But now I will have to add a third category: counterfeit cards.
There is strong evidence that counterfeit cards are spreading like plague since second half of 2009. Usually sold through Internet, shipped from Asia and significantly cheaper than equivalent cards in retail stores.

You won’t notice until it’s too late

Unfortunately, you won’t notice it until it’s too late: the card works fine, then fails silently. One day, you will want to copy or watch the movies and you discover that the majority of them are unplayable.

Treasured, the diagnostic app for damaged movie files, will give some hope: Unplayable files indeed contains some video, and you can see the preview. But you will also notice that all the unplayable files seem to contain the same few seconds of video. This is the symptom of a counterfeit card.

Here is why:
The 16 or 32GB card that you have purchased on this obscure website is in reality a 2GB card. It masquerades its capacity to look and feel like a 32GB file, and at the beginning, while you are filling the first 2GB with data, everything is fine.
But once you go over the real capacity, any data that you write to the card is lost. The card doesn’t complain, the operating system doesn’t notice. Everything seems to work, but in reality your movies and photos are never written to the card. Because it’s already full!

Needless to say, such unplayable movies can’t be restored. It’s possible to repair the content of the card, but not what was not written in the first place.

Please take a look at those web pages to learn more:
http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/
http://www.overclockers.com.au/wiki/Fake_Memory_Cards

and to this utility to verify your card:
http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/h2testw-14-gold-standard-in-detecting-usb-counterfeit-drives/

The website had been the atom the the Internet for a decade: You would shop on Amazon, find flights on an airline website, sell on eBay, look for a job on Monster.

Now for many people the Web is Facebook. This where the services are, where their people are hanging around, where their leisure time is spent. This recent article, Facebook wants to be our One True Login, and the habit of using Google Search as a replacement of the URL bar, show that most people don’t get how the Internet works.

Where do you want to live?

And the success of platforms like Facebook is not surprising: it’s a place where people doesn’t feel confused, a curated, safe environment where they can do their stuff. Without messing with URLs, multiple logins and the dangers of the wild Internet.

And developers follow users, because users is where the money is or will be. This leads to a fragmentation, happening now under our eyes.
If you are a start-up or a software developer starting a project, one of the strategic decisions is: On what platform?
A few years back, the answer was evident: Web.
But powerful platforms have emerged: Apple’s iTunes / App Store and Facebook are the most impressive examples. Palm purchase by HP may end up creating a third powerful alternative.

Platforms?

Those platforms bring customers by the millions, take care of the most annoying aspects of web services, like login, marketing, payments, among others. Why would then developers want to open their web shop “in the wild” and fight for visibility, customers, and reputation, if they can have a comfy land inside the walled domain of their Lord?

Therefore, the Internet is now shrinking, not in size, in number of users, but in ambition.
Ambition is heading down for two reasons:
Innovation is more likely to happen in the wild than in walled domains with strict rules to respect. And if those new platforms are draining a big amount of the innovation power, there is less for the Web.

Why does it matter?

For developers, because they are in front of an ineludible strategy decision: What platforms for my products?
For users, because they are giving away their personal information, consuming habits, payment information, time and money to a single vendor.
And bet all your assets on a single vendor is risky.

This is why the Web should ultimately win, because nobody controls it, because it’s multi-vendor by essence, and because you are not tied to a single vendor that ends up controlling you.

The last cycle embraces roughly the last 15 years, and it’s been an amazing journey:
I remember back in 1994, sitting in my university dorm room (or what it my neighbor’s room? I don’t remember owning a PC at that time) and trying the new stuff: Linux with X-windows and a little program called Mosaic to see graphical pages on the “World Wide Web”. Or was it running Windows 95 beta with Netscape 2 ? Or maybe both, I’m not sure.

There were actually very few sites to visit. I remember being told by a friend (there was no portal, no search at that time…) to go to the Louvre website, one of the few to have high-quality pictures. It was amazing.

Porn sites didn’t exist either. To get hot stuff, you had to download text files from Usenet and build images out of them with complex tools like uudecode.

As incredible as it may seem today, you couldn’t search either. Just look at the web archive and you will see that Google did not exist until late 1998.

You couldn’t find stuff. No music. Computers at that time were not powerful enough to decode mp3 music, and did not have enough storage anyway!

So the web at that time was very small, and had very little “functionality” or use for day to day activities.

Fast forward to 2005.
Web 2.0 is all the rage. The Internet has become a marketplace, an application platform, people starts blogging en masse. Wikipedia shows that collaborative efforts can.
Maybe circa 2006-2007 we have witnessed the high-water of the web, ambition-wise.

We never have been so close the see the vision of the 21th century web fulfilled: an universal, open, ubiquitous software and services platform.
Despite impressive efforts, like HTML5 standard, Webkit, Cappuccino, and the demise of poisons like Flash or Internet Explorer 6, the web is under new threats.

Next post will explain why the Internet is shrinking in ambition, and why it matters.

For a one-man-business that has grown slowly over the years, adding a second person comes as a shock: you discover that you have no processes in place, no office hours, no office space, no collaboration tools.
Suddenly, you have new legal liabilities. Worse, your business apps do not “support” the new split-up of tasks, you have to modify them. And having to share the information is a new habit to learn.

