Video Capture! (then and now) Hawking Technology USB [1.1] Video gadget DV200U $74.99 at MicroCenter [9/00] worked more-or-less. I had to install the drivers twice, and find the accompanying “VideoWave” editing software installation on my own, it’s hiding in a directory on the CD. There was also something called “PowerVideo” which seemed to be completely nonfunctional in a brief investigation. However what I want out of life is a way to make entertaining GIFs, and I was able to cut-out the section I wanted with the VideoWave software after fighting with it for a while (it wants to help), and read the resulting AVI file using my trusty ULEAD GIF Animator version 3 (incidentally version 5 seemed worse in a very brief inspection). Note in this connection if you’re thinking of editing your precious videos on your computer — you can’t. Your computer is too slow and too small. At least mine is. If yours has a spare 60 gigabyte drive or two, 256 meg memory, and a Pentium 17, maybe; and probably a higher-performance capture gadget than the DV200U — well actually I suppose these days your computer may have those things. ... But you understand the enthusiastic magazine reviews will never tell you any of this; why do you think all those hardware manufacturers advertise in them? But I could produce downloadable slow-stupid-modem-style (supposedly) video with the free Microsoft On-Demand Producer; a fairly cute program, probably with better editing features than the VideoWave software mentioned above, but apparently only produces Windows Streaming Something output, i.e. proprietary but compressed. And here you can Watch the Boss, or at least I could around 2/23/2001 2:16 pm [friday]. Also see the amazing RoboHelp popup CD Demo for a longer but still short example. // Note incidentally that this program won’t play it’s own output; for that you need Windows Media Player — as I discovered during one of these periodic registry explosions we like to celebrate at Owen Labs.... primitive digital camera animation: So How Are Things in 9/06? (or 7/09) Oddly, not much better! ... Our computers got much bigger and if you bought yours in the last two years you probably do have enough room for at least some video — not to mention adequate processing power! ... And of course you’ve upgraded to a digital camcorder, which’ll have a usb link and doesn’t need no stinking video capture (well actually I did; eventually). ... Oops wait, that’d be your most recent upgrade; apparently the tip-top USB feature, available in every digital still camera, is still restricted to the very most deluxe hard-drive-based digicams. ... No, you’d’ve previously upgraded to a digital video/firewire and bought the extra-price add-on gadget for your PC (or own a recent Dell / Mac) — i.e. like a video capture card, except it works perfectly.... No? ... Well, I didn’t do that either; still stuck with cheap analog video. ... And I had some adventures copying VHSC and 8mm videotapes to DVD with stand-alone equipment, and that didn’t work out too bad.... But then I decided to push the envelope and bought a $30 KWorld (remember that name!) video capture PCI card for my 2003-or-so XP crate (2.5 GHz, 900 Mb RAM, lots of hard drive). I’m pretty sure it worked for at least a few minutes a month or two ago, but then some of the 5 million things changed and now it captures for less than a minute and then the frame freezes-up — until a reboot! (Which, incidentally, is probably a typical violation of Owen’s Third Rule i.e. there’s no way to reset the card in the software, so at least after it freezes it’d work when you started the stupid software again, and not have to reboot.) Hawkings OK!? I wandered the web a bit and discovered that this video freeze-up is accepted as a typical symptom of, say, your computer being under-powered for the application — i.e., it’s your fault! ... The USB 1.1 Hawking thing above — which I see I didn’t think so much-of in those olden days — never did that! It faults by dropping a few frames and says so in a little error caption! ... I know this, because in my video hysteria I installed all the Hawkings stuff again on the original 1999 Windows 98 / 224 meg RAM antique I got it for in the first place (the computer had of course been wiped in the interval) — and it worked! ... Good as ever, at any rate, and way better than the lamentable Kworld junk.... Dazzle DVD Recorder? — mebbe.... So from studious attention to the chit-chat on the web I concluded I knew nothing, and went and bought the cheapest thing at Best Buy: a $52 USB 2.0/XP Dazzle DVD Recorder which promises to copy DVDs right out of the box — which function I am testing even as a type, even ’though I’m really only interested in capture per se (i.e. because I already have a copy gadget), which I did verify it was up to also of course. ... I should note my DVDR drive is an external unit, also on a USB port although at a different end of the computer i.e. back and front — which may be significant or maybe just my drivelling ignorance.... DAZZLE TEST 1: FAILURE. By way of advertising my technical bona fides, I forgot an 8mm video tape is 120 minutes long and therefore concocted a 60 minutes direct-to-DVDR copy operation from my camcorder — during the course of which the Dazzle never froze-up, at least! ... But in the event, I’d have to say it failed: the video was herky jerky and somewhere in the middle it recorded a loud hissing noise instead of the audio for a while.... DAZZLE TEST 2: OK, but flickering line. So I figured my mistake in test #1 was specifying highest-quality video (see how I “bond” to the unit and try to excuse the poor wretched thing’s obvious failings!?) so I tried again with “Good” quality 133’/DVDR speed, which is obviously what I’m supposed to use for 8mm tapes, because that’s what fits 2 hours on a single DVDR — and in any case, 8mm isn’t that high quality. ... Much better! Not herky jerky, at least beyond the inimitable Owen handheld