Ulanism

What are your thoughts on using Quicktime video in our blog posts instead of Flash?

Your blog website can display and handle both Quicktime and Flash.

Quicktime (QT) is part of the H.264 video compression standard. QT is the industry standard – everyone (except Adobe and Microsoft) is moving towards it. This standard is developed by hundreds of parties and is legally required to stay open.

Pro QT
1) QT uses open standards
2) QT displays much higher quality video
3) QT podcasts can be listed on the iTunes Music store
4) QT can be repurposed (transferred and watched on the iPhone/iPod/etc)
5) QT works on slower computers
6) QT has few viruses (on Windows)

Pro Flash
1) Flash files are smaller
2) Flash allows for the creation of ‘cool’ websites

YVOD is an Open Source advocate. We try to work only with technology solutions that are open for all to review. Flash is closed and wraps all video content in a proprietary container making your content much harder to redistribute. YVOD tries to get your content in front of as many eyeballs as possible. As such, we highly recommend you stay away from Flash if at all possible.

I have been in love with Carnival photos for years now. I could look at them all day =)

rio-carnival.net has a nice slideshow of a all 13 schools along with two extra galleries.

Found this nice post on auroville.org and thought I would copy it in here. I hope you enjoy it =)

There should be somewhere upon earth a place that no nation could claim as its sole property, a place where all human beings of goodwill, sincere in their aspiration, could live freely as citizens of the world, obeying one single authority, that of the supreme Truth; a place of peace, concord, harmony, where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his suffering and misery, to surmount his weakness and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities; a place where the needs of the spirit and the care for progress would get precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the seeking for pleasures and material enjoyments.

In this place, children would be able to grow and develop integrally without losing contact with their soul. Education would be given, not with a view to passing examinations and getting certificates and posts, but for enriching the existing faculties and bringing forth new ones. In this place titles and positions would be supplanted by opportunities to serve and organize. The needs of the body will be provided for equally in the case of each and everyone. In the general organisation intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority will find expression not in the enhancement of the pleasures and powers of life but in the increase of duties and responsibilities.

Artistic beauty in all forms, painting, sculpture, music, literature, will be available equally to all, the opportunity to share in the joys they bring being limited solely by each one’s capacities and not by social or financial position.

For in this ideal place money would be no more the sovereign lord. Individual merit will have a greater importance than the value due to material wealth and social position. Work would not be there as the means of gaining one’s livelihood, it would be the means whereby to express oneself, develop one’s capacities and possibilities, while doing at the same time service to the whole group, which on its side would provide for each one’s subsistence and for the field of his work.

In brief, it would be a place where the relations among human beings, usually based almost exclusively upon competition and strife, would be replaced by relations of emulation for doing better, for collaboration, relations of real brotherhood.

—-

Tomorrow night will you remember what you said tonight
Tomorrow night will all the thrill be gone
Tomorrow night will it be just another memory
Or just another song that’s in my heart to linger on

Your lips are so tender, your heart is beating fast
As you willingly surrender to be my darling at last
Tomorrow night will you be with me when the moon is bright
Tomorrow night will you say those lovely things you said tonight

Tomorrow Night by Patty Griffin

Sol Sender speaks on how Obama got his logo.

I love stuff like this =) I especially enjoy that the video is not over-produced. I like that this video uses simple lighting, 2 cameras and easy transitions. It is very easy to watch as a podcast. Nice work!

Hotel Evolution

This is a cool web app that highlights a few wonderful things about the new iPhone platform.

It sure would be nice if people who are writing good stuff could stick to standards. Why these guys do anything for the iPhone and then a website in Flash is beyond me. I guess they are so in love with their own mrketing that they forget some people actually go to their website to get information.

Oh well, I guess if I want something done correctly…

I think these videos are very good and worth watching.

The Influence Of Marcus Garvey

Part 1

Part 2

—-

Some folks writing on Garvey

The Gnostics

Garvey’s impact on his own was without parallel.   Approximately twelve hundred branches of the UNIA in over forty countries speak for itself.  His impact on succeeding generations has also been immense, in spite of a concerted mainstream effort first to expunge him from the pages of history and secondly, when the effort failed, to distort his record.  Many African leaders in succeeding decades have expressly acknowledged their debt to Garvey’s influence.  They include Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Nnamdi Azikewe of Nigeria and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya.   Modified versions of Garvey’s red, black and green flag can be seen in the national flag of Kenya and the flag of the African National Congress in South Africa.  The strong influence of Garveyism on the ANC of the 1920’s and ’30s continued in the ANC Youth League of the 1940s and resides today in the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania.