Therefore, one should consider hiring the first employee as an important business change, that must be carefully prepared and implemented. The benefits will come down the road, but during a few weeks, be prepared for your daily dose of frustration:

• your business will never be the same again. It’s no longer your “baby”.
• things you were doing routinely will require training. The “rookie” will not have your productivity, at least not in the first weeks.
• paperwork and set-up (see below) will consume a lot of time.

Hiring is really a daunting task here in Europe. Governments say they do their best to ease economic reactivation, with incentives and the like. But honestly, that’s bullshit. We are still in an over-regulated mess. Twentieth century stuff with applications threefold, and don’t forget the company stamp in the corner or we reject it, mandatory yearly office inspections, …

I had to do a ton of paperwork. None of it for free. Set-up costs are important, in particular when you hire the first person. It can work for middle and big organizations, where one-time costs are diluted. But very small operations suffer the full weight (money and time) of this bureaucracy. Not surprising that we have 20% unemployment rate in Spain, if hiring your co-worker is so difficult.

Despite all this, hiring is a turning point for Aero Quartet:
We believe that the movie repair business can scale, and we are taking the first actions to make it happen!

Here I consider the whole iPhone ecosystem as the sum of the “Touch” user interface and the AppStore and its 140,000 existing applications. For developers, it’s indeed the same platform.

The iPad re-purposes the iPhone ecosystem into the future mainstream utility to get things done. The magic is in simplifying things to make them iPhone-like, and the genius is in artificially restraining some technical capabilities.

Your mythical grand-ma cannot buy or use a computer alone, but she downloads and uses apps on her iPhone, alone. That’s the whole differentiating point of the iPad, and because it’s not a computer, Apple has met its goal to give whole new demographics their Internet-age appliance.

Now, let’s go back to SimpleMovieX. I have no doubt that the iPad will be a successful platform, that eventually will displace current platforms. That is definitively a place I will be unless I want my business to address only niche technical markets ten years from now.

SimpleMovieX is a lightweight video editor. From the scope point-of-view, it can be a good fit for the iPad, that is primarily a consumption and lightweight creative device. SimpleMovieX uncluttered user interface could easily be transposed to iPad screens.

The first problem is how you get your data into your iPad. Movies syncing through iTunes works well, but it is not the channel that people will use to import content that they want to modify. According to published information, the iPad doesn’t have a built-in camera, nor does it connect directly to video cameras.
The iPad seems too disconnected from video production workflows and from video devices to be a place for SimpleMovieX to live. At least today.

From the technical stand point, it looks really bad too: All indicates that the QuickTime framework that powers SimpleMovieX is not available on the iPad. Instead, the modern and efficient QuickTime X, used in the iPhone and iPad for audio and video playback, supports very few codecs and formats, and have near-zero editing capabilities.
This will improve over time, for sure, but Apple is like a car with no reverse gear: QuickTime X will grow towards the future, not towards ensuring full backwards compability with legacy QuickTime.

In other words, if SimpleMovieX someday exists on the iPad platform, it will have nothing in common with today’s SimpleMovieX. Except maybe the skin and purpose. Time will tell.

Similarly, every two or three months, I receive a movie repair that is at the edge of impossible. It has this rare quality of being too damaged to be repaired with known techniques, but at the same time I foresee that there is a small chance that a new technique may fix it.

Officialy, I don’t call it Everest-class, but rather Investigative Repair, to convey to the customer three important ideas:
- I have to develop something radically new. A unique solution for a unique case.
- it’s gonna be expensive (I charge usually one order of magnitude more for those repairs)
- at the end, I can come to the conclusion that the repair is impossible. Results are not guaranteed.

I do such repairs primarly to challenge my repair ability and to push the enveloppe of the discipline. As boring as repairing movies may seem, an Everest-class repair is when there’s adventure, struggle and achievement.

The last Everest-class repair came last month: Canon EOS 5D Mark II files with some bitstream corruption. Mr Szot, the polish director, did not notice the problem until the production was finished. The clips, needed for a 15 minutes short movie called “An Exclusive”, could not be shot again.

I observed around fifty defects in a dozen of files. The footage is encoded in H264, where one wrong bit can propagate nefarious effects over a dozen of frames. Even with “creative editing”, it would be impossible to tell the story: For some important takes, the footage was unusable.

In 99% of the repairs, the problem consists in re-indexing the clip: Audio and Video media is fine but the “table of contents” that tells where the data for each frame, is missing.
But here, it’s the opposite. The table of contents is fine, but the media is corrupt.

Not that corrupt, according to real world standards, since the amount of bad data is only 1 for 100 millions. Like a rare disease that would affect just 70 people in the world population. The typical needle-in-a-hay-stack problem. Change needle for bits and haystack for a file with one billion bits and you get the idea.

Bits Flipping Party

The repair technique lies on a simple idea: when decoding the frame, the wrong bit will cause errors and exceptions that eventually stop the decoding process. That is what we observe in a defective frame: the top is ok, then something occurs, then the rest of the frame is not decoded.
The location where it stops should be close to the wrong bit. Never before, at a short distance after.
From here, we will go backward and flip the bits one by one, until we get something that decodes without error.

