mDistribute - License films to mobile industry

mDistribute is a ‘self-serve’ licensing platform for filmmakers, animators, and buyers. It’s actually a great way to bring those people who make video type content together with those who want mobile content.

This program appears to bring film makers and web content providers together by allowing film makers to list their films and set a license price for distribution. Buyers purchase the license to the film and are able to distribute across any mobile medium. It’s remarkably simple and such a great concept. All to often distributors and producers have a hard time crossing paths. It’s nice to see a well designed, functional site that easily brings the two together.

It is good to know that the site would be able to endorse your work once uploaded to different web and phone companies. They in turn would be able to show your video to end consumers who would like to view it. I felt it was something like pay per view or something to that extent. I would however get paid if my uploaded video gets its license purchased by the companies less the transaction fee the site would take away and it is very reasonable. So if you are a content provider whether you do live film, animation or other video and you might be interested in seeing if you can license and make money for distribution, check out mDistribute, it may be a way for you to bring in some revenue for your art.

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Laptop Storage - Is SSD the future?

Notebooks do not use the same hard drives that desktop PCs use. A smaller form factor i.e. 2.5-inches is what is prevalent. Notebook hard drives also come with different spindle speeds; faster speeds mean better performance at the cost of extra heat generation and more importantly possibly lower battery life.

The three common speeds are 4200 rpm, 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm. Stay away from 4200 rpm drives; these are a little too slow for most users. 5400 rpm is what you should look at; remember that 7200 rpm drives are better albeit costlier and some very compact notebooks cannot utilize these hard drives for fear of overheating.

Solid State Drives (SSD) is a relatively new technology that has pervaded the notebook space first. The biggest advantage with SSD is the lack of any moving parts which allows SSDs to enjoy very low power consumption and yet have higher performance than any hard disk drive. In fact the read and write speeds of SSDs are three times higher than the fastest HDDs around — a very solid performance increment.

In SSDs data density is not as high as HDDs. The highest capacity SSDs are in the region of 250 GB; these cost fifty times more than a hard drive of the same capacity. However, smaller capacities like 32 GB and 64 GB are a little more affordable and if you want extreme performance and better battery life then you may opt for an SSD storage based notebook. Many manufacturers are offering such drives as optional upgrades on various notebooks.

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MVC Design Pattern: An Introduction

If you’ve ever trawled the internet looking for information on programming in your favorite language, you must have come across the term model view controller (MVC). Ever wondered what it was, and why people make such a fuss about it? Well, here’s your chance to find out. It’s a principle that has over time been proven to assuage several issues that come up while developing large software projects. It isn’t limited to any specific programming language, instead it is a paradigm for organizing the code and functionality of your application in such a way that it is easily extensible and easier to maintain.

The MVC Paradigm
So what does this have to so with programming? For one, most programs are centred on data and display. A majority of the software we use accesses some kind of data and displays something on screen. The data need not be something we would concern ourselves with, but it is there. To use the MVC paradigm, we separate the functionality of our application into three parts, the model, the view and the controller. The model is the data store of the application, the view / views are what decide how data is displayed, and the controller is what handles interaction and response. It is not as simple a job as it sounds, it can often be quite counter-intuitive, and sometimes might not even be the best thing to do.

The model
The model is the repository of data for the entire application. Any information that the program works with is part of the model. By decoupling this from the other parts of the program we ensure that the program will continue working as expected even if we decide to change the way we store or access data. For example, if you develop a simple application for handling contacts, and address book. You initially start off using text files while developing the application. However, you may later decide to store it as an XML file or a VCF file, or even a full fledged database. For this, all you would need to do is add the requisite functions to handle those formats to your model. Since the rest of the application works off the model, it doesn’t matter how the model is getting the data, as long as it’s getting it. So you could even add functionality to store the data online, and all you would need to change is the model. It merely provides a standard fixed way of accessing its data, and modifying it.

The View
The view is part of the application that displays data. Buttons, lists, combo boxes, etc. make up the view. It retrieves data from the model and displays it to the user; however, it does not make any changes to the data itself. Therefore, in a way, it has read-only access to the data. An application need not have only one view. On the other hand, having multiple views easily is one of the strong points of using MVC architecture. Taking our previous example of an address book application, we could create as many views for it as we want. To add or edit contacts, you could provide multiple views such as a wizard view or a simple form view. The view is not dependent on the control; however, it needs to be aware of the model to display the data in it.

