Dirk.Net

The referendum on the junta-sponsored draft constitution was held today and the draft was accepted with a (for many) surprisingly low margin of 58. 24% vs. 41.76% against. The Northeast turned in a resounding “No” vote and in the North it was a close contest.
The military-installed government campaigned for the acceptance of the charter draft while opposing campaigns were threatened with criminal prosecution. Arguably, had the government disseminated unbiased information about the charter, there’s a chance that the draft might have been rejected.

Here’s what I witnessed at leisurely temple serving as a polling station today:

A transparent glass box serving as the ballot box is placed in the center of the room. The voter walking into the polling station sees the box first, with all the ballots already cast clearly visible. He or she might thus fear that his or her ballot can be identified after it has been cast into the box and that thus, her vote can be linked to her identity. In a culture such as Thailand’s that demands preserving face and not creating a public embarrassment for oneself and others, this is especially severe and might be an effective deterrent from the “wrong vote” for many. IMHO placing a glass ballot box out in the open space not very democratic and I haven’t this in other elections in Thailand. The government is obviously compromising the secrecy of the vote to help a favorable outcome.

Beta 2 of HD View has been released, now supporting Firefox! This is great news. The MS research team is on track to  create not only the panoramic viewer of the future, but to establish a platform for an entirely new viewing experience for large (gigapixel, if you like) images. Yes, this is all based on (evil) Microsoft Technology (HD Photo, see here, here and here), but the technological leadership is apparent and the benefits for panoramic viewing are undeniable. Being able to just stitch megapixel images into one large image, upload it and (after the server side determines the viewing parameters) being able to view it in a fast viewer serving just the pertinent pixels, is a whole new ball game for online panoramic image viewing. And it should be easy to eventually create a fully automatic stitcher working on the server side (at least for wide angle images in cylindrical projection) finally making online panorama sharing a popular pastime.

Just for the record, you can download the HD View browser plugin and the HDMake utility to create your own HD View content from here (this link is hard to find when navigating from the HD View home page). I still believe this to be revolutionary viewing technology, IF Microsoft Research follow through on this and create plugins for the most-popular browsers and computing platforms. The inspiration for the project came from the Gigapxl project but even with smaller resolution HD View makes it so much easier to publish large panoramic images as there is

• no need to resize images to fit the screen, viewer or QTVR container,
• no need to optimize for fast viewing as there is no download of the entire image as with QTVR and other viewers, the server just streams the necessary pixels at the request of the plugin,
• no need to obfuscate the image (i.e. prevent users from downloading the entire copyrighted panorama) as is virtually (no pun intended) impossible with QTVR and difficult with the Java-based viewers (usually accomplished by read protecting image folders on the server).

It’s really just snap>stitch>hdmake>upload. Fantastic.

QuickTime and the Pocket PC are not a good match.

QT uses mainly the older and proprietary Sorenson Video codecs (codec: compressor/decompressor, a software component used to translate video or audio between its uncompressed form and the compressed form in which it is stored) whose specs Apple kept secret so they had to be reverse-engineered for the ffmpeg project. Pirates of Silicon Valley in reverse… As of today support for the Quicktime codecs has yet to emerge with any player, even the super-versatile TCPMP.

As a workaround you might have to convert your .mov files into the likes of MPEG-4 with the SUPER app mentioned yesterday (which works fine in spite of my rant). To get the accompanying AAC sound decoded you will need the pertinent TCPMP plugin from here. Thanks to the “Don’t be Evil” mantra the latest Sorenson codecs (Sorenson Spark/H.263) as used by YouTube and other web video sources couldn’t be kept secret as in the bad old days. To play such encoded videos you just need this TCPMP plugin. Hope it helps.

SUPER is a GUI to ffmpeg, mencoder, mplayer, x264, ffmpeg2theora & the theora/vorbis RealProducer plugIn.

If you need a simple, yet very efficient tool to convert (encode) or play any Multimedia file, without reading manuals or spending long hours training, then SUPER is all you need. It is a Multimedia Encoder and a Multimedia Player, easy-to-use with 1 simple click.

Trying to download this useful app from their web site at http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html is a waste of time as the browser will keep looping back to the same page and you will not get to any actual download link or file. They have some pseudo-fixes posted such as  ”clear your MSIE cache” but this is bs as the problems happen with all browsers and configurations. “Queries concerning this issue will not be answered.”, duh! I suspect that the loopback wants to let you sift through the page more thoroughly on the lookout for a download link, hoping you will click on some ad links along the way. IMHO this borders on spam and wastes people’s time, so to save some just download the app from AfterDawn. Most other download sites will link to the product’s endlessly cheating repeating home page. Hope it helps.