One of the many innovations Sam Palmisano has spearheaded at IBM is the idea of reaching out to "alumni". The first initiative was a few years ago when he started a semi-annual reception for executives and former executives of the company. That was just the beginning and now the idea of reaching out has been opened up big time. The number of past and present IBMers is probably close to a million people. Establishing communications with such a huge base can be nothing but a good thing for the company.

When I left engineering school and joined IBM in 1967, it was common to look for a job at a company and expect to stay there your entire career. Nobody thinks that way anymore. If you tell someone you were with a company for decades, they might ask "what's the matter, couldn't you find any other jobs?". Another change is in the old days if someone left the company they were considered a traitor and barred from coming back. Today, there are many executives that left the company at some point, got some experience at one or more other companies, and then brought that experience back into IBM.

The Internet has enabled everything to be connected to everything, so setting up a blog to "connect" past, present, (and maybe future) IBMers to each other and with the company seems like a very good idea. The The first step was the Google Group, the logical step two is the new Greater IBM blog. Over time other forms of web technology such as wikis, audio and video podcasts, instant messaging, and various mobile technologies will likely enter the mix.

The possibilities are endless -- collaboration on projects, personal networking for jobs and deals, referrals to and from IBM, and social networking for the fun of it. I look forward to being part of this as it evolves. Upon e-tirement in 2001 with nearly four decades at IBM, I don't really feel like I left anyway! Feel free to visit patrickWeb. There are a number of categories that I have been writing about for more than ten years. Things related to IBM are at this site, I am sure I will be writing about and linking to the Greater IBM blog as will others. Cross linking will increase the overall "connectedness". That's what the web is all about. I am really proud that IBM is taking the blogosphere so seriously.

Greater IBM Blog
Greater IBM on Google Groups
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Technology writer, Peter Svensson, wrote an interesting story called "Will video break the Internet?". From a technical point of view there are many factors to consider. If a large number of web "surfers" were using the Internet as their primary way to watch TV, there would be a problem. More capacity is clearly needed, especially as HD-TV becomes more prevalent. The pessimists -- and some telecommunications operators -- see rising fees to pay for the bandwidth expansion. Optimists know that various technologies such as multicasting, caching, digital video recorders, etc. are dramatically improving the Net's ability to deliver video content and in parallel the cost per unit of technology continues to decline. History would suggest the optimistic view is the right one.

During the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta there was a bomb blast. Native Atlanta ex-patriots living in Japan and Germany and other parts of the world wanted to get as much news coverage as possible about the status but had few choices (there were no blogs then). The Internet Technology team at IBM in Southbury, Connecticut was running a large web infrastructure for the Games at the time and one of the engineers, Andy Stanford-Clark, got the idea to "stream" a local Atlanta radio station over the Internet using an IBM technology called Bamba. It was a very successful project but only a handful of people could listen simultaneously due to the limitations of the technology and the Internet. Some people thought that if there were large numbers of listeners "audio would break the Internet". Today millions of people consider audio over the Net as commonplace. (Listening to crystal clear classical music from KUSC-FM in Los Angeles through my Sqeezebox as I write this). Based on the tens of millions of daily visitors to YouTube, it is clear that video has also become commonplace. Another leading indicator is what is happening on campus. A number of universities have decided to use the Internet to deliver cable TV to their dormitories.

One of the issues Mr. Svensson raised in his story is "net neutrality", a term that means different things to different people. The fear is that the really large telecommunications companies that provide parts of the "backbone" of the Internet may decide to not only raise fees but also to be discriminatory. In the extreme it would mean that Verizon would block access to Google because they made a deal with Yahoo! or visa versa. The telcos have never been successful in getting into the content business so a new angle for them might be to make deals with content providers that would make their video move through the Internet backbone at a higher priority in return for fees. These fears have gotten the attention of lawmakers who are now talking about legislation to insure net neutrality. Legislation is the worst possible way to address the issue.

What is really needed is more competition. In Japan, the Internet service available to consumers is significantly faster than in the U.S. and significantly less expensive. For example, Yahoo! Broadband offers 8 million bits per second for about $20 per month. Up to 100 million bits per second is available. What technical breakthrough have they had? None. The breakthrough was to separate the various infrastructure elements of Internet service and allow "Adam Smith's invisible hand" to go to work. More competition means higher speeds and lower prices. In the U.S. we have legions of lawyers and lobbyists at work doing their best to gain protections for themselves and to slow the spread of innovation such as municipal wireless and voice over IP. Will video break the Internet? No. The biggest threat to freedom of choice for content at competitive prices is a lack of competition.