I made a bold assumption here: that wrong bits are extremely rare. So rare that we can consider that there is only one wrong bit involved in every decoding error.
I had nothing to really back this assumption: If it’s true, we would be able to repair. If it’s wrong, it would be impossible. Checking the assumption thus became a priority before engaging into time consuming developments.

There’s a second assumption: The distance between the wrong bit and the error is small.
One iteration will be needed for every bit, and iterations are slow since they decode several video frames each. Not just one frame, but the whole group from the I keyframe to the damaged frame. That can take several seconds, so if we have thousands of iterations, it would become impracticable.

Prototype and Automation

I assembled a prototype from various pieces, an open-source H264 decoder, a couple of small programs to flip bits and to detect errors and generate pictures from potentially successful iterations.
I tried it on a first defect, a slow process since almost everything had to be done by hand, and results have to be carefully interpreted.
When I finally managed to get a good picture out of the prototype, it was unbelievable. I had found the needle.

Since I had almost fifty defects to fix, I spent some time automating the process. At the end, I would only have to send a few command-line commands, choose manually the starting point of the search, and launch it.
The computer would run for minutes, sometimes hours, until it starts spitting pictures.
I had to review the pictures one by one, until I could find one that was perfect.
Then, I would modify by the wrong bit in the movie and verify that it fixed the frame and also the rest of frames in the “Group of Pictures”.

In some cases, fixing a frame would just unveil a defective one a few frames later. Just as one train may hide another…

Finally, I managed to clean completely all but one defect. This was quite a surprise. I would never have anticipated such a desperate repair attempt to work with a 98% success rate.

My customer, Mr Szot, is happy. His film “An Exclusive” will be presented this week to the polish public.

Today, by doing casual research on “back side touch” keywords, I found a very interesting 2007 patent filing by Apple:
Back-Side Interface for Hand-Held Devices

The patent is credited to Apple engineer John Elias. This guy is the founder of Fingerworks.com, a company dedicated to develop devices than can be controlled by gestures. Apple hired him 5 years ago, and surprise! the website has been shut down this week…

Timing is perfect for a 27 January presentation.
I don’t intend to convert this blog into a rumors place, but God! speculation is exciting!

Either it’s on resting on a flat surface, and you have unacceptable ergonomics, with your hands hiding the screen and your neck bent at an angle that your EHS department won’t permit.
Or you’re holding it in your hands on front of you. But how do you use the touch screen if your fingers are behind the tablet?

Apple will for sure come with the solution, that will feel so natural and simple that all speculations like mine will look a bit stupid two week from now.

My take on the Tablet:
Why not make the back side of the tablet a touch sensitive surface and show the fingers as an overlay of the user interface?

Fingers that are merely resting on the surface would show a small, transparent “finger print” while the active finger would be more visible, for example with a black circle representing the pressure applied.
This would enable multi finger gestures, and give natural feedback, both visual and tactile.

Such a device with a screen on the front side and a tactile surface on the back side would work well in the two natural positions:
- Held with both hands, mid-air
- Held with both hands, but with hands resting on a table. This one provides a nice 45 degrees angle, and it’s comfortable for long sessions (like watching a movie).

I am not excluding that the screen would also be tactile.

What about the keyboard?
It’s hard to imagine interacting with a software keyboard operated from behind the screen, but why not? With the appropriate visual feedback, it seems plausible.

Such a device layout has another advantage: the touch surface doesn’t need to be exactly as big as the screen, it can be dimensioned to work well with standard hands size.

If ever it comes true, remember that you’ve read it here first!

Customers that have purchased the program in the last 6 months (June 1st onwards) are entitled to get a refund. Just email to supportcw@mac.com asking for it.

As the father of the creature, let me do the obituary:
CubeMovie is my first relevant program. With over 400 copies sold and $5000 in sales, I cannot call it a success but it still in the median of what a piece of shareware sells. (Fortunately, my more recent products were designed with more ambition and experience, and are doing better…)

CubeMovie is the first program I ever sold. This encouraged me to continue and write more programs. SimpleMovieX was born six months after CubeMovie, and showed enough potential to grow a business upon: I remember paying a fairly expensive PowerBook G4 in 2004 with CubeMovie and SimpleMovieX sales.

Finally, what sets CubeMovie apart is a little known fact: Under the hood, CubeMovie is a ClockWorks application. The whole program is made of around 400 interconnected “vignettes”, that define the flow of events. CubeMovie was first and foremost written as a “demo” of ClockWorks, a programming environment. But ClockWorks was a failure and CubeMovie was the unexpected debris of the shipwreck.

The picture below is the code that manages the texturing of the 6 faces of the cube: from top to bottom, the 6 picture views of the User Interface that link to 6 parameters objects that link to 6 OpenGL display lists.

The whole source of CubeMovie can be seen here (it’s a pre 1.0 version, the final 4.0.2 version graph was far more complex with over 400 vignettes, but I don’t have a picture in my archives, sorry).