http://benderydt.com

It took a while, but my movie pages are finally online. Let me know if they work for you. I’ll be editing the movie posts to point to the right pages.

By the way, I realised that the smaller sized mp4’s are the perfect size for the new iPod “video”. You should be able to download them and put them straight onto your iPod. See, there’s a reason to be standards compliant :-)

On an unrelated note, I noticed last week that the backups on my old linux file, mail and printserver were failing. To give you an idea how old this machine is: it’s a Pentium II 350 MHz with 128 MB RAM running RedHat 7.3. The machine runs rdiff-backup (recommended!) on a RAID 5 array. The backups had failed somewhere in the last month, causing rdiff-backup to revert the backup-area to the previous known good backup state. Trouble is, among the things being backed up is my home directory with my mailbox in Maildir format. In my mailbox there’s a spam folder containing about 14000 spam mails at the moment - I get about 100 spam mails a day. Reverting these 14000 mails caused my ancient 0.11 version of rdiff-backup to rapidly consume all available memory. I guess there was some recursive code in it. I couldn’t just delete all spam and be done with it, because the problem was in the already backed up files. I could delete all backed-up files and start all over but there were a few things there whose recent history I wanted to keep. So I set on the task to update rdiff-backup to it’s latest 1.0.1 version.

I wasn’t very happy doing this since I know that this is such an old version of RedHat Linux that updating stuff can be a chore. My fear became reality: compiling the new 1.0.1 version failed because it needed a new version of librsync. But, as it turns out, Dag Wieers still maintains an archive with updated RedHat 7.3 rpms. apt-get update and apt-get upgrade took care of librsync. rdiff-backup 1.0.1 compiled without even a warning. Running the new rdiff-backup cleanly reverted the backup area and my automated backups started working again. All in all the proces took about an hour and a half, thanks to Dag and the rdiff-backup team caring about old machinery. Thank you guys!

This was the second time in the last three years I had to work on this small server. Last year a harddisk failed. Took me a while to find a 40 GB drive for the RAID 5 array :-) Remember, this machine can just about run Windows 98. Linux can be good for the lazy sysadmin.

In case you’re wondering about the 14000 spam mails I’m keeping: I’m building a spam corpus for Spam Assassin or some other bayesian spam filter. I hope this will work better than my provider’s spam filter and Apple Mail’s spam filter combined. I just haven’t found the time to implement it. Reminds me about something: time to install rdiff-backup on my MacOSX machine.

In the past month I’ve been working an article that starts like this:

In the last year, a lot of cheap (or not so cheap) HD video cameras came onto the market. These cameras are targeted towards consumers or professional users at the bottom of the scale (”prosumers”). This page tries to give a comprehensive overview of the different cameras and their characteristics.

It’s not finished yet, but Mike Curtis has beaten me on speed anyway. So, if you’re interested in a shiny new “cheap” HD camera, go read his article for an overview of the market in the next couple of months.

A couple of remarks: the Panasonic HVX-200 looks like the camera to beat, but it isn’t out yet, nobody knows the exact tech specs and only a few have seen footage shot with it. The same goes for the Canon XL-H1 although that one will be on the market sooner. Please remember that Mike Curtis’ overview is written from the perspective of indy film makers. If you’re looking for run-and-gun, ENG or documentary camera, the Sony Z1 or the more expensive Canon XL-H1 will be hard to beat. The JVC HD-100 needs attention to get good images out of it (manual focus and iris) and has lousy low light performance. Battery perfomance is awfull, it won’t record 720p60 or 720p50 and there’s also the split screen issue. Panasonic P2-media is expensive and holds only 8 minutes at highest quality. You will have to fiddle with hard disk recorders and/or laptops if you shoot hours of footage a day with a Panasonic HVX-200.

Especially for European users, I’d like to note this:

• The Sony Z1, JVC HD-100 and Canon XL-H1 are multiformat cameras, PAL and NTSC compatible. All others have a specific PAL or NTSC version.
• The Sony FX1e doesn’t have a fake 24 p (CF 24) solution in Europe (although you wouldn’t want to use it if it existed).
• The Canon XL-H1 will need a factory modification (meaning €€) before it will record 1080i50.
• According to this post the Panasonic HVX-200 won’t be having a 24p feature in PAL countries.
• The JVC HD-100 comes in two versions in Europe, a HD-100 without firewire input and a HD-101 with.
• The state of HD in Europe is immature. HD television sets are rare and it’s not decided yet whether the HD broadcast standard will be 1080i50 or 720p50. The EBU leans towards 720p50 but the only European HD station is 1080i50. One of the biggest selling points for a Sony FX1 or Z1 is that it’s a damn good 16:9 DV cam. You can always edit in DV with it, even if you shoot in HD.

Update 2005-10-18:

According to this page, the Canon XL-H1 will be delivered as a 50 Hz camera in Europe (1080i50 and a pseudo progressive 25p solution called 25F) with the option to add 60i, 30f and 24f recording.

In case you’re wondering what’s happening, I’m working on the “business” end of my site. The goal was to embed my movies into simple presentable pages. I succeeded but in the process I learned once again why I don’t want to do this web development thing for a living.

Here is the goal: to embed mp4 movies in my pages while keeping them XHTML compliant. I don’t want to force people into one and only one plugin, I don’t want the plugin to load whenever you load the page and the page should be compatible with as much browsers as possible but at the same time stay very simple. I don’t want a special case for each and every browser.

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