Artists rendering of Curiosity landing on mars with the sky crane.
A new, enhanced version of Curiosity decent video has been created. The original NASA release was only thumbnails. This video is available in up to 1080p and it looks amazing.
Here are some links for more information on Curiosity:
PRESENTATION IS EVERYTHING
There is something that learned over the past couple of years, presentation is everything. It is quite possibly the most important element in all we do.
Presentation from the aspect of leadership can mean the difference between shared vision and unengaged worker bee. Presentation from the aspect of a product ( in my case software product) means the difference between phenomenal success and utter failure of a product.
In short, no matter how good or revolutionary your product is, if it looks bad, it will fail. To have a physical product example, look no further than the current mobile phone market. Look at two products: one you like and one you hate. What are the specs of each one? Are they comparable or does one have an advantage over the other. Now, for arguments sake, lets say the more “cool” one has a better physical appearance and a more flashy user interface but the one that is less “cool” looking and has a plain user interface has better specs and capabilities, which one would you buy? I’m betting (and society proves) that the “cooler” one with the more flashy interface wins out more than the other device. I’ve got no facts in front of me to prove this directly, only experience and my own beliefs.
FIXING OUR SOFTWARE
So how do we fix our software? Well here are some design concepts to keep in mind.
These are some of my most important concerns for a software product because if a user cannot easily pick up your software and start using it immediately, then you will have problems with adoption within your targeted user base. As with the mobile phone example above; if you have two pieces of software equivalent in terms of capabilities and specs, but one is presented a lot better and is more user friendly, which would you choose?
Going Forward
What we’ve learned here can be summed up in the two following statements. Software must be intuitive, discoverable, and easy to use. Also, presentation and appearance are quite possibly the most important part of software.
With all the fear mongering by the news outlets, I thought I’d make a short post about DNS Changer.
DNS Changer is malware that if you are infected it changes how your computer looks up website addresses. Essentially, it tells your computer to use a service setup by criminals. The criminals behind DNS Changer have since been caught, but with far reaching implications, arrangements were made to turn the criminals’ service into a short-term legitimate service. Monday that service will be turned off.
To make sure you’re not infected, goto this site setup to be a quick test: http://www.dns-ok.us/. If the result is Green, you are ok and have no need to worry.
If the test fails. you will need to go here: http://www.dcwg.org/fix/. It contains directions and links required to get your computer fixed.
For more information, goto the DNS Changer Working Group (http://www.dcwg.org/)
These photos were taken at the 2012 Fireworks show in Estill Springs, Tennessee. It was a really good show, one of the best I’ve seen.
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These pictures were taken from the Tullahoma, Tennessee airport June 5, 2012. I had a 200mm lens with a no. 14 welder’s glass in front of it to capture Venus and the sunspots.
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I took these two pictures back in April. These are Rapeseed fields in Belvidere, Tennessee. Rapeseed can be used for various things such as Canola oil and biodiesel.
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I use ffmpeg to make timelapse movies of images taken from one of my several webcams. Recently, I started having trouble with it converting all the frames of my video to gray scale. I’m am unsure if a software upgrade or a script change caused it, but I had a heck of a time tracking it down.
This is the gist of what the message ffmpeg was giving me: “Input stream #0.0 frame changed from size:” … “fmt:gray”. There are virtually no resources out there that mention that exact phrase, but after scouring the web for a few weeks off and on, I finally found a website mentioning a similar experience and it had a solution. To solve the problem, use ImageMagick’s convert utility with “-type TrueColor” in the options list. The example below is in my timelapse bash script. This will stamp the date and time onto the top of the image and save it into my temporary directory.
convert $FILE -bordercolor Black -border 20x20 -gravity north -crop 640x500+0+0\! -gravity NorthWest -font /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeMonoBold.ttf -pointsize 16 -type TrueColor -fill white -annotate +10+0 "$TIMESTAMP" $TEMPDIR/$(basename $FILE)
As I mentioned earlier, I found the hint at the solution I needed here: Source.
This is a dance routine by the Wrecking Crew Orchestra, a dance group from Japan. This video was taken at one of their performances of a Tron-Inspired routine. Its a pretty awesome concept and even better video.
Source: YouTube