A lot of people have been giving a lot of oooh’s and aaah’s to Microsofts still beta/alpha Silverlight’s HD video features. While HD video in Silverlight is cool and all, it was only a matter of time before Adobe offered up their HD offering. According to News.com, an upcoming Flash player update code named “Moviestar” will bring high-definition video along with H.264 compression as well as HE-AAC version 2 audio.

The new Flash player will offer hardware-accelerated, full-screen video playback. Additionally, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch for Adobe to take advantage of the hardware-based H.264 decoder in the iPhone. If that’s the case, then one could argue that this is the Flash update that Apple will include in the next iPhone update.

This update is important to Adobe in their effort against Silverlight. Unlike Silverlight which only supports Windows Media specific codecs, Adobe have chosen an industry standard approach. And to date, Adobe’s cross-platform track record has been extremely good when compared to MS. Granted, Linux support still needs a little more work, but Flash 9 has been leaps and bounds better than before. So now with HD video and industry standard compression, what makes Silverlight anymore compelling than Flash?

After parking my car in the garage this morning, I walked down stairs to the train platform to see it full of people waiting for a train that wasn’t there. It was now 8:26 and the 8:25 was no where in sight. Annoyed as why the train wasn’t here, I pulled out my Q to see if Internet Exploder Mobile could render the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s web site so I could check the service alerts.

Much to my amazement and delight, the MBTA now offers a mobile version (at the same URL) which is very usable on a mobile device. In addition to that, they’ve organized the content in such a way that it’s more useful for a mobile user. For example, The first item on the home page is “service alerts.” Minor, yes, but extremely useful. The content is nicely organized and easy to navigate on a mobile device.

The only complaint I have so far is that I can’t personalize it like I can the main site. Having MyMBTA available on the mobile home page would be even more useful. At any rate, it nice to see increased fares actually doing something useful. Now if only they’d put WiFi on the commuter rails.

If you’ve been disappointed to learn that Adobe does not offer an installer for Live Cycle Data Services ES, you may be happy to learn that the AIX installer runs just peachy under Mac OS X. The AIX installer is an executable JAR file that runs an InstallAnywhere installer. Simply double-click the JAR and go. However, you will need to have a servlet container handy such as Tomcat or JBoss.

There’s no question that Parallels Desktop is the current tool to beat when it come to running Windows applications under Mac OS X. There are a number of great features that Parallels offers like being able to create a VM image from a real PC and import VMWare images. These are a few things that VMWare Fusion doesn’t yet offer, but does it matter?

So one has to wonder, why choose VMWare Fusion at all? For one, Walt Mossbergs review sums up the difference between the two products nicely and I can agree with his findings. I have had Parallels pretty much paralyze my machine while resuming a saved state. It would do this for about 2 minutes before Mac OS X became usable again. Parallels can be a major CPU hog in many cases, but VMWare on the other hand, feels much lighter on it’s feet.

One thing I find amusing though is that everyone is focusing only on the “running Windows” aspect of virtualization. If you take Windows out of the equation, Parallels Desktop kinda sucks. Sure, I was able to run OpenSUSE 10.2 under Parallels, but there is no desktop integration at all. Under a non-windows OS, you still have to ctrl-enter to return cursor control to Mac OS X. VMWare on the other hand has it’s VMWare tools supported by several Linux distributions as well as Solaris 10. Additionally, VMWare will dynamically adjust the screen resolution of the target OS when the VMWare window is resized. It does this flawlessly under Ubuntu. I am currently writing this post in Ubuntu 7.04 in VMWare and I can seamlessly bring my cursor into both OS’s. Under Parallels, Linux integration isn’t this smooth (And BTW, Ubuntu is a very slick distribution!).

So the long of the short is, if you’re looking for running more than Windows, you should give VMWare a look.

A lot of folks get pretty excited when they get a new Apple product and share their unpacking experience online. Just the other week, I was able to snag a refurbished 15″ 2.16GHz MacBook Pro at the Apple Store Special Deals section for $1499. I was curious to see how much of a departure the refurb unboxing ritual would be as a opposed to a new one. The machine is great, but the unpacking experience is a completely opposite of getting a one. Here are a few photos of my refurb unpacking experience:

If you look close at the power supply, you’ll see that it’s packed in a plastic sandwich bag. I’m not kidding. But for the $500 savings, I can deal without the fancy packaging.

Lately I’ve started seeing some pretty impressive download speeds from Comcast. For example, it took me less than 4 minutes to download VMWare Fusion:

That’s 1.2MB/sec which is pretty damn speedy if you ask me. Ironically, at the office the best I can get is 300KB/sec. Going the other direction, I’ve found that upload speeds are topping out at 150KB/sec where about two or three months ago it was peaking at 34KB/sec. Dunno if I’m all too anxious for Verizon FiOS to come to town now. Now if only Comcast could improve their DNS response times, then we’d be all set

I generally take a mild offense when people look at my photos and say things like “wow, you must have a nice camera.” Sure, my Nikon D70 isn’t a bad camera, but it’s no D2x either. I also don’t have the greatest assortment of lenses either: I have the 18-70mm kit lens, along with the the 50mm f/1.8. That 50mm lens cost me $109 and is one of my favorite lenses. My point is that this NOT top notch equipment.

And while yes, I could go on ago trip and talk about how I studied photography and blah, blah, blah, it’s not valid for the point I’m trying to make. I do shoot my images in RAW mode and post-process them in Adobe Photoshop. But, this too does not make for an awesome photograph. Yes, you can pull out way more detail with RAW, tweak the colors more, etc., but it does not make up for a bad composition. So why am I saying that shooting RAW makes you look like a better Photographer? Because RAW forces you to edit your images. For me, about 10% of what I shoot could be considered “good.” The rest are either out of focus, not a good pose, or just simply not worth showing. Because I’m shooting RAW, I need to think about what I am going process and show.

No imaging service that I am aware of currently takes vendor-specific RAW images (or DNGs for that matter). In order to get your images printed, you have to process the images yourself. So out of the 200+ RAW images on your card, you are far more inclined to select only the best images out of the bunch to process. This generally a good thing since no one really wants to see all 200+ shots (30% which were out of focus anyway). Basically, the RAW work flow usually has people edit their images to best few. Some images look good on the surface, but when you start to process them, you can notice the flaws right away. When all is said and done, you a have a smaller collection of good images. The smaller good collection always stands out against the 600 images of your friends kid picking his nose.

Well, it seems that an old staple of Mac rumor sites has finally seen it’s last day. The site MacOSRumors.com was once one of the greatest Mac sites around. Over the past few years however, due to health issues with its founder, had gone down hill. Most readers had put the site on death watch, and deservedly so. Now when you visit the site, you are greeted with a Network Solutions renewal page. Farewell MacOSRumors.com, it was fun while it lasted!