Pink and Green Dots

Look at the following picture.  Stare at the black '+' in the center and you will see a moving green dot but try to follow the green dot with your eyes and it will disappear.

No, that's not me

A different fellow named "William Frantz" was sentenced for negligent homicide following a DUI accident. We both happen to be from Michigan but the defendant is a 19 year old Michigan Tech student who just happens to share my name. I sympathize for the kid but the moral is clear. Drunk driving can be deadly.

Difference between DivX and Xvid?

First, an example, what do these things have in common?

1. Microsoft in Redmond, WA
2. Apple in Cupertino, CA
3. LAME, the open source project on SourceForge

Answer: all of them offer a MP3 audio encoder.

Likewise...

1. DivX Inc. in San Diego, CA
2. Xvid Solutions in Hof, Germany
3. XviD, the open source project on SourceForge

All of them offer an MPEG4 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP) video encoder. The Xvid Solutions encoder is the same as the XviD open-source encoder and often appears in free software. The DivX encoder is proprietary and only appears in DivX Certified software such as the free DivX Converter.

Convert Phone Video using FFMPEG

I recently shot some video using the camera on my HTC Touch Cruise. I was easily able to send it as an e-mail attachment using Pocket Outlook and my gMail account. However, when the video arrived it was in an unusable format so I had to do some FFMPEG processing on it.

DivX Noobs

I saw this question today so I'm posting my response here for everyone.

> I am seeking a way to covert my dvd's to a video file format.
> I am looking to use mp4 or divx...

In the USA it is illegal to circumvent the copy protection found on most commercial DVDs. However, if you have an unprotected DVD, you can use DivX Converter to convert the DVD to a DivX file.

William Frantz Elementary School Address

William Frantz Elementary School is located at 3811 North Galvez Street, New Orleans, LA 70117. While we share the same name, I'm not related to the school.

Lee Harvey Oswald was born October 18, 1939. He lived on Alvar Street, across from William Frantz Elementary which he attended with his brother.

Decades later, 6 year old Ruby Bridges also attended William Frantz Elementary marking the end of segregation on November 14, 1960.

3 years later, on November 22, 1963, Lee assassinated one of the biggest proponents of civil rights, President John F. Kennedy.

Apple Teaches People

By now there are a few million iPhone users compared to hundreds of million Windows Mobile phone users. Yet, in The Seven Biggest Mobile Content Stories of 2007, Fierce Mobile reported that iPhone Safari browser usage has dramatically exceeded Windows Mobile Pocket Internet Explorer.

I find this astonishing. Apple overcame a 100:1 disadvantage and a several year head start. Then again, I'm often taken aback when "average users" believe some feature is revolutionary when in fact it has been available for years. Now I realize that Apple's skill is not simply making good products but actually promoting their use. There are no commercials on TV that show happy Windows Mobile users scrolling around web pages on a phone, so I guess nobody realizes its possible until Apple runs an iPhone ad. Suddenly everyone thinks only an iPhone can do this, that or the other thing.