Habari DR, and some bad news

Yes I was in on the joke. Owen asked me to be the "straight man" for this little prank, and I must say it worked out quite well. Owen and Scott are both very much committed to Habari for the long hall, fear not.

Well today saw the release of the Developer Review of Habari, and the departure of two of the founders. They could have chosen a better time to leave, but to each his own I suppose. I wanted to talk about this now, before other sites like HabariWank blow it out of proportion.

I am still not really sure what happened, but as of today Owen Winkler and Scott Merril have left Habari to start a new project. I am still reeling from this, since I had really thought that we had gotten past all the bickering and second guessing that showed up in the first couple of weeks of the projects life.

Both Owen and Scott will be missed, Owen commited a lot of great code to the project, and Scott was ever the champion for the user, which we really needed. I hope that their new project is able to provide the atmosphere that they feel they need to work in. I just wish Habari could have given it to them.

On to some lighter news. Today we release the long anticipated Developer Release of Habari. The core committer team have been working round the clock to get the code whipped into shape, and I have to say that we are proud of the product we have turned out. You can find the official announcement on the Habari Project Blog, I suggest you go read it and then download away.

Springtime Rituals, a Viddler episode

So I am trying out the "Next Big Thing" in video sharing, Viddler.com

Most of you might be thinking, "Whoopty Crap, another video site." I can forgive you your lack of enthusiasm; it mirrored my own at the beginning.  But after playing around with it a bit, Viddler has some rather novel, and I tend to think, inspired features missing from other services.

Things like, tagging or commenting points in a given video; another way to look say it, tag or comment specific time codes in a given video.  Its brilliant.

So, here is my first Viddler video, in which I talk about "Spring Time Rituals".  Enjoy.

AppleTV, some random thoughts

The Apple TV is now shipping, and some lucky blokes like Walt Mossberg were given demo units to play with early.  I don't have much to say, other than as it stands now I will not be purchasing one, and here are some reasons why.

I want my DIVX!

Seriously Apple, come on.  H.264 is actually a beautiful codec; I have no complaints with the quality that you can get out of it.  What I will complain about is the footprint.  I can get the same, or better quality, from a DIVX encoded file that is sometimes half the size.  Period.

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Current Side Projects

Update: Do to lack of support for DVI on my ATI video card, I have had to dump Ubuntu and go back to using the MacOS. This isn't something I am extremely happy about, but it works so I can't complain too loudly. I will have pictures and a write up of what I needed to make everything work soon.

So I like to have side projects to occupy my time with; usually these projects are required to have nothing to do with web programming, and if I can swing it, nothing to do with Computers in general.

I like to build stuff, so I usually try to have something cooking in that arena. My current building side project is to build an altar for our home. This is a long, involved process and as such it is very much on-going.

My current short term project was/is to build a digital media center, to replace my aging EyeHome. I have an aging G4 tower lying around the house so I thought I would see how far I could push the hardware. Surprisingly I can push it pretty far.

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