Misguided or overly-prescriptive legislation can have unintended consequences. It can often fix one problem and create two new ones or add yet another layer of protectionism. Mike Nelson, former Director for Technology Policy at the Federal Communications Commission (and former colleague at IBM), says "a lack of competition which lets companies exert monopoly or duopoly power is probably the biggest damper on innovation". Not all legislation is bad. It is possible to use it to increase competition and decrease regulation, to fund e-government pilot projects, "connect the unconnected," or fund university education and research.


Other patrickWeb stories about Internet Technology
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Day two of the Business Leadership Forum at "the auditorium"opened with a big-screen video made for the event by Tom Friedman, author of The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. Less than four hundred years ago, people still thought the world was flat and that ships would "fall off" the globe if they went too far. Then people figured out that the world was round, not flat. Now we are all realizing, thanks to Tom's book, that the world is indeed flat. Tom Friedman totally gets it and tells it very clearly.

1989 marked the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Windows. This was followed by Netscape going public in August 1995 which triggered the dot-com boom which triggered massive over-investment in fiber optic cable which enabled extremely low cost transfer of information on a global basis. A revolution in web applications enabled collaboration using interoperable standards-based protocols. These three things flattened the world and brought us from the industrial age to the information age. The end result, Tom says, is that when the world is flat, whatever can be done, will be done. The only question is "will it be done by you or to you". He says it takes an innovative flare, not vanilla ice cream -- which everybody can make -- but "whipped cream with a cherry on top".

Kunio Nakamura, President of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (otherwise known to most of us as Panasonic) with classic Asian sincerity, paid great homage to IBM for all that his company had learned and how it was supported during a significant transformation. Matsushita was founded in 1918 and now has sales of $75 billion with $3.4 billion in profit and 335,000 employees. Their management philosophy is that the company is a public entity, that the customer comes first, and to start each day anew. Their largest single product is TV's but it is only 8% of revenue. The company was in crisis condition in 2000, reached the survival level in 2006, and plans to achieve global excellence by 2010. A key element of this comeback is management innovation, a key part of which is using IT to drive productivity. This may seem obvious but Nakamura-san pointed out that culturally productivity was thought of as something that can be nudged by maybe 10%, whereas American companies think of doubling and tripling of productivity. He said Matsushita wants to change from a lead ball to a soccer ball. I have heard many CEO's describe corporate strategies over the years but never have I seen a CEO use the terms "IT" and infrastructure as extensively as Nakamura-san. He outlined how the company plans to invest $1.5B in IT over five years to integrate their procurement, production, distribution, sales & services from material & component suppliers all the way through to customers. He plans to use IBM as the company's innovation partner.


Intro to Roman Rendezvous Stories
Index to Roman Rendezvous stories

I learned my lesson with Fable, so I'll try desperately not to start a flame war of any sort here. Up front, I'm giving the game a definite thumbs up. If you are the kind of person that likes to flame, then leave now knowing that I've given your favorite thing my personal approval.

Let's start with the good. The campaign and story is pretty nice. The cinematic effect is definitely there, something I don't approve of in games most of the time. In this case the cinematics were rather short and they appear to have answered all of the questions from the first Halo, about what in the hell is actually going on in this universe. Don't expect a major story though, in all there is about 30 minutes of video (maybe someone will time that eventually). It appears in most cases that the actual game engine was used to produce cinematic sequences. I'm a huge advocate of this process, since it generally reduces the size of the game even if it doesn't allow for as much eye candy through complex, non real-time, shaders.

Playing from both sides of the story is another great feature even if the movement features are identical between the arbiter and the master chief. Of course you get to use all of the weapons no matter which side you are. A couple of the new weapons are even pretty nice and if you add dual wielding then you can really do some drastic damage. Getting used to the new weapons is a short process, but for the most part, just realize everything is going to take a good amount of shots in order to take down. Nearly every enemy has energy shields now, so making use of a good pairing of weapons is almost always required (for a good run-down of the weapons, head over to GameFAQs where someone has posted a huge review of all of the weapons, relative damage, recommended threat ranges, etc...)

Movement has been speed up a bit from a basic land speed metric. The jump has been increased as well. Most of the same movement considerations from the first Halo are in place and the game still has the same feel, while at the same time having an increased level of agility. I noticed that my look sensitivity 10 from Halo one has been dropped to 8, and the new 10 is fairly insane. I've managed to work my way back up to 10 and I have to say it is much closer to the look sensitivity in UT now. Thats definitely a good thing since I'm tired of getting punked in the back by a lamer while I'm trying to turn around. Now my more precise shooting abilities will take them out while they wing half their shots by my head.

