Crankybear

Because the Terrorists Have Already Won

Why there are no German stand-up comedians, part 2,349

37-year-old Jochen Naumann of Leipzig was arrested Sunday after telling ticket takers at the Magic Kingdom that he had a bomb in his back-pack. The Orange County Sheriff's Office says the cast member asked Naumann about it, and he once again said that he had two bombs with him.

The cast member alerted a deputy who was posted near the security checkpoint and a bomb-sniffing dog was called in. It found nothing in Naumann's bag.

During an interview with deputies, Naumann said he was just joking about the bombs. He was charged with felony making a false report of a bomb.

via wdbo.com

Beer? Sure.

A social safety net to be proud of? Check.

Comic timing? Not so much

Live streaming from a frickin' phone

Once upon a time I used to get paid to do streaming media.  Now I just sit around and pull what little remains of my hair watching the rest of the world "discover" it.  And mostly screw it up, but that's neither here nor there.

I'm still fascinated by it, and I always will be.  After years of schlepping a big road case and doing hours of setup, it's pretty amazing that I can stream live video off my cellphone at pretty much the same quality that we were doing back in 1999-2000 when I first started.

So far I've installed Qik and UStream on the Droid.  I was fortunate enough to get a copy of the beta of the Droid-optimized client.  I decided to shoot some side-by-side video under convenient, yet truly awful conditions to see how well the encoding and compression holds up.  

Here's the Qik:

http://qik.ly/q3ej

And here's the UStream:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/from-tom-s-phone

Low light, high contrast and motion.  Pretty much a nightmare scenario.  

Rounding Error the cause for Droid issue?

There is a guy named Dan Morrill who works on Android at at Google.  This was posted in the comments in the Engadget article I posted earlier. Is this the same guy?  Don't know.  

Dan Morrill @ Nov 17th 2009 11:26AM

Yes, this is exactly what is happening.

There's a rounding-error bug in the camera driver's autofocus routine (which uses a timestamp) that causes autofocus to behave poorly on a 24.5-day cycle. That is, it'll work for 24.5 days, then have poor performance for 24.5 days, then work again.

The 17th is the start of a new "works correctly" cycle, so the devices will be fine for a while. A permanent fix is in the works.

A few people have said they've reset the date backwards a few days and had the issue return, but others have said otherwise.  Who knows? There's an over-the-air update that's supposed to be out around December 11, and that's 24.5 days from today.  

What are the chances?  I'd like to see this somewhere else with Google or Motorola's name on it.

Yep, my Droid camera seems to be working better. Hmmmmm

Motorola Droid camera autofocus fixed in secrecy?

by Vladislav Savov

posted Nov 17th 2009 at 7:03AM

While we were busy looking into external speaker problems on the Droid, it would seem Moto was itself hard at work remedying a separate issue with the device. A number of users on support forums have complained of the Droid's camera failing to focus and giving them "red corners" when attempting to take pictures, but now -- suddenly and without warning -- their ailment has gone away as if touched by the hand of an omnipotent being (or, alternatively, a silent firmware update). This particular autofocus issue was mentioned in Verizon's 5-page treatise on known issues with the Droid, though the planned resolution was an official update by December 11. The fix seems to have been delivered early, as green corners are sprouting up all around, but this silent update conduit sounds a bit nefarious, no?

Update: Sure enough, we can confirm from testing one of our own Droids that the issue has been resolved. The endless quest for the green focus box is over, and you can now finally begin scanning all your discount cards into Key Ring.

I hadn't noticed until I came across this on Engadget, but I did what I consider to be a definitive test: there's a bar code on a book in my office that -- until today - has defied scanning.

Somebody did something. Color me pleased.