to try to convince his daughter not to be a ‘human shield’ in Iraq.

Cheeny’s office is denying it. The only source cited by anyone is a London arablic paper Al Quds Al Arabi. I couldn’t find a direct link, but according to google the paper is either here or here. Both sites are in arabic. I can’t even translate them with babelfish.

This story probably isn’t true, but it got a good laugh when we found out about it at work today.

This morning Marketplace (on the radio) had some interesting commentary about some of the reasons for war. It seems Rumsfeld and others associated with the Regan adminstration were trying to set up an oil deal in Iraq. Some of the same people later crafted the case to invade Iraq.

Info here, audio here or search for today’s am broacast. The commentary is near the end.

Update: Here is a better link to the audio. The commentator is Jim Vallette.

Despite my left leanings and my loathing of this administration, I have generally optimistic. I am not sure why.

When Bush became president, I knew he would be bad, but I thought he would be sort of mildly bad like his father. I thought I had nothing to worry about as a white man from an upper middle class background.

After 9-11, I hoped the administration would handle it well. Initially, I actually thought they did. The war in Afghanistan started well, but they just seemed to ignore the country after a couple months.

I had hoped that as bad as 9-11 was, at least it would bring people together. Shortly after the attacks it seemed everyone from the right wingers to the French were together against the terrorists. Now the country and the world is more divided then ever.

I was optimistic that Bush wouldn’t use 9-11 to push his agenda and question the patriotism of the Democrats. I thought even Bush wouldn’t go that low.

When Bush started talking about Iraq, I hoped his hawkish stance was sort of a “bad cop” routine to get inspectors into Iraq on our terms and finally end the back an forth we were having with Iraq. I thought they actually wanted fewer weapons and more normal (and profitable) relations with Iraq. I really didn’t think war was the actual goal.

As Bush was seeking UN approval, I thought that maybe we might get some international support. I was glad Bush appeared not to want to go in alone. I even hoped he might take other views into account.

When Turkey refused to let the US invade Iraq from their country, I hoped that Bush would be at least delayed from invading.

When the war actually started, no matter how disappointed I was, I hoped that I was wrong. I hoped it would be like the first gulf war and that we would go in relatively unimpeded with minimal casualties. Iraq is putting up more resistance than we were originally told they would in southern Iraq, and the casualties are already mounting.

I am thoroughly against the war, and would pull all the troops out now if I could, but if we have to be there I want us to win. I hope we can do it quickly and decisively and not get bogged down in a long and costly battle. I am still optimistic that could happen, but not so optimistic that I think it is likely.

The blog templates are done. I have index templates, archives and categories all done. Now I only have to wait for the Politics, Tech, and Misc subdomains to propagate. Well that and add some content.

Obviously, I am Jeremy Scharlack and this is my blog.

I got inspired to start this blog after I set up my friend Sam’s Blog. I have been reading lots of other blogs, mostly political, which will be listed on the sidebar soon and will greatly influence how I write.

I have divided this blog into three categories.

In Politics I will rant on our current situation. George Bush II and his war on Iraq have made me politically aware and concerned in a way I had never been before. I am horrified at our current war, everything leading up to it, and most policies Bush has enacted or tried to enact. I am reading a lot of political blogs recently and I plan on collecting ideas from them. Politically I am a libertarian leaning liberal; I have a strong belief in individual rights, but I believe there is a small roll for the government beyond simply enforcing laws.

In Tech I will talk about gadgets I have, tech news, and problems I run into. I have the naive hope that if I write about a problem I manage to solve, someone might find an answer to the same problem through a google search and save the time and hassle I went through. I like to add to the huge knowledge on the web. I also love talking about technology.

Misc, is, you guessed it, everything else. It might be about my personal life, particularly if I have an interesting anecdote to tell. However I don’t want to reveal to many boring or personal details about my life. I will also put things here that I find interesting or funny that don’t quite qualify as politics or tech. I will also but general entries such as this one here in Misc.

This is a test entry to make sure movable type is working.

It seems that it is. As of 3/24/03 @ 2:11am I have the main index template completed. Tommorow I will complete the other templates (they are all based on the main index template).