Posts tagged "video"

Here’s a video I just uploaded to YouTube, walking through 7+1 examples of how AI has woven itself into my daily life — from the mundane to the surprisingly useful. No demos, no hypotheticals, rather what an actual week with AI looks like for me.

At 54 years old, I just started a YouTube channel.

This is an experiment. I recently read Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s book Tiny Experiments and decided to try something I haven’t done before: creating my own videos, not for a company or conference, but for anyone who might find them useful.

In Summer 2010 I learned about a cool new geeky movie called Iron Sky (no link, ironsky.net no longer exists) that was crowd-funded. I decided to help finance it with a small sum.

Then the second Iron Sky teaser came out and I thought: Wow, this is looking really good! And I invested some more.

In December 2010, I was invited to attend the Iron Sky shootings in Frankfurt together with my brother. This is where we got to meet the crew, the actors, the people behind the movie and other investors. And I thought: Wow, this is not only cool, this is for real! Everybody was 100% determined to make this the coolest movie ever, and everybody put in so much attention to detail, love and true craftmanship that I thought: “Yep, this is going to be a true movie milestone!” And I also got to shoot an interview with the director and the inventor of Iron Sky. This time, my brother and I together invested a bit more to help this baby fly.

If you’ve been following my blog or the Systemhelden.com podcast for some time, then you probably know that I’m a big fan of and small investor in the movie Iron Sky, a crowd-funded science-fiction comedy about the Nazis who went to the dark side of the moon in 1945 and come back to conquer Earth in 2018.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending a pre-screening of the movie’s beta version in Helsinki, Finland. What can I say? It exceeded my high expectations!

A deserted street in the docks. The rain is pouring.

A small, old, flower-power style painted Volkswagen van drives by at high speed, then stops below a lifting crane, tires screeching.

The door opens and a woman stumbles out of the vehicle, as if trying to escape. A tall man in uniform catches her violently. Intense exchange of words, probably four-lettered. She hesitates, then follows him back into the van.

“Cut!”

My brother and I are watching from the side of the road. It’s a scene from the upcoming movie Iron Sky (no link, ironsky.net no longer exists), a science-fiction comedy about the Nazis who escaped with UFOs to the dark side of the moon and who come back in 2018 to conquer the earth.

What?

It’s a long, fun story, but you better see it for yourself. Early 2012, that is, when the movie is done.

About 4 years ago, a few colleagues and myself got together and we created a short video about the coolness of two of the most innovative products from Sun of the last decade: ZFS and the X4500 Server.

Today, nearly 4 years later, the video has been downloaded more than 100,000 times (across the original German and the English dubbed version, plus the full resolution downloadable files) and shown to a lot more people during tradeshows, customer demos, etc.

Now YouTube and Google Video (remember?) don’t allow for highest video quality and the old Sun Mediacast server, where we hosted the original MP4 file, no longer exists. Instead, Vimeo has emerged as my video hoster of choice for a variety of projects (check out my video collection on Vimeo) and so it was time to give this video a new home.

For my last article, I wanted to include a couple of videos from YouTube.

First, I pondered using the standard YouTube embed code, but I wanted a more simple, elegant solution. The Drupal RepTags module supports powerful macros and it comes with some pre-built YouTube macros, so that wasn’t bad.

But I wanted more: HTML5. Read on and see how easily you can create your own Drupal RepTags, including the code I use to add HTML5 support for the Drupal YouTube RepTag.

During OSDevCon 2009 in Dresden (no link, osdevcon.org no longer exists), I had the honor to present on some lessons learned while putting together a ZFS Automatic-Scrubbing SMF service.

Today, Deirdre was so kind to publish the video recording of my presentation on The Oracle Solaris Video Blog (no link, sun.com no longer exists).

From the description:

This talk walks you through the implementation of a simple SMF service. What sounds “simple” at first, develops a life of its own when you consider installation/de-installation, security considerations, error handling and debugging, and of course unexpected little bugs and shortcomings. Finally, we add a GUI to our service by discovering the OpenSolaris Visual Panels project. This “lessons learned” talk is intended to be a practical roundup of things to consider for developers interested in integrating with SMF.