The Controller
The controller represents the main logic of your program. It is like the brain which manages the other elements of the MVC program. It accesses and modifies the data of the model in response to the user’s interactions with the view. It is again not concerned with what the view looks like. It is an action-reaction system, where certain interactions with the view will result in modifications in the model, or changes in the view. As in the address book example, the controller would then views such as a wizard view or a simple form view. The view is not dependent on the control; however, it needs to be aware of the model to display the data in it.

An Example
Here is simple explanation of how things go in a simple MVC program. We take the example of a simple program, which has a textbox and a button. When you click on the button, the content of the textbox is capitalised. Here, let’s enumerate the role of the model, the view and the controller.

• The model stores the contents of the textbox, and provides a way of accessing and modifying it. It also registers an event when this data is change.

• The view creates the visual part of the application, the button and the textbox, and the window in which they reside. It also registers an event when the button is clicked.

• The controller responds to any events generated by the view (or elsewhere), and modify the contents of the model.

So when the user clicks on the button, it responds to that event, and capitalises the text box content stored in the model. The same view can be used for a program which would encrypt and decrypt the contents of the text box, and the same controller can be used in a word processing program for providing capitalization as a function. Some kind of mechanism for updating the view in response to changes in the model should also be in place and this is where a framework comes in. Although it is possible to make it entirely yourself, why not let the framework do the grunt work for you?

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Video tutorial/review of the Apple iPad

Here is a cool video about the new tablet from Apple - iPad. This video gives you a overall review of the product as well as it can also be considered as a video tutorial for using the device.

I just loved watching it. It describes all the features of the device.
Folks, I have nothing else to write here. Just watch the video...

The video is not allowed to be embedded. The embed code is not available.
But, don't worry....
You can watch it on YouTube, here is the link...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wj9nYPl5l8U

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Internet Explorer 8: Tips and Tricks

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is the latest web browser from Microsoft and is the successor to IE7. It comes with added features such as accelerators, web slices and many more customizing features that were not present in the older versions. IE8 is also more secure and shows improvements in many ways.

We have discovered some interesting tips for you to use this latest version of world's most used browser....

Rearranging the toolbars
The toolbar is locked in IE8. Right-click on the IE8 toolbar area and uncheck “Lock the Toolbars”. By doing this, you can move the Command bar and Favorites bar around with the mouse. You can also move the Favorites button down to the Tabs level and separate it from the Favorites bar. You can rearrange items on your Favorites bar by dragging items from one spot on the Favorites bar to another. You can also create folders and organize your favorite links, web slices and feeds. To create folders, right-click an existing item on the favorites bar and then click New Folder. You can then drag items from the Favorites bar into that folder. To remove old links, right-click the item on the Favourites bar, and then click Delete.

Change the position of Stop and Refresh
You can change the position of the Stop and Refresh button from after the Address bar to before it. To do this, right-click on the toolbar area and go to Customize. Next check “Show Stop and Refresh Buttons before Address Bar” and you will have changed the position of those buttons.

Wider search bar
For those of you who want a little more space for your Search bar, or little less space for that matter, you can adjust the length of the Search bar in IE8. For this you just put your mouse in the area between the search bar and the address bar and adjust it accordingly.

Adding links
There are three ways to add a link to the Favorites bar in IE8: you can either drag the web page icon from the Address bar directly to the Favorites bar. Alternatively, you can drag a link located on the web page to the Favorites bar, or lastly you could just click the Add to Favourites button and then click on Add to Favorites Bar.

Subscribing and previewing web slices
Web slices is an interesting new feature added to IE8. It keeps you updated not with an entire web site, but a particular section or part of a web page. For example, once you subscribe to a web slice such as an auction price, you will be able to see the updated content and this appears as a link on the Favorites bar. When the Web slice is updated, the link on the Favorites bar will appear in bold. You can then click the link to see the updated content. When a Web slice is available, the color of the Web slice icon will change on the Command bar. The Web slice icon will also appear on the content that you can add to the Favourites bar. To subscribe to a Web slice and add it to the Favorites bar, you can either click the Web slice button on the Command bar or click the Web slice icon on the page. Your subscribed Web slice will appear on the left side of the Favorites bar. When there is an update on one of your subscribed web slices, that link will be highlighted on the Favorites bar. You can also preview the Web slice that you have added to the Favorites bar without leaving the web site you are currently viewing. Just click on the Web slice link on the Favorites bar to bring up a rich preview of the web page, which you can then click to navigate to that site if you want.

