Coffee is a big deal at CG. Most of our geeks pride themselves on being caffeinated and with the coffee machine down panic is on the rise.

The thing about this is that it’s not the actual coffeemaker that is broken, it’s the grinder built into the coffee machine that is having issues. We have a fancy machine that grinds coffee right before brewing it. When it’s working it’s pretty magical — nothing tastes quite like freshly brewed coffee made from freshly ground beans. It happens automatically and other than the noise from the grinder we don’t even know that it’s there.

When the machine is down it’s obvious. Some of us need coffee to work. We are dependent on that machine.

Thinking about the caffeine situation in the office made me wonder about other pieces of technology that we’re dependent on. Our email software runs in the cloud on Google’s computer. Our data traverses networks and is converted to light, microwaves, electricity and back again before it arrives at its destination. Do you know how an email sent from your phone is routed to its destination? What other things does technology do for us automatically that we don’t notice? Heck, I can’t even remember my wife’s phone number — my phone does it for me.

Someone sent me an article the other day entitled, “The Cloud Fails Again.” In the article, John Dvorak complains that a power outage left him unable to function because all of his data and services existed in the cloud and not in his own machine. He goes on to describe a “priesthood” of systems administrators that has existed since the early days of computing whose sole purpose is to “beat back the individualism” that desktop computers brought to all of us.

I was unaware that this cabal existed (if you are a member, please send me an invite) and I feel like the advances that technology has brought us in life, business and communication are really amazing. We live in a magical world. But even though the advances are great, they have made us completely dependent on technology. I think Dvorak’s article is a pretty good example for people who rely on technology and refuse to invest in their own infrastructure. In other words, we need to understand what we’re using so that we can evaluate the risks and benefits of using it.

Control Group’s mission is to help people and their organizations better understand and utilize their technology so they can be more efficient. That’s why Control Group is a great place to work — even when the coffee machine is down.

Our engineers were able to create a temporary workaround for the coffee situation. We’re also not exactly stranded in a coffee-free wasteland: Kaffe 1668 and The Blue Spoon are within walking distance. So, no worries, we’ll stay jittery.

Image via coffeeaddict/Flickr

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“Email volume is a legitimate problem and no viable email platform has really offered a feasible solution until Priority Inbox. Google is the only company looking to fix how we use email and finding ways to use email better. The first two big steps were seen when Gmail used labels to replace traditional folders for email organization and when conversation view grouped messages by subject.

“Priority Inbox isn’t going to change the world but there is no denying Gmail is redefining the paradigm on email solutions. This shift is clearly evident with each small feature Google releases for Gmail. Microsoft and other traditional software developers update their products every few years, ship the products out and then expend tremendous energy pushing for customer adoption of the new version that will never be able to keep up with Google’s continually improving email service.

“Google’s VoIP service may be spotty, but it’s free and — as a free service — it’s nothing short of exceptional. I like that Google will take some calculated risk on a great idea and release it for free to their user community.  The VoIP service they integrated with Gmail is another in a long list of service additions intended to make Gmail a portal for all communication. It’s interesting to follow Google’s evolution as they are leading the charge to make the operating system and all the applications tied to the OS unnecessary. This has definitely simplified my life and I’m grateful.”

Image via Google.

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With the release of Safari 5, Apple included the ability to choose between several search engines for the default search target. Confronted with the choice, I found myself recalling the days when I’d flip between Lycos, AltaVista, Excite, &c while trying to find something. It’s no wonder one would resort to memory when pondering alternative search engines. Google’s become peerless in its original pursuit.

Since complacency is antithetical to discovery, I found myself wondering if I was missing out by not trying Bing. Besides, Google has enough of my life on record between using it for email, phone calls, Internet searching, route mapping, and DNS servers. With much trepidation, I opened Safari’s preferences and changed my default search engine selection from Google to Bing.

It’s amazing how ungainly I felt afterwards. Even the simple change of not seeing the grayed-out word “Google” in the search field felt weird, to say nothing of having a visually unfamiliar results page come up. I’d find myself double-checking searches with Google as some sort of reassurance.

There were also immediate upsides to the switch. Bing’s image search layout is a welcomed improvement over Google’s offering. Bing also does better when researching Windows-related issues; something I do frequently for work. Certain queries for things like company names will return a specially formatted overview that includes the stock price, contact number, and other useful information.

Putting comparisons of design and feature implementation aside though, the most noticeable effect of the switch was the social aspect.

