Spore Galactic Adventure Released in Europe, today 23 June 2009

This afternoon i received a SMS that my preordered expention kit, called Galactic Adventures for the EA Spore game, was available. I picked it up for 30 euros and installed it. Everything went smooth.

After a succesfull installation, we clicked on the Spore icon in the dock of the mac and prepared for the new fun....that we didn't find. Looking up the documentation and calling the EA helpdesk brought no prevail. I tried a second install. Nothing helped. Until I went looking in the installation directory Spore in the Applications directory. I saw that a new executable was there called "Spore Ruimteavonturen" (dutch for Spore Galactic Adventures). Dubbel click this new executable and of we go:

links to JPEG images in ATOM feed entries must be typed image/jpeg

After some debugging, I found a nasty bug in an ATOM feed that validated by the W3C validator service. I was trying to parse image url's out of an ATOM feed. ATOM 1.0 feeds are defined by the RFC 4287. In paragraph "4.2.7.3. The "type" Attribute" it is defined that the type must conform to the syntax of a MIME media type. The MIME media type is in turn defined by RFC 4288. Media type registrations are listed by the IANA at: http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/
If we look up the media subtypes of image/ we find that JPEG images have MIME type image/jpeg . The feed I was parsing had images with MIME type image/jpg instead of image/jpeg as it should have been. Apparently the W3C validator does not validate the type of links. I reported the bug/unconformence. Hopely it will be fixed soon.
A handy list with all MIME types to be used as reference is also provided by w3cschools.

First experiment with Imovie '09

This weekend I bought Ilife '09 for the mac. The software packet has four components : Iphoto, Imovie, Garageband and Iweb. So I played around with Imovie '09 and made a small project with my ski trip movies I shot with an Panasonic DMC-FS3. The movies are 640x480 and come in a .mov file container. The video tracks are encoded in Photo Jpeg and the audio tracks are in 8-bit unsigned mono 8KHz. The resulting movie project is uploaded to Youtube by Imovie's built in share function. Here's the result:

The soundtrack is from World of Goo. The track is "Brave Adventure" by Kyle Gabler.

I really enjoyed using Imovie'09 for this task. I works fast and intuitive. It proves that the choice to abandon the timeline is really working out for consumer oriented movie editing. Time will tell if this will also hold for professional editing. Imovie'09 has an export to Final Cut Pro (Apple professional editing program). Hence an escaped path is on board.

Back from ski trip

Back from a skitrip in Nassfeld, Austria in Hotel Berghof with the Sporty organisation. Enjoyed good things in life.

Sync Nokia 6124 Classic contacts with Google Sync via SyncML

I own a Nokia 6124 Classic since a few months. It's the entry model employees get from my employer. Since I work on mac, I could not sync the contacts because there is no free Isync plugin available yet. Recently, Google Sync was announced. It worked very good to sync my contactc on my Iphone with my Google contacts. I use Google Contact as my main database. Hence, I begun to wonder if I could sync my Nokia using Google Sync. Based upon the instructions from Google for another type of Nokia phone, I was able to derive a working setup. Here are the instructions:

1. From the main menu, go to the "Settings" folder and select "Connectivity".
2. From the Sync screen, select "Options"->"New sync profile" and enter the following:
3. Sync profile name: Google Sync
4. Select "Applications" then "Contacts"
5. Include in sync: Yes
6. Remote database: contacts
7. Synchronisation type: Both Ways
   
8. Select "Back" then "Back" then "Connection settings"
9. Server version: 1.2
10. Server ID: Google
11. Data bearer: Internet
12. Access point: Always ask
13. Host address: https://m.google.com/syncml
14. Port: 80
15. Username: username@gmail.com (fill in your own username)
16. Password: the password of your Google Account
17. Allow sync requests: Yes
18. Accept all sync requests: No
19. Network authentication: No
20. Select "Back", "Back" and then "Exit" to save the settings
21. You have now finished the setup

To perform the sync operation, take the following steps:

1. From the main Settings menu, select "Connectivity".
2. From the Connectivity menu, select "Sync"'
3. Highlight your Google Sync Profile.
4. Select "Options" and click "Synchronise".
5. Select your access point: Px Live (depends on your configuration)
   
6. That's it. Your 6124 Classic will now connect and sync its phonebook with your Google Contacts. The contacts on your phone will appear in your google contacts and all your Google contact are stored into your phone. If you don't want this, change the value for the synchronization type set in step 7 of the setup

The synchronisation goes via Internet over the air (OTA). The next I would like to find out if i could pair the phone to my mac via Bluetooth and use the internet connection of my mac to do the synchronisation. I don't now if that possible. On the other hand, the synchronisation of my 800 contacts or so only took a few minutes, so I don't now its worth the hassle.

