Author Archive for andrew

A review HTTP Live Streaming

I wrote a paper about Apple’s new HTTP Live Streaming specification/protocol. You can browse it on issuu.com or read the pdf.

Those of you who want a shorter introduction: the presentation is available on issuu.com, as a pdf or as a quicktime video with transitions. :-)

In the paper I describe what HTTP Live Streaming is, fairly technically, and why it is a great step forward. I compare the new technology with the industry incumbent RTP/RTSP protocol and Adobe’s proprietary Flash Media Streaming, popularized by YouTube.com.

As a teaser: here’s a graph of the client CPU Load on a MacBook when viewing the same video clip:
Average Client CPU Load: HTTP Live Streaming vs RTP/RTSP vs Flash Media

But I have to warn you, the paper is quite technical.

An Erlang implementation of lists:seq for floats

If you want to use lists:seq/3 with floats you will notice that the standard implementation only works with integers. So I wrote a quick & dirty way to do it with floats.

You can use it just like you would use lists:seq/3

If anybody has a better implementation I would love to see it.

Autonomy, mastery and purpose

Take a look at what Dan Pink has to say about traditional management and why in most cases today the “reward and punishment” model for motivating people is outdated. Carrots and sticks don’t help creative thinking, giving people autonomy does. When people are intrinsically motivated they will flourish at doing creative, non linear work.

The final case he makes proves it all.

The Credit Crisis

I stumbled upon this great visualization that explains the credit crisis.

If you wonder how all of this could have happened, watch the video below. It might go a bit fast sometimes, but I found it really interesting and a nice summary.


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Best viewed in full screen in HD (on Vimeo).

Partition Recovery and Virus removing

If you ever find that some partitions are missing on your Windows PC, try using Active Partition Recovery. It saved my ass two times already.

Today I booted my bloody windows box and 3 partitions were missing, and I had a pretty bad Virus infection. Booting windows in safe mode i could remove the entries made to my system from the trojan and scan the systems folders for more trojans with ClamWin open source anti-virus software.

Problem 2 was a bit easier as I had already dealt with ‘deleted’ partitions before. Booting from the floppy and searching for the missing partitions was not too hard.

After two hours of misery, the machine is working again. I swear this is the last Windows box I’ll ever buy. I’ll probably replace it with a MacMini when the new version comes out.

Student Syndrome

Why projects fail to meet the deadline:

Why activities run late.

The Wikipedia entry explains why this “Student Syndrome” is a good thing :-) :

The student syndrome is defended by a layman’s understanding of the functioning of the human memory, most notably the concept that a person’s short-term memory fades over time, and thus studying at the last possible moment leads to better results than studying early because more of the material will be remembered during the exam.
Wikipedia

F1Time Tool – Sinatra App

I’ve been playing an online F1 manager game for a couple of weeks. F1Time is a manager simulation game with great depth and the right level of complexity. I like it.

I wrote a small tool to extract laptime data from the race reports so it can be easily analyzed in MS Excel. I wrote it as a Sinatra webapp. Sinatra is a Ruby DSL for writing small webapps with a minimum amount of code. This tool was written in 35 lines of code.

It’s open source, so you can view (or fork) the sourcecode on github.

F1Time managers: You can simply copy & paste the html code of your race report HERE, and it will generate a table that you can copy/paste into Excel. (to get the html code from the race report: right click and click “View page source”)