I know this is supposed to be the “last” year, but I don’t believe it; bring on the supposed end of the world.. lol

Happy New Year my friends and readers! I know I’m planning positive changes for myself and I hope you all do as well. I am also looking forward to the new year’s entertainment, especially the summer movies; Avengers and Promethus!! For now I offer you a gif that makes me laugh and miss one of my favorite shows

The first step to becoming a grill master is having the right tools; actually that goes for anything you want to “master”. I’d say I’m pretty good at grilling almost anything over fire but I’ve always hated my “stock” grill grates, to me they seemed an after thought on the part of the grill maker. So when I got a groupon for a “man grate” I was intrigued and purchased a single grate with a brush. When the cast iron grate came in the mail I was impressed at the heft and construction; now this is what I was looking for! Cooking on cast iron is awesome and it takes me back to when my late Grandmother made eggs and bacon on her perfectly seasoned skillet (which is now mine).

But alas, not everything in wonderland was sunshine and rainbows. I had neglected to notice meaning of a single grate, this was my mistake. I contacted Justin over at mangrates and he explained everything in great detail as well as how to care for my new grates. To go even one step beyond with customer service is unusual in this day and age, but Justin came though and even offered me a deal I could not refuse to get a couple more grates!! Now here I am with three grates that will cover one side of my gas grill or my entire charcoal grill; ready to cook-up some meat!

If you want to grill like a pro, head on over to http://mangrate.com/ and get your “man” grates!

Lastly, Happy Thanksgiving to all of you!

New offer $10 off the regular price: https://www.mangrate.com/offers/GFOrder.aspx?affiliateid=15971&linksourceid=2

If people aren’t complaining about Flash and HTML5 they are falling back to NoSQL vs RDBMS. There is a time and a place for everything, just remember that tidbit. So to get on with it, I would like to state that I am mostly a Windows user and I love Windows 7.. It f#@king rocks! I also use Google Chrome as my primary browser on both OSX and Windows. I recently loaded the latest dev build of Chrome that contains a streamlined Flash Player and I can say that it is awesome.
To test, I started up a Red5 instance with some mp4 and vp6 videos to see what the CPU usage would be and here is the result: Red5 = 0% to 7% and Chrome = 3% to 6% (average 3%)
The playback was smooth as silk and the audio was perfect. Next up for comparison, I tried IE and FF:
IE 8 with FP10.1 = 5% to 11% (average 5%)
Firefox 3.6 with FP 10.1 = 14% to 66% (average 40%)

Since I’ve seen nothing which addresses the processing delays that I noticed in ffmpeg when generating thumbnail images, I figured I should share some important optimizations. I used to specify this command line when generating the images from a movie source (f4v in this case):

ffmpeg -y -i mymovie.f4v -an -ss 00:05:00 -t 00:00:00.01 -sameq -r 1 -vframes 1 -deinterlace -f mjpeg mythumbnail.jpg

This will take about one minute to generate the image of the video frame which is five seconds into the clip. This seems really extreme and is even worse when you try to increase the start location; for instance 45 seconds in, takes about an hour.
So, I knew there had to be a better way and I monkeyed around with the options:

ffmpeg -y -ss 00:05:00 -i mymovie.f4v -an -t 00:00:00.01 -sameq -r 1 -vframes 1 -deinterlace -f mjpeg mythumbnail.jpg

There is only one change between these lines, the placement of the “ss” option. This change causes the command to complete in less than a second, no matter what our start time is. Quite an increase in processing for something so simple! I hope this helps a few of you out there.

I could have said one reason I hate the iPhone, but it is an awesome work of engineering and a fine gadget. So to get on with it… I hate them because of their draconian lock on the addition of applications / features. Its not about stability, its about greed; so stop lying Apple. I could rant for about an hour on this and other messed up things Apple does but I’ll save it, since greed has little chance of going away. I’m posting this due to two articles I read this morning:

The bad: Why Apple Won’t Allow Adobe Flash on iPhone

The good: Adobe Flash 10 running on Android G1 Google Phone

Needless to say, but I purchased a G1.