Garvey’s influence in Afro-America can be traced through a variety of major organizations and leaders.  Elijah Muhammad was a member of the UNIA in Detroit and his Nation of Islam bore many obvious similarities to Garvey’s organization.  The parents of Malcolm X were both local UNIA leaders in Omaha, Milwaukee and Lansing Michigan.  Garvey himself visited the home of Malcolm’s parents on more than one occasion.  Carlos Cooks of the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement, former Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and ex-congressman Charles Diggs are among the post-Garvey leaders who emerged out of a Garvey background.  The entire Black Power Movement of the 1960’s and 70’s was permeated with Garveyite symbols and ideas.

The Black Arts Movement was a counterpart of Garvey’s literary and cultural program which spearheaded the Harlem Renaissance.  In the Caribbean practically the entire group of labor/political leaders who emerged circa the 1930’s were influenced in one way or another by Garveyism.  They included Clement Payne of Barbados and Trinidad, St. William Grant of Jamaica, D. Hamilton Jackson of St. Croix and others.

Garvey’s influence can be traced also in non-African figures, particularly Ho Chi Minh of Viet Nam, an ardent support of UNIA during his New York sojourn in his younger days.

—-

The KKK

In a message dated October 28, 1925, Garvey introduced a speaker from the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America (the northern KKK counterpart), whom he had invited to speak at Liberty Hall:

“Mr. Plowell and his organizations sympathize with us even as we sympathize with them. I feel and believe that we should work together for the purpose of bringing about the ideal sought-the purification of the races, their autonomous separation and the unbridled freedom of self-development and self-expression.”

YVOD had a great development lunch today!

Kings of Old
by Prince Buster

—-

My ancestors
Were kings of old
They ruled this world
And all of its gold
But just look at me
Just you look at me
I’m as poor as can be

My ancestors
Would fight the sun
Before they’d bow down
To any man
But just look at me
Whoa just you look at me
Just you look at me

Just look at me
I’m a stranger in this land
Just watch me stand
And what me be a man
I’m going to fight now
For liberty
And I’ll achieve
Freedom, justice and equality like…

My ancestors
Were mighty and strong
They would not bow down
To any man
And that’s the way I’ll be
My children will be proud of me
I’ll diminish slavery

My children
Will be mightier than me
They will correct
Mistakes made by me
They’ll be mightier than me
Yes! They will be stronger than me
Every eye shall see

My friend Jules Kobelin is going to Berkeley Digital Film Institute to learn everything about digital film creation. So far she is loving every minute of it!

She recently came to me because she is having issues around inexpensive yet stable media storage. Specifically, she is trying to solve two problems:

1) She needs to store lots and lots of data from her film shoots

2) She needs fast access to her data while editing

The Storage Box

The first issue is relatively straight forward – throw a bunch of cheap drives at it. My friend Art Simon recently hooked me up with this 2-bay Galaxy Metal Gear “Storage Box” for $55. It uses a USB 2 interface and is set up to easily toss two large drives in it for backup storage.

I suggest Jules use the drives for the original off-loading of media and the final backup of completed media. She can put two 1 terabyte drives in there and store 3-6 months work of work. She should mirror each drive to make sure that if one fails she still has all the data. Additionally, I want her to store one of her drives “off-site” with YVOD.

The Editing Box

The second issue involves a bit more thought and leads me to a RAID solution. Jules uses Final Cut Studio which can process as much data as you can shove at it. As such, I would like to get her a Firewire 800 box with two drives bays.

It should be noted that she is NOT going to use this box for backups. As such she only needs to stripe the drives for speed which means the box only requires RAID 0. This will cut down on the cost of the box considerably.

Note: I have looked at Drobo but am not sold on the whole BeyondRAID proprietary technology. Sure it makes life easier – until something bad happens. When their system goes down, Drobo is the only game in town to recover your data. Of all places you do not want a single point of failure it is with your data.

Additionally, she can be smart about what drives she uses for each project. She can get smaller drives which costs less when the project allows (ie: she can use two 300GB drives instead of two 1 terabyte drives when appropriate).

Her main focus for this second Galaxy Metal Gear “Editing Box” is on speed. This enclosure has all the requirements for a sweet price of $110!

Firewire 800
RAID 0
2 internal SATA 3.0Gb/s dive bays

If I had not seen it, I would not have believed it. Seriously…

 

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