Sep
27
Fellow Mac users: MSNBC.com video now supports Mac, Firefox
Filed Under Professional | Leave a Comment
Yes, it’s true. MSN Video has finally released Beta support for Safari (Mac) and Firefox (Mac/PC) support on our MSNBC.com video player. I’m going to have to get Ubuntu back up and running on a spare machine to test, but it might even coincidentally work on Linux boxes with current versions of Firefox and Flash.
As someone who works all day on a company-supplied 17″ Macbook Pro running OS-X, and plays all night on my personal Mac Pro (also running OS-X 90% of the time), this is freaking great. It’s even better for my wife, a devout computer neophyte who knows only enough to know that she loves Macs and hates our site because video doesn’t work.
I’m not going to go into the long, sordid tale of why it took so long, but I will say the MSN Video team really Sees the Light now. When I received my super-secret MSN Soapbox invite, the first thing I did was fire it up in Safari. Low and behold, it works great. Huge kudos to those guys for taking the time to make sure their products are going to work for all of us going forward.
We’re not ready to crow too loudly quite yet. This release is still in Beta, and may stay that way for a while. If you fire up the player and let it run for a while– about an hour in my very informal testing– Safari will bomb out, no doubt due to some nasty memory leak somewhere in the chain (my wildly uninformed guess- Flash plugin). Edge case, yes, but it’s a little annoying if you know it’s there. Side note: Intel Mac folks should really upgrade to the latest Universal Binary version of the Flash plugin. It’s far more stable than what came stock on our Macbook Pros.
Also, the Firefox/Safari player doesn’t support ads quite yet, which you’re probably thrilled about, but is an issue for us and our balance sheet. Finally, the video gallery at the bottom of the player seems to be a little slugish when the player first loads. There may be other issues that we haven’t found yet but rest assured we’re going to make sure the dev team keeps pounding away on these issues.
More broadly, I can say with great confidence that the days of sub-par Mac support at MSNBC.com are coming to a great and final end. The question of Mac support comes up every time we evaluate new technologies, Microsoft-developed or not. There are loads of Macs now in use all across MSNBC.com, not just by our graphics folks but by Program Managers, a couple of Directors, even a VP.
Things aren’t perfect yet but we’re very, very serious about platform parity. Nothing better than eating your own dogfood….
Sep
19
drowning in pictures…
Filed Under Photography | Leave a Comment
This is kind of a strange post, but I sometimes find spitting things out all organized-like helps me think…
I’ve been a professional photojournalist for many years (though I’ve been promoted beyond my personal point of incompetence and rarely shoot for work any more). I was lucky enough to begin my career shooting film and was trained not only in 35mm but medium and large format. I’ve also experienced the birth of digital photography first hand: my first copy of Photshop was version 1.0 and came on a single floppy disk. I was lucky enough to experience the best of both worlds from the very beginning of my career.
All of our work now, of course, is digital. Even in my private work, I find very little reason to shoot 35mm film, though I do maintain a fondness for the extremely wide tonal latitude of B+W film.
Over the years, as digital has gotten better and better, I’ve sold off virtually all of my film equipment– EOS film bodies first, a few medium format cameras, my Leicas and both of my 4×5 view cameras (a cheapish monorail and a fantastic Super Graphic). I still have a single EOS1n dedicated to shooting Illford XP2 film, but the digital Canon 5d’s I use now are absolutely without question the finest hand-held cameras I’ve ever used, period. Image quality is stunning, and the digital work flow is, at least for me, a dream. The quality, combined with the ease and speed of digital work flow, has pulled me away from film almost entirely.
About 6 months ago, we had our first child, a daughter. As any doting father, much less a recovering professional photographer, I’ve shot literally tens of thousands of images of her already, almost all digital. With digital cameras, I’m shooting with wild and liberating abandon. But I’ve started to grown less than completely satisfied, not just with the end product but the process itself.
Sep
9
Posting from my Mac Pro running Vista RC1 x86 (not Parallels)…..
Updates below….
Update: Shorter and more concise version of what I did….
See the bottom of this post for my system config. I can’t promise anything else will work (or based on feedback even that the same config/process will work for you)
What you’ll need:
- A new, unformatted SATA drive. You’re going to dedicate this entirely to Vista.
- In addition to your Vista RC1 DVD and PID, you’ll need a stock XP install disk (SATA slipstream not required; I used an SP2 disk but an SP1 disk would probably work too). You won’t need a PID for XP.
- You’ll need a non-mighty mouse mouse for the XP install. Mighty mouse works fine once you’ve finished the installation.
1) While still booted into OSX, burn a Boot Camp driver CD, eject it, then insert your Windows XP install disk. Shut down the computer.
2) Remove ALL of your peripherals, save the keyboard, monitor and non-mighty mouse mouse. I only have one, stock Nvidia 7300 in my system, so any other video card config may not work properly (dual cards, 1900xt, etc).
3) Remove ALL of the other hard drives in your system and install the new, clean one that you’re going to dedicate to Vista. I put mine in Bay 4.
4) Boot the machine with the Option key, and select the CD that says Windows.
5) Proceed with the XP installation. When you get the Hard Drive/Partition screen, select and delete ANY and ALL partitions on the disk. Then proceed with installation of XP on the single, large unformatted partition.
6) Wait 45 minutes while XP does a full, low-level format of the drive.
7) Finish installing XP and allow it to fully boot.
Eject the XP installation CD (open My Computer, right click on the CD and eject). Put in your Vista RC1 DVD and push the drive door closed.
9) Vista installation screen should automatically start, but if it doesn’t just open the DVD and run autorun.
10) Proceed with installation, making sure not to select Upgrade, but a Full Installation.
11) At first reboot, your system will blue-screen. Shut the machine down manually (button method), restart, then proceed with the Windows install. It will bluescreen like that a couple of times as installation proceeds.
12) If the Gods are with you, you’ll finally boot into Vista proper. Vista should have installed a usable WDDM NVidia driver and you should be able to set your resolution to 32-bit color, native resolution of your display. You can now reconnect your Mighty Mouse if you like, and probably any other peripherals you might have.
13) Eject the Vista DVD, and insert the Boot Camp driver CD. Run the install. You’ll see errors galore, but just click OK. This will get sound working.
14) Reboot. Your system will bluescreen again on the way down.
15) Go get the NVidia beta driver from here and install it. It will want to reboot again, but say no.
16) Run Windows Update. It should find at least one ‘optional’ driver update, which you should install.
17) Open Device Manager, and look through the list for anything that has an exclamation mark. Select, right-click and disable. The Big One is Microsoft Watchdog Timer (which has been causing those blue-screens)
18) Now reboot. It may blue-screen one last time (can’t remember) but on future reboots it won’t.
19) Enjoy.
The full story……
