MindInHand

Electronic music guru Nick Didkovsky leads more students into interactive audio applications at New York University.

These pages require the JSyn plugin. Check out their latest work here.

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~jeh371/javamusicsystems/hw2/
http://www.jibberia.com/classes/jms/hw2.php
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~wws217/JavaMusicSystems/Homework2/Homework2.html
http://www.dodody.com/JavaMusicSystem/HW2/JavaH2.html

A quick comparison of 4 free video editing systems:

Contestants
T@b - www.zs4.net
Windows Movie Maker - www.msn.com
Jahshaka - www.jahshaka.org
Motion DV Studio LE Edition - free with panasonic camera

Judging
Jahshaka is the most professional and feature rich of the bunch. It has the ability to add color filters, layer multiple vide images together and a huge library of realtime effects. However, since its difficult to learn and constantly crashes, its gathering binary dust.

Windows movie maker is the best for arranging clips that are already set up. Its really easy to set up transitions, change clip length and add titles. Its storyboard feature is wonderful. It also provides export features that enable users to set a target filesize.

T@b is not too user friendly. But if you need facilities to change the colors in a clip or crop a clip, then it provides features that other programs lack. Just watch out which codec you use!

Motion DV Studio is great for organizing a collection of video, and for chopping up a long clip into smaller bits.

Verdict
If I only had one choice, motion DV is the clear winner. But the combination of the last three is a potent punch.

The blogger as a CMS experiment has begun. I am using blogger as a datamanagement center, and incorporating blog posts in an iframe on another site. So far so good, although everybody warns me that iframes are inherently evil.

Top ten geek business myths triggered some good debate.

My favorite comment on slashdot:

It's ironic. The two things that make engineers so good at engineering are the two things that make them so unsuited to running a business.

Hubris is a trait of engineers that makes them strive for greatness in their products. After all, you can't really have good pride if you're constantly getting negative reactions to your stuff. However, it also leads to a close-mindedness and tunnel-vision in regards to other technologies and solutions. A good businessman must be able to survey the market and understand the positioning of his product. Someone who thinks that they have such a great solution that it is applicable to any and all problem domains is selling snake oil. See Netscape and Sun's Java for two examples of solutions that were billed as much more than they realistically were.

Laziness is a good trait for engineers because it forces them to seek efficient, easily-implementable solutions to everyday problems. Automating tasks is absolutely essential to creating value in a company. However, the business side of running a business is not reduceable to a script. There are serious tradeoffs that must be weighed all the time in order to guide a business down the road to success. These can't be automated. The laziness trait leads engineers to seek easy solutions when they should be seeking difficult-to-find synergies. Well-designed software is modular with simple interfaces. Well-run businesses are well-integrated and derive their strength from business units coordinating with each other, not simply acting as a pipeline from one end to another.

Yeah, I'm guilty of that.