Compatibility view
Not all web sites on the internet have evolved to be compatible with IE8 and so Microsoft has introduced the Compatibility View option with its browser. This will allow you to view the web site as if you were viewing it on the previous version, i.e. IE7, so that no major changes need to be made on the web site’s front. This option is located next to the address bar, right before the stop and refresh buttons. This feature, once clicked, will only work on the site you have used it with and not other sites that you will visit in the future. IE8 also allows you to maintain a list of the web sites that you want to use with the compatibility view options. For this, go to Tools > Compatibility View Settings from the menu bar. This settings window will allow you to add or remove web sites to be viewed without all the IE8 features. There is an option that you can check “Include updated website lists from Microsoft” which will get an updated compatibility list from Microsoft itself. For those who don’t want any changes to be viewed at all, you can opt to view all the web sites in Compatibility View by putting a check next to “Display all websites in Compatibility View”.

Accelerators
Everyday browsing tasks like translating a word or a line, mapping an address and other such tasks are normally done by opening a new web site for each one separately. IE8 has an interesting new feature to perform all these tasks on the spot, making browsing more efficient. When you highlight some text on the web site you are currently viewing a small icon appears — the Accelerators icon. Either click that icon or simply right-click to get a list of options that you can perform for your selection. By default, you can add that text to your Windows Live Blog, email with Windows Live, Map with Live Search, Search with Google and even Translate with Live Search, and other such daily tasks. Some of them don’t even need you to visit another web site. For example, a definition of the highlighted word will be displayed in a small box when you just mouse over one of the accelerator options. You can download and add more accelerators from www.ieaddons.com.

Caret browsing
An alternative to using a mouse to select text and navigate around within a web page, you can use the navigation keys on the keyboard — Home, End, Page Up, Page Down and the arrow keys. This feature in IE8 is called caret browsing. To use this feature, you just need to hit the [F7] key. On activating caret browsing, click once on any text on the web site you are currently viewing. You will see a cursor that you can now navigate with freely.

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Data De-Duplication: What is it?

Data de-duplication refers to removal of redundant data. In the de-duplication process, a single copy of data is maintained along with the index of the original data, so that data can be easily retrieved when required. Other than saving disk storage space and reduction in hardware costs, (storage hardware, cooling, backup media, etc), another major benefit of data de-duplication is bandwidth optimization.

Types

Data de-duplication can be deployed in two ways -source based and target based. The source based de-duplication is done before the backup i.e, at primary storage such as NAS, while in target method, de-duplication is done after the backup. However, in a target based method, de-duplication can also be during the backup, which is known as inline de-duplication. The benefit of in-line deduplication over post-process deduplication is that it requires less storage as data is not duplicated unlike post-process de-duplication.

Source based data de-duplication is usually deployed in environments such as, file-systems, remote branch office environments and virtualization environments. In remote backup scenario, the source based data de-duplication also means that there will be less data traveling through the WAN pipe, resulting in effective bandwidth utilization. Target based de-duplication is a good option where bandwidth is not an issue, such as SAN or LAN backup environments.

Working

Largely, there are three techniques used by data de-duplication vendors, file level, block level and byte level. File level de-duplication, also known as single instance stores (SIS), searches for identical files on the disk and eliminates identical ones. The biggest drawback of this method is that if the same file is present with two different names, it won't be eliminated. Block level de-duplication works at more granular level as compared to file level de-duplcation. Here data is broken down to blocks which can be any logical or fixed length blocks and the de-duplication solution looks for unique blocks (most solutions do this by calculating hash). When a unique block is stored, its identifier is created in the index. Now, whenever a repeated block comes across, instead of storing the entire block, a pointer to the existing block is placed in the index thus saving the storage space. Block level de-duplication offers various advantages over the file level de-duplication. The same file with two different names not removed by file based de-duplication will be easily removed in block level de-duplication. Also, if only a part of the file is modified, the modified part will be stored uniquely as compared to the entire data.

Byte level data de-duplication is mostly used in post-processing scenarios. Here, new data is compared at byte level with already existing data and only the changes are stored. Byte level de-duplication can deliver accurate backups. As byte by byte comparison is time consuming, which is the precise reason de-duplication is done after backup, but before data is finally written. However, the catch here is that, this requires extra disk space, to ensure there is enough space for de-duplication to be done while data is on hold. For block level de-duplication to work effectively, data needs to be broken into very small chunks, mostly around 8kb. The drawback here is, the smaller the block size, the more the entires in hash table, and handling the table in itself can become a challenge. Compare to this, byte level stores data in large segments, mostly around 100MB.

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