Anita Blake TV Series — No Show?

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

According to Laurell K Hamilton:

Now no wailing and gnashing of teeth about it. In the two years and some change since I sold the rights to my series its been very educational. I know a great deal more about television, movies, and how this branch of the entertainment business works. It has been frustrating watching other shows in the genre I pioneered go on the air while we didn’t, but in the end I believe most things happen for a reason. I would rather have no television show than a bad one.

I learned through this long process that I loved Anita and all the other characters in my world. I’d known that in a vague way, but through meetings and talks and hearing other people’s takes on my world, I began to realize that I really loved them. I say they are my imaginary friends. I take friendship very seriously. I protect my friends, take care of them, and the scariest thing to me is not having the TV show die before it really started, but the thought of watching my friends on the small screen and hating it. That would have killed a little part of me. I didn’t understand how much they meant to me until we ventured out into Hollywoodland. Like I say, its been educational.

Tomorrow I will get up and I will continue to write Bullet, book 18 in the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. I will get to finish choreographing a scene with Anita, Asher, and Jean-Claude the likes of which I have never attempted before. The thought makes me both giddy with happiness and full of intense performance anxiety.

That saddens me, but isn\’t fully unexpected.  Sorry but Anita Blake \”personal\” life, isn\’t exactly TV fodder…

China’s 60-Mile Traffic Jam Is Breaking Up

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

After 10 days of bumper-to-bumper stop-and-start congestion, a 60-mile-long, 10,000-vehicle traffic jam on a major freeway west of Beijing has been broken up, Chinese traffic authorities said on Tuesday.
The state television network CCTV said traffic had returned to normal on the Beijing-Zhangjiakou freeway, which stretches from the capital’s northwest suburbs to inner Mongolia. But traffic authorities in Zhangjiakou, about 90 miles northwest of Beijing, said the road remained crowded and that a long line of trucks was waiting at the Mongolia border for permission to enter the highway.
via China’s 60-Mile Traffic Jam Is Breaking Up – Wheels Blog – NYTimes.com.

Touch Screens, how do they work?

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

One of the big questions I have to deal with after showing someone an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch is how does this touch screen work.  Yes, they are use to their microwave ovens, and the basic touch screens, but I watch people push down on the screen as if they were trying to break the glass….
Here\’s a secret, there are different types of touch screens, and they all behave differently.
Types of Touch Screens:

  • Resistive –  The touchscreen is composed of several layers, including typically two thin, metallic electrically conductive layers.  When an object presses down on the outer layer, the two metallic layers are pressed together which is detected by the touchscreen controller.  This is actived purely by pressure, so any type of contact will work, as long as there is enough pressure.  This is less likely to support multitouch.
  • Surface Acoustic Wave –  This uses ultrasonic waves that are detected by a series of sensors, and any break in the signal triangulates the position of the \”break\”.  Drawbacks include that this method is exposed (potentially) to the elements, and contaminants on the screen can affect the signal.  This is also material neutral.
  • Capacitive –  The display has been coated with a transparent conductor, and when the surface is touched by a conductive object (eg a finger), causes a disruption/alteration in the electrostatic field.  This disruption is localized, and the position is generated from that.  This technology easily supports multitouch, and continous input.
    • Surface Capacitance only has one side of the display coated, and a small charge is applied to this layer creating a uniform electrostatic field.  The disruption is located by calculating the distance from the corners of the display.  This has no moving parts, is durable, but has a limited resolution, has to be calibrated and can be prone to false signals.
    • Projected Capacitance uses two different capacitance layers and is used quite widely, including in most high end cell phones, including the iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone, etc.  The improved sensitivity allows the capacitive grid to be covered with additional protective layers…  And protective layers means that it will generally last longer and be more durable.
  • Infrared – I know this from older CRT based units, but the same technology can be used with LCD, etc.  There is a grid of infrared (invisible) LED and photodetector units around the edge of the display.  This forms an invisible mesh that when an object breaks the beam, it will break an X & Y beam, giving the system the \”coordinates\” of the break.
  • Strain Gauge (force panel technology), the display is spring mounted at the corners, and strain gauges are used to determine where the screen is touched.
  • Optical imaging – Two or more image sensors are placed around the edges of the screen, an infrared back light is placed in each camera\’s field of view, and the shadow that is created by an object touching the screen is used to triangulate the touch and/or measure the size of the object.  I believe this basic technology is used by Microsoft\’s surface.
  • Acoustic Pulse recognition – Small piezoelectric transducers are located at various positions around the screen, when the screen is touched a small vibration is caused that is then transformed through the transducers into an electrical signal.  But this can only detect the action of being touched, so an finger left on the display would be \”invisible\”.

All of the significant touchscreen technology patents that were filed during the 1970\’s and 1980\’s are expired and for that reason royalties and patent licenses are virtually non-existant….

Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

I’m the last person on earth who wanted to believe Steve Jobs when he told Walt Mossberg at D8 that “Flash has had its day.” I took it as nothing more than showmanship when Jobs shared his thoughts on Flash and wrote that “Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices.” After spending time playing with Flash Player 10.1 on the new Droid 2, the first Android 2.2 phone to come with the player pre-installed, I’m sad to admit that Steve Jobs was right. Adobe’s offering seems like it’s too little, too late.

The difference between the smooth Flash trailers on Sony.com, the jerky episode of CSI, and the system-stalling Flash video on Fox.com is that the smoother ones were optimized specifically for phone playback. But if content providers have to go back and optimize their videos for mobile platforms, one of the key benefits of mobile Flash – backward compatibility with millions of existing videos – is lost. If you’re modifying your videos anyway, why not go the full monty and use an HTML 5 player instead of Flash?


Laptop Magazine takes a look at the Mobile flash players, yes from Adobe on Android v2.2, and realize that everything is not as rock steady as Adobe would like you to believe.
For example, their was a clear performance difference between flash video for desktop and mobile…  The Mobile players had significant difficulties if the video was not \”Optimized for Mobile\”…  Yet, wasn\’t the idea of using flash on the mobile devices to allow the provider to create it once?  So now they need a mobile video, and a \”broadband\” video?  How does that help anyone?
Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right.

Dilbert Creator Scott Adams Tries to Build an Eco-Friendly House

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

… So the architect — and later your building engineer, too — each asks you to sign a document saying you won\’t sue them when beavers eat a load-bearing wall and your entire family is crushed by forest debris. You make the mistake of mentioning this arrangement to your family, and they leave you. But you are not deterred because you\’re saving the planet, damn it. You\’ll get a new family. A greener one. Your next hurdle is the local planning commission. They like to approve things that are similar to things they\’ve approved before. To do otherwise is to risk unemployment. And the neighbors don\’t want to live next to a house that looks like a compost pile. But let\’s say, for the sake of this fascinating story, that everyone in the planning commission is heavily medicated with medical marijuana and they approve your project over the objections of all of your neighbors, except for the beavers, who are suspiciously flexible. Now you need a contractor who is willing to risk his career to build this cutting-edge structure. Good luck with that.\’\”
Dilbert Creator Scott Adams Tries to Build an Eco-Friendly House – WSJ.com.