“Bing‽ Are you [expletive deleted] kidding me?” was the first thing I heard from a coworker when he glanced over at my display. This was coming from a guy who employs any beta product he can get his hands on in his daily routine. I might as well have told him that I prefer IE5 for my daily browser.

Other people were less abrasive than my coworker, but just as confused. No one reacted passively. Some people wondered if I mis-set my preferences. Others assumed I made the change as a political statement. Even my non-technical girlfriend had a few choice words for the change.

Based on these observations, it would seem that using Google has evolved into being a cultural choice. Further evidence of this is the word, “Google”, becoming a verb in 2006. I wish the best of luck to Bing on that uphill battle. The world’s a better place with both Coke and Pepsi.

It has now been several weeks since the switch, and I’m finding myself becoming comfortable with Bing. At the risk of continuing my status as a search engine outcast, I plan on trying Yahoo next.

Hopefully my friends will understand.

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I just read about this knot tying App for the Android on Lifehacker this morning and, as I love knots and am always looking up new ones, I thought it would be great to have the app on my phone.

but when I went to install it, it told me it required my location, my identity, full Internet access and access to my phone –  why on earth would an app that shows me pictures of knots need all that? On top of it, there is no place to read about who made this app, what they do with my information or how long they store it.

Kudos to @Great_Moloko for the spot-on comment and calling them out.

A second example that set off the warning lights was a Chrome Extension I thought about installing ‘Send from Gmail’ . Withthe Extention, when you click on an email link, a new email opens in Gmail rather than in my desktop mail client.  Simple, right? And its made by Google, so it cant be evil!  However, the Chrome Extension told me it required “Access to my data on all websites’ and ‘My browsing history” – Really? What do they need that for? Does that include my bank account balance? my facebook credentials, feeds and photos, private emails or chats with my mother or doctor?

Where is the more info button?The problem with these types of applications is that they are seemingly simple and basic, but they have access to enormous amounts of personal data and don’t disclose any information about who made the app, who owns the data, or what they are doing with it.  Of course this is true for 99% of all the facebook apps out there, but it makes you think twice about installing a cool business extension like rapportive – does it now have access to all my sensitive corporate communications? The ambiguity and sheer number of privacy violating apps is staggering, almost as staggering as the public’s lack of concern over giving up control to every private piece of their life.

We have entered a stage in human development that is very different from anything before.  Our most intimate thoughts and hopes are owned by corporations large and small. What does it mean when privacy like RIM’s encryption is broken at the highest levels, not by hackers, but through corporate/government deals without user consent?

I was talking with my friend Albert Lee over lunch, about what can be done – there is a certain amount of technology abstinence that can take place, but it gets to a point that in order to keep up – and to take advantage of the evolving landscape –  you need to play the game and give up your privacy.  This seemed especially interesting when looking into the origins of the word ‘privacy’.

Privacy from Latin privatus; separated from the rest, deprived of something

If you want to play with others, you need to share.  Today it seems you need to share everything.

I installed the Chrome Extension and the knot app.  I’m curious to see what happens when all the world knows my browsing history and penchant for the truckers hitch.

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Jeff has been a big part of the brains behind many of the more sophisticated applications for our clients, such as Firebrand, IMG Fashion Week and Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Buy his book — and feel free to congratulate Jeff in the comments.

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I think you have to go back 10 plus years to find a gaming platform (I’m thinking wide area progressives?) that has altered the landscape as much as the Walker Digital platform; To quote the press release:

With integrated RFID technology, a card-reading shoe and Walker’s Core Game Technology, the system provides an upgradeable, networked game platform that exactly tracks turnover, hand outcomes, wagers, payouts and player ratings in real time. It also eliminates losses due to dealer error, cheating and counterfeiting and increases game speed, precisely assessing player value and providing detailed reporting on game speed, bet mix, table occupancy, turnover, theoretical win and actual win.

To boot, the ‘Elite’ version of the game adds a whole bunch of new and exciting bets — knowing the game, the cards, and the chips allows the system to present wagers never before possible. Say hello to bigger wins and more exciting wagers for the players and better house advantage to the Casino on one of the most popular card games in the world.

Of course the Judges were ‘duly impressed’ who wouldn’t be?

“This product would resolve many of the problems casinos currently deal with regarding very high-end baccarat play,” said one. “It automates many of the functions of administering baccarat play, but does so in a manner that would not be intrusive to the serious high-end customer.”