Login failed for EA Spore : solution on Mac OSX

I bought the galactic version of Spore when it was released in Europe on 5 september 2008. Since then, me and my two kids of 8 and 10 years old, enjoyed playing it offline. Due to some strange reason, I could not get Spore online. The error messages were different over time but last month I got a message something was wrong with privileges. I tried to change my password but that did not help. Finally, I found "What do I do if I get the error: 'Login failed: You do not have the proper spore.com privileges'?" on the support site of EA. Unfortunately, the explanation is windows only. But after some sniffing around I found the login.prop file on OSX :
You can find the file as follows:

1. Go to your home directory
   
2. Double click on Library
3. Double click on Preferences
4. Double click on SPORE Preferences
5. Double click on p_drive
6. Double click on User
7. Double click on Application Data
8. Double click on Spore
9. Double click on Preferences
10. In this folder there will be a file login.prop, right click and delete this file and try Spore once again.

After the login.prop file was deleted, Spore asked for a new email/password/nickname combination (or you can login with you EA account). You can find our Spore creatures under the name losesi.

Happy sporing

Canon EOS 5D Mark II : a game changer

Recently, Canon made available a new picture camera that might become a game changer. A good preview, based on a preproduction sample, is made by dpreview. The reason that this camera generates high expectations is twofold : a 35mm (full frame) sensor and the new Digic 4 processor. The large sensor means wide angle shots and excellent low light performance. The new digic 4 processor means that now you can record video from that excellent sensor with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels (Full HD) at 30 frames per second. Hence, we might see a crossover happening from the photo camera business to the video camera's. The first results are indeed stunning. First, there's a professional made movie called "Reverie". A second movie, made with much lower budget, still captures my imagination:

Tokyo Reality (Canon 5D MarkII) from utsuru on Vimeo.

The resulting movie files are Quicktime Movies encoded using MPEG-4 AVC and uncompressed PCM sound (a total of 38.6 Megabits/second).

I asked Eirik Solheim (Project manager, development department
at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK)), who already has an Canon Eos 5D Mark II two questions:

1. How is the process of getting the video into Final Cut Pro. Is there decoding/transcoding going on. If yes, does that take time ?
   Answer: You don’t have to transcode, but at this point you would probably end up transcoding: the files are standard H264 and can be edited directly in Final Cut. But the problem is that you need very powerful hardware to edit full HD H264 in Final Cut. If you want to edit on a laptop you have to transcode to Apple Intermediate or another less compressed format.


2. Video quality is amazing judging the videos that already circulating in the net. But how about audio ? How does the build-in microphone performs and what do you get if you connect an external passive microphone. This issue will determine if external audio recording is still necessary or not.
   Answer: With the tests we have done the audio is OK, but not good. Using the internal mic on the camera has serious limitations of course. Picking up the sound of all operations you do on the camera and the image stabilizer motor if you use an IS lens. With an external mic it is better, but still a bit noisy.
   For professional productions you would be better off recording audio with a separate device. For interviews and simple background audio you could do with the built in audio and preferably with an external mic.

To test how my macbook pro with a 2.33 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo processor would be able to handle the HD files, I downloaded the full HD version of "Tokyo Reality" via bittorrent. Playback on the macbook pro was unfortunately not smooth. On an Imac, playback was perfect. Hence, I guess my macbook pro will not be powerfull enough for working with Full HD files coming from the Canon 5D. Maybe a new technology, called OpenCl (Open Computing Language), will solve this issue. OpenCl makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing. OpenCl is a new powerful Snow Leopard technology.