The Many Aspects of Ratio

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Posted 27 days ago.

Have you ever wondered why so many movies come in different screen sizes? These various sizes are called "aspect ratios" and are industry standardized media formats. An aspect ratio is the relationship between width and height; for example, HDTV has an aspect ratio of 16 inches of width to every 9 inches of height, which can be read as 16x9 or, to simplify it further, 1.78:1. This is close to the 1.85:1 ratio of most movies released in theaters. A 35mm film negative has an aspect ratio of 4x3, or 1.33:1. To create the 1.85:1 aspect ratio, filmmakers have a choice of shooting it in 1.33:1 and composing every shot so that nothing is lost when theaters show it as 1.85:1, or they can have the camera modified to shoot it as 1.85:1 without wasted space. Almost all HD digital video cameras shoot at a native aspect ratio of 1.78:1.

How to Create QR Codes For Android Market Apps

Tags: android market, qr codes
Posted 32 days ago.

Have you wondered how to create those nice QR codes to link directly to Android market apps from your blog article? Go to www.sparqcode.com, then click on APP STORE in the menubar Read more ... (34 words)

What is Virtualisation?

Tags: virtualization
Posted 39 days ago.

The topic of virtualisation is a the forefront of many techies' minds. Virtualisation is a product that enables computers to use up fewer resources with increased output. These two benefits are obtained by running several operating systems on one server using special virtualisation software and a virtual machine monitor. The result is a server simultaneously running several operating systems and allowing each system access to its hardware components like the CPU, RAM, etc. The working of this product is explained below with Dell Server virtualisation in mind.

Top 5 Android Apps For a Better HTC Desire HD

Tags: android, htc desire hd, htc sense, top apps
Posted 175 days ago.

The HTC Desire HD phone is a particular nice Android smartphone, but the HTC Sense interface has some flaws.

Here is my list of top 5 free apps I have installed on my HTC Desire HD to replace stock apps or fix unwanted behaviour of HTC Sense.

A Multithreaded Job Queue For Ruby (on Rails)

Tags: job queue, load balancing, mysql, ruby on rails
Posted 531 days ago.

I have a Ruby on Rails application with a rapidly growing database of currently 50,000 jobs per day to be executed. Each jobs fetches data over the internet and takes about 1-10 seconds to execute. These tasks are scheduled for specific times and should be executed with as little delay as possible. Read more ... (1380 words) 2 Comments.

Something not so nerdy today...

Tags: art
Posted 1270 days ago.

Found this via the blog of my favorite indie t-shirt label online shop. Roland Brueckner's website, featuring scanned postcards with extraordinary hand made drawings from the artist himself.

Read more ... (53 words)

Deploying Rails (2.0) to Mongrel with Capistrano 2.1

Tags: capistrano, mongrel, ruby on rails
Posted 1555 days ago.

Capistrano 2.1 includes some major improvements over the 1.x branch, so everyone should start using it right away. Yet it doesn't work with Mongrel out of the box and it's most likely not backwards compatible with your old deploy recipes. Since there is no official documentation on how to get going with Rails and Mongrel, I put together these instructions.

Gaming with Boot Camp on the MacBook Pro

Tags: apple, bootcamp, gaming, half life 2, leopard
Posted 1636 days ago.

Boot Camp in Leopard has gone beyond beta and turns the MacBook Pro into excellent gaming hardware for the casual gamer.

Not so long ago when I first installed Boot Camp beta I was surprised to find out that my recent MacBook Pro Santa Rosa 2,2 Ghz was not that bad at all for playing recent 3D games. In fact, it was so good at it, that my productivity decreased dramatically for some weeks. Half Life 2 runs at very smooth 60 – 70 fps with most detail settings set to their maximum value (with Bootcamp beta).

Old, ugly Fish and other Technologies

Tags: apple, geek culture, squid
Posted 1691 days ago.

After watching Steve Jobs’ Keynote address on WWDC 2007 it gets more evident to me to me what many people are already thinking: technologies and scientific theories are much like items of pop culture. It’s all about who wears it and it’s new shiny appearance.

RubyRobot Theme for Textmate

Tags: mac os x, ruby on rails, textmate
Posted 1790 days ago.

A color theme for my favourite text editor Textmate. Easy on the eye and optimized for working with Ruby on Rails, HTML, PHP and Javascript files. Colors appear a bit too bright with Safari in the screenshots, but that seems to be the old color profile guessing issue.

Ruby on Rails