Another judge noted the product would “work well in high-volume baccarat markets where the clientele prefers to handle the chips.” The features he liked best included the combination of accurate real-time bet recognition and optical card reader. “Together they allow for complete tracking of game play,” he said.

Congrats to the WDG team for pulling it off!

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Personally, if the only upgrade to After Effects CS5 was 64bit, I’d be overjoyed. There’s nothing more maddening than being unable to render a frame in your timeline because of memory issues, be it in a RAM Preview, output to disk, or working interactively in the application. The dreaded error I’m talking about of course is “After Effects error: could not create image buffer”. This error has the potential to disappear with this release, given your workstation is souped up with RAM.

Indeed, I think many After Effects artists do not realize what a massive overhaul this is, and how much easier it’s going to be to work interactively and render with the application. Those 32 gigs of RAM you have in your workstation actually mean something beyond having a million tabs open in Firefox while you wait for your render to finish, which is crawling because After Effects CS4 is limited to 4GB of RAM, and is using swap space to avoid spitting out an image buffer error. Yes, that’s right, your renders will be much faster at higher resolutions, even if you’re not being given an error. I think once artists start using CS5 they’ll realize how much more sanity they have when working on HD, 2K and 4K projects. You folks that are delivering for non-standard ultrawide displays, such as for stadiums, buildings and museums will be stunned at what a difference 32GB of RAM will make compared to the 4GB you were limited to. It’s funny, I heard one guy say that 64bit support should have been a .5 upgrade, and I was like “Are you out of your mind?! They had to rewrite the entire application!” Finally, After Effects artists will no longer be snickered at by their fellow Nuke and Inferno compositors that have already been working in 64bit for sometime. 32bit was great when our resolutions were NTSC 640×480, but those days are long gone.

The lack of a 64bit wrapper for 32bit plugins is a mixed bag, but ultimately, I’m really glad 32bit plugins won’t work. With paradigm shifts like this, I think it’s all or nothing. The adoption rate from plugin developers would be less than a trickle in the Sahara if they weren’t forced to rewrite their plugins for true 64bit. This would have been a great opportunity for Adobe to introduce some standardization for plugin licensing, but it looks like they dropped the bag on that already. Anyone who’s had to build or maintain an After Effects render farm knows the jungle of mess licensing is with 3rd party plugins and I wish Adobe would at least encourage best practices while developers rewrite their plugins.

Unfortunately, due to the plugin issue, I do think migration from CS4 to CS5 will take longer than it already does, which is typically most of a product cycle. I for one, will keep After Effects CS4 around until I find a replacement for Stefan Minning’s plugin called Normality. Unfortunately, the developer will not be updating it to 64bit.

On the After Effects scripting side, not much has changed, other than some deprecations and a few nice features. You can now read/write layer labels (the colored square next to the layer), which will be useful for making persistent selections for script batch operations. The upgrades to Mocha is nice too, especially the ability to import Mocha shapes in After Effects, which is pretty huge. That combined with the rotobrush finally makes After Effects an excellent choice for roto and tracking. I pretty much avoid rotoscoping whenever I can, but I think the rotobrush tool will be pretty useful, especially for making mattes that don’t need fine detail, such as for localized color corrections. I’m curious if you can specifically shoot footage for the rotobrush, when a green screen isn’t available, but I’m not sure how it’s tracking and edge detection works.

I’m very excited to see Premiere’s enhanced performance. I’m a huge fan of dynamic link and I’m always encouraging people to use it instead of Final Cut when prepping footage for After Effects. Premiere really excels where After Effects doesn’t, and that’s real time video playback. Premiere has been further accelerated with CUDA enabled Nvidia cards and if you’ve never tried dynamic link, or imported a Premiere project into After Effects before, this is the release to do so.

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3D (stereoscopic) video does not always double the capture data for a couple of reasons, most notably because there are different capture methods, different post-production methods for processing the data, and different ways to project the data, all which can affect the data requirements at different points in the production, post-production, or delivery process.

Data requirements will be double at worst because there are (sometimes) two stereo video tracks, but since the cameras are capturing very similar information, one of the accepted standards for delivery is 2D+Delta compression for the MPEG format. Using this compression the image data is processed with an algorithm that removes redundant pixel data from the two video tracks. The amount of data is equal to one image plus whatever is different in the other image (the Delta). Using this compression, 3D video is usually roughly 40% larger than a single stream of HD video.