We'll do 3 good paragraphs and 3 bad ;-) Not all of these are bad, just things I'm not all that happy with. While all of the new weapons are great they feel drastically underpowered most of the time. I think this was a balancing issue and I definitely agree that some weapons in Halo were far too powerful in multiplayer. Losing my pistol is hard though since that was definitely my primary weapon. I loved picking off people with that weapon. It is now a closer quarters weapon and a few weapons have stepped in to take it's place. They didn't add any more grenade types, something that would have been extremely nice. The usage of the flashlight has been minimized drastically and it now lasts indefinitely. I'm not sure why they kept it in, if for nothing more than to add a parity feature with the temporary invisibility you get as the arbiter.

I think the explanation of the story is great, but I'm not all that happy with the wrap-up. Halo in itself was an epic FPS which is something I'm not getting from Halo 2. Maybe this is the curse of the sequel. More importantly, most of Halo's intrigue after the initial month was driven by its multiplayer. I haven't gotten a good chance to play a few thousand hours of multiplayer yet, so I can't judge whether or not this game is equivalently interesting. The epic value may still be there, especially as the tournaments and ladders start to form. All in all, the basic campaign was a bit of a let-down for me.

Now for the flat-out bugs. The physics engine is better, but in many cases broken. There are cases where the environment is moving and in turn the movement drastically impairs your ability to aim and fire. I'm not sure if that was meant to be or a side effect of a real physics engine in play without the proper controls to ensure realism. In general though, only accelerating bodies would apply forces that might throw off your aim. All of the moving platforms in Halo 2 are massive enough and travel at constant speed, that the aim issues shouldn't come into play. Even more odd is that it only happened to me in one location. In general, I think many of the vehicles fall prey to some poor physics as well. Apparently getting run over by a ghost now just pushes you out of the way, many of the flying vehicles are cumbersome even with the new boost tricks.

One more good paragraph. I've written quite a bit on AI, and I have to say that the AI in this game is pretty good. The allied unit code works well most of the time, something you don't see in many games, even if they do shoot you in the back. I'm supposed to run in damnit, I'm the master chief, so quit shooting me in the back! The mission guys should get shot in a few instances where they provide challenges that are nearly impossible if you've lost most of your allied group. In some cases the allies just disappear or fail to follow you, something else that I think could dearly be fixed. The path-finding, beast aggro, cross side fighting, and tactics make up for everything wrong with the allies. I'm still thinking about what the best way would be to handle the battle between the brutes and elites where the two hunters come out. I played just that spot 8 times beating it different ways and trying to work out the appropriate weapons to minimize my ammo usage and leaving me with the least number of enemies to fight when the battle was over.

All in all the game is a graphical beauty, definitely a tribute to the amount of time it took in production (this is how a 4 year development process SHOULD end). I have some goodies to go along with it. I managed to produce a series of custom controls that mimic portions of the Halo 2 UI. I'll try and get them up on Project Distributor. I know that I made a Form, ListBox, and GroupBox, but I'm not sure if I finished any others. They don't allow much customization, so I'm adding the ability to change colors and simplifying the asset production code (I currently precompute the images used by the controls and need to change that over to dynamic creation at run-time based on properties). Give me a heads up if this type of control is interesting to you.

Enjoy your Halo 2 and feel free to invite me over to any gaming parties. Address and telephone number are in the resume link ;-)

How to rip and compress DVDs in Mac OS X

A couple of months ago, I got a Mac Mini* and immediately (of course) hooked it up to my TV so I could use it as a media center. (That’s probably a good topic for a separate post.)

Since then, I’ve ripped my DVD collection onto the Mac so any movie I own is only a few clicks away. Here’s how you can do the same thing:

1. Insert a DVD in your Mac’s DVD drive

These directions are optimized for feature films, not TV shows or other things you might find on a DVD. However, with a little creativity you should be able to adapt these instructions to serve your purposes.

2. Use MacTheRipper to do a “Main Feature Extraction” to your Mac

I use MacTheRipper first because it allows me to archive a raw VIDEO_TS folder that I can re-compress later if I want. For more detail about doing a simple DVD-to-disk rip, see the first half of Mark Pilgrim’s excellent how-to video.

Here’s what my MacTheRipper settings look like:

3. Use HandBrake to compress the movie

This part is critical because there aren’t many programs (including Front Row) that know what to do with a raw VIDEO_TS folder. But nearly any video player (again, including Front Row) can handle an MP4 file, so that is what we will convert this movie into.

In HandBrake, I use the XviD encoder with a target size of 1000MB (about 1GB). This produces a very watchable picture at a reasonable file-size.

Here’s what my Handbrake settings look like (click to enlarge):

Put the video file in your Movies folder, and enjoy!

You can obviously keep your movies wherever you want, but I keep mine in the Movies folder (under my home directory) so Front Row can access them.

Give it a try!

Feel free to try this yourself, and let me know if you have questions!

* * *

* The Mini was a gift from my generous Grandpa, who you may recognize from his occasional comments on this site.

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