New Star Trek Trailer

I’ve got to admit that the space scenes are very impressive, but I don’t know if I like the new “vision.” And what’s up with that bridge design? It looks like a set from Galaxy Quest; a parody of a Star Trek set. It’s just too bright, and has too many damn lamps! I’m still going to reserve judgement until I’ve actually seen the movie. I’ll give it a chance. What really concerns me though is that Star Trek is first a TV show, and then a movie second. I just can’t see how a movie franchise alone can keep Star Trek alive. It might look like Star Trek, but it won’t BE Star Trek without it being a television series.

Halloween Ambience

I put together this audio file using Garageband and iMovie. I plan to use it Friday night for spooky ambience. You can use it too if you like.

Download it HERE.

Yet Another Time Warner HD Complaint

Last night I rented Speed Racer in HD from Time Warner’s Movies on Demand service. In simple terms, it’s unwatchable. Since Speed Racer was made to look like a cartoon, it has a limited color palette. This coupled with fast action sequences creates compression artifacts so noticeable that the “HD” version of the movie I rented becomes so distorted I can’t watch it. It’s just too annoying. The details I should be enjoying for the tracks and cars are totally distorted thanks to Time Warner’s over-compression of their HD content for streaming. Time Warner, you’ve really got to step it up if you really want to play in the HD sandbox. I’m starting to wonder if satellite’s any better…

Jing – A QA Guy’s Best Friend?

This post is for my QA brethren. At my current job I have been introduced to a great free screen capture tool called Jing which allows you perform screen captures, crop them, annotate them, draw on them, and then upload the image as a jpeg to Screencast where it’s hosted. (Jing also does video too, but I won’t get into that here.)

What’s so great about that you ask? Well, you know how difficult it can be to describe exactly what you’ve seen during testing, especially if your talking about UI elements. “Is it a title bar? A menu bar? A window group? Oh hell, here’s a screenshot.” What’s great about Jing is that you don’t have to fill up your defect repository database with images. If you have a large testing team, all those uploaded screen shots can start taking their toll on drive space, and may even slow down your defect tracking tool. (Bugzilla for instance.)

When using Jing the image is uploaded, and then the URL to the hosted image is placed in your clipboard. You can then simply paste the URL into the description field of your defect. This allows the developer on the receiving end of the defect to just click the link, and see the screenshot you took.

Now the downside to this is that your company might not like screenshots of its intellectual property being stored on an external server. Something that might give your employer a “warm fuzzy” is the fact that ScreenCast takes your company’s ownership of the content you uploaded very seriously and has processes in place to report violations of your company’s copyrights. (The service agreement also states that you retain all ownership rights of the content you upload.)

So if you need a good screen capture tool give Jing a shot.

Star Wars Film Strip

A buddy of mine sent me a link to this, and I just had to post about it. It’s a film strip version of Star Wars. If you’re too young to remember what a film strip is, it’s basically a slide show with a soundtrack. Oh, Wait. Hold on. If you don’t know what a film strip is, you probably think a slide show is something you make with Powerpoint. You know what? Nevermind. I’m old and your not. So what?! Who do you think you are you little punk?! Get off my lawn! But, I digress.

Take a look at this horrid film strip. It’ll make you laugh, and at the same time take you back to that classroom in school where it took every ounce of strength for you to stay awake while the teacher made you sit through an excruciatingly boring film strip.

Paul Newman Dies at 83

“Oscar-winning actor and noted philanthropist Paul Newman died Friday at his home in Westport, Connecticut, of cancer, a spokesperson told CNN. The actor was renowned not only for his work in such films as “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Exodus,” “The Hustler,” “Cool Hand Luke,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Sting” and “The Verdict,” but also for his many years of charity work.” – MTV.com

I’ve always been a fan of Paul Newman, especially for Cool Hand Luke and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He was a class act; a man’s man, a ladies’ man and most importantly a great actor with a big heart. He’ll be missed.