Some cameras, like Pace’s Fusion camera (above) which James Cameron used for Avatar, do shoot with two cameras side-by side, thus creating stereo video tracks and double the data for post (plus metadata). In this workflow, the two tracks are used to focus differently on objects in 3D space, dynamically changing the space between the cameras, and effectively using different z-depth focus to achieve the effect. This actually is not a new methodology, but using software algorithms to help determine focal length and automating what previously was manual can bring faster and more repeatable results. Another company, 3ality, is also providing similar functionality with different toolsets, including hardware that retrofits into 2D workflows. Interestingly enough, one of the major differences between them as 3D forerunners is that Pace is only a rentable technology solution, and 3ality cameras can be purchased. Two different positions.

When post is complete, there are some tricks that can be employed to reduce data for delivery including the 2D+Delta for transmission. For viewing the 3D data, there are a few different methods all which require different hardware (projectors, screens and potentially different methods of decoding).  Instead of using two projectors, some 3D can be projected using interleaved frames at a higher frequency through a polarized filter, i.e. one frame for the left eye, followed by one for the right. This is employed by RealD 3D and has by far the widest adoption in US theaters. Further, some theaters are equipped with active glasses technology, meaning that the glasses themselves ‘shutter’ either mechanically or using an LCD shutter linked wirelessly to the projection system for timing. I have heard these glasses are bulkier and heavier but better for certain situations.

3D workflow is particularly interesting to Control Group as an opportunity to help our clients design lean, optimized pipelines. This will impact our data stores, but why double data if it can be avoided? I think this is an opportunity for integrators like us to help productions, as well as the post-house, in evaluating these technologies and coming up with an appropriate blend of supporting technologies and workflows. Our goal is to build workflows that suit the business model and subject matter, as well as figure out how data is managed, archived, and stored. This is not the time to spend unnecessarily, but it is time to consider when and how this will affect our clients, and help them begin readiness preparations. We want to help our clients avoid turning down work because they haven’t put thought into these issues.

In conclusion, there are a variety of methods that a broadcaster or strategic consultant can invoke – some new, some old – to solve the technical issues. I think a lot of real challenges lie in the production of 3D content, such as the creative process of capturing a scene and the framing of the shots to take advantage of the magic of 3D. These are new processes and they involve re-educating producers, directors, cinematographers, camera operators, actors, and production designers.

The technology? No problem.

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About a week and a half ago, Myriad Group announced an updated version of the Dalvik VM for Android, appropriately called the Dalvik Turbo VM.  Running the Dalvik Turbo VM, Android devices can experience a 2x – 3x performance boost in their applications.

What does this mean for Android users?

With any Android device, it’s pretty apparent that they are performing below what one would expect from their hardware specs.  This is because Android was designed to run on a wide range of devices, including devices with limited resources and processing power.

If your phone were to be updated with the new Dalvik Turbo VM, you wouldn’t experience nearly as much lag, applications would open faster and perform better, and you would actually see improved battery life (all things that as an Android user I would LOVE to see.)

How does it work?

The Dalvik VM is a virtual machine that runs in the background on all Android devices.  It acts like a middleman between the applications and the OS itself.  One of the things that makes Android so attractive to developers is that it’s apps are written in Java, the Dalvik VM then takes the Java code and converts it on the fly into code that Android can use.  The Dalvik Turbo VM is an enhanced version of the original VM that makes the conversion process a whole lot speedier.  The new Turbo VM is said to be 100% compatible with Google’s stock VM so any existing apps would be able to see the benefits from this as well.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blJpQQZdYPM]

A demo of the Dalvik Turbo VM vs Dalvik VM on a pair of Android Dev Phone 2′s.

How can I get it?!

Sadly that’s not such an easy thing to answer.  While Myriad hasn’t given an official answer, it is believed that the devices that would most benefit from the new Dalvik Turbo VM (T-Mobile G1 and MyTouch 3G) won’t be seeing it and it will only be included on new retail devices (which we should see before the end of the year.)  That said, many of the Android faithful (myself included) are hoping to see the new VM show up in the popular Cyanogenmod Android ROM amongst others in the near future.

If you’d like to see some more info on the Dalvik Turbo VM, check these links for some impressions and other demo videos:

Myriad Group Announcement

Myriad Group Youtube Channel

Engadget Hands-on at MWC

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