On a PC, I want to be able to easily capture screencasts for the products we use at work. The ulterior motive is to be able to show a video rather than repeat the demo hundreds of times.

VMWare gives a tantalizing option: Capture Movie

It is under the VM menu in the menu bar. Prompts for a filename and you’re away.

Slight catch. Playing back the movie that is recorded leads to not much but trouble. Turns out that VMWare encodes the movie into a non-standard video format. Details of it are here. (It is using the VNC protocol to encode the video with some VM specific headers)

If you’ve installed Workstation, the decoder for the codec is included. Otherwise, you can download the codec here. I found you need to use Microsoft Media Player to actually play back.

That still leaves the problem of editing the video. With the video recorded and the codec installed, you can convert the video into a suitable format. I used Prism’s conversion program to produce an AVI that can be read by Final Cut Pro.

Final Cut Pro took a bit of effort, but produced a very slick result. You can use simpler options for the video editing piece.

The result is that I can now capture video of demonstrations that are run in a VMWare environment, and re-mix them into various screencasts.

Fixed width fonts don’t play nice with non-Western character sets.

Recently was editing some code in Vim that included strings in Vietnamese. Ignoring the bit where code and strings shouldn’t be in the same file, the font should at least display properly.

Not good.

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, my default fixed width font for everything, did not work.
Playing around a bit, I found Courier New worked perfectly for English and Vietnamese.

Not wanting to have to swap fonts based on language, I tried out the other language I use a bit for work, Mandarin Chinese.

Nope.

So I’m now in the unfortunate situation of needing to pick a font for my programming editor based on the language of the strings mixed in with the code. Not cool.

My current fonts (on Windows) now look like:

• Bitstream Vera Sans Mono – English
• Courier New – English + Vietnamese
• NSimSun – English + Mandarin

Any suggestions on a good fixed width font with characters for other languages?

Brilliant, brilliant article. Go. Read. Now.

Some highlights:

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first—hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”

At least they’re doing something.

The cost of participating in social media seems like small change given the cognitive surplus from turning the TV off.

If you didn’t listen before… Go. Read.

Business and technology news is awash with the latest rounds of M&A.

Amidst the noise, Fred Wilson adds some perspective:

The Internet is decomposing into a vast array of micro-services that we, the end user, stitches together to make our own unique web experience.

And yet, these large behemoths are trying to do their normal consolidation play on the Internet. First of all, it’s not going to work. They are destroying value with all of their M&A efforts and the bigger they get, the more value they will destroy, for them and their shareholders.

And:

Here’s the problem. The company/web service creation process needs some kind of end game. The entrepreneurs who spend years and risking a ton need a way to get paid for that effort.

… if you can’t take a company public, how do you get out? M&A has been the primary answer in the web/tech sector for the past eight years. And it’s been a great period to sell companies.

But if you look deeper, I wonder. Delicious grew nicely for a while under Yahoo!’s ownership but recently the user base has fallen off pretty dramatically. I double checked this chart in compete and alexa and they all show the dropoff.

But who am I to complain? We got paid right? So sit down and shut up.

Except I am also a user of these services. I see what happens when a company gets purchased. The service languishes. The team leaves. It stops getting better. And often gets worse.

Fred sees this from both sides, as a VC looking for liquidity and as a consumer of web services looking for quality.

The problem with consolidation is in how large companies typically innovate. To get a new idea through requires either skunkworks, acquisition or sixteen layers of approval to risk people’s time. It becomes a problem of permission.

On the flip side, for a start-up you have two options: innovate or die.

Large companies are trying. Google’s 1 day a week program gives explicit permission for people to tinker. Microsoft invests big dollars in R&D and the start-up community. Unfortunately, it isn’t enough.

Fred is quite right. There needs to be a better path to liquidity. Or stated differently, start-ups need a way to become companies, not food for dinosaurs.

I admit, I didn’t understand Twitter when it first came out. I still wasn’t sold on the second wave of popularity. In fact, the blogosphere never sold me on Twitter. So why am I now using it regularly?

Local.

It needed to be local for me. Once a few of the developers in my office started using it, I payed more attention to my own account. Now it’s more addictive than Facebook. Although for similar reasons.

The difference is that you can follow someone on Twitter without needing to establish friendship. Thus I can quote one of my heros:

duncan: I’ve decided I dislike using Twitter as a replacement for Chat. Chat’s TCP. I liked Twitter for being UDP.

The UDP/TCP distinction completely nails it for me. Twitter is all about broadcast. Chat is better for exactly that, chatting.

The whole status thing has been done before, the status message in MSN, the status in Facebook. The catch is that they are all walled gardens and require a two way relationship to be established.

The benefit of a low barrier to subscription to broadcast is that anyone can follow updates. This means that you hear things on Twitter before they get anywhere else.

It feels more dynamic.

It is the backchannel for the internet.

I’m sold.

(Hat tip to Tony for the selling)