style! ... But there is a flickering line at the bottom of the image which some perfectionists might be annoyed-at; the illustration is a blow-up, but from higher-quality video captured to the hard-drive; the flickering line is larger on the direct-to-DVDR copy, which stands to reason since it was presumably lower resolution. ... So the Walmart gadget definitely wins this round, but for me this is good-enough for government work.... DAZZLE TEST 3: Total Victory! In minutes of testing, the fancy dangerous giant “Pinnacle Studio” program that came with the gadget seemed to capture without the flickering line! ... So all’s well that ends well, and the $52 Dazzle DVD Recorder’s a cool tool. ... And Oh! I almost forgot the most important part! It comes in a beautiful tear-drop plastic enclosure (with left/right audio, video, and svideo inputs, attached USB output cable) and a presentation-quality product box.... How ’Bout 7/09? Well now of course the Dazzle costs $40 at Best Buy — but it’s still there! ... However, the Pinnacle software that came with it really sucked! ... When I got around to uninstalling, I was quite perplexed about a haunted path element, until I found pinnacle had mutilated the autoexec.bat file — on XP — which apparently will change the path! — recalling thusly traditional hateful stupid software of ancient eras!... ... But we all actually have graduated to digital video recorders, at least I have (which probably means everybody); the cheap kind, what I call the “you tube” kind, the Mino Ultra kind, and I just copy the stupid “.AVI” files onto my hard drive through the USB! ... I will copy my Sony Camcorder tapes onto my Walmart RCA DVD burner no more forever.... The Excellent Free!! DVD Flick But then, you cry, how do I get my precious AVI files onto the obsolete DVDR media!?!?!? ... Well, quite; I used “DVD Flick” — google for it. ... Open source, seemed to work good; I donated $20 to the guy! ... Two notes: 1. copying to CDR doesn’t work; at least they don’t play back in my cheapo DVD player good (sound stutters). ... But DVDRs are cheap. ... 2. You have to specify a menu other than “nothing” to get one of those. ... But otherwise it seemed to work great, and the video / computer / DVD problem is solved completely forever at last. ... 3. Oh and here’s the distilled genius of my DVD Flick hopes and dreams for the ages, replacement help files in dvdfhelp.zip; check the readme.txt for meticulous incomprehensible instructions. Movie Maker The Web was scornful about Microsoft’s Windows Movie Maker — which I gather doesn’t actually make DVDs but might be useful for editing or something, i.e. as opposed to getting one of these really awful Roxio whoever vast bloated junk — but apparently, if you can find it on another machine, you can just copy the directory somewhere, and it’ll run. (Which of course all software would, if it wasn’t copy-protected up the fazoo.) But I couldn’t drop my precious mino AVI files on it! ... I mean it’s tricky anyway, since it is a Microsoft program, but the web informed me You have to download the ffdshow mpeg-4 video decoder from http://www.free-codecs.com/download/FFDShow.htm and weirdly, that actually worked; and didn’t seem to install any trojans or set the machine on fire or anything. ... How useful the software is I don’t really know; it has some silly transitions that look interesting.... — the strangely-poignant programmer Friday, July 17, 2009 2:19 pm

The UML, CMM (Capability Maturity Model), Blah Blah I noticed, reading Software Development Magazine 6/01, what these people are selling, which is (well okay maybe I already suspected) esoteric insider knowledge for the mystified. I mean, they’re at it hammer and tongs; there is no programming anymore, it’s all architecting modeling yammer yammer. And it probably sells, because there are a lot of frightened corporate types who are utterly clueless. There’s “Process for Sale” page 35 where they attempt to present exactly what it is that Rational (Rose no longer apparently) is doing these days, since the UML got too obviously pointless; it says they’re selling “process”. And then the ever-popular Larry Constantine “Methodological Agility” p 67: “At one end of the field, in scruffy jerseys of assorted color and stripe, lurk the unruly rabble representing the methodless chaos that all too often passes for programming in many organizations. ...” The other side is the high-minded UML etc. of course; they don’t even mention that Capability Maturity Model any more I gather, although there’s a letter “Indian Ascendancy” p 13 where some poor pilgrim chides the magazine for foolishly believing sub-continent claims in this regard, and the magazine says, essentially, never mind we’re much more esoteric than that, now. Anyway, the “scruffy jerseys” is me; actual people who write software. The ideal of, let’s call it the BS/SW Movement, is that all its practitioners get paid for telling the scruffy jerseys what to do. Since it’s true-enough nobody can figure-out how to tell them what to do, and someone who volunteers gets a certain amount of respect for free, it’s a scam that may well work. At the very least, each stupid corporation as it steps off the cliff may pay these people a bundle once or twice. It all fits into Owen’s Theory of American Marketing, just a tiny variation on “give them what they want”: “Pretend to give them what they want”. ... Do you have a quality problem? Just run a bunch of ads saying your company has really really REALLY high quality. Can’t get software to work? Hire someone who promises to make it work. When the software doesn’t work, the BS/SW practitioner’ll probably be long gone; but even if he gets to be the goat, he’ll be paid for it! The software may never actually be written, much less work, but the execs are covered, the BS/SW prac gets paid, and everybody’s happy! If only it weren’t for those dratted shareholders....

Owen’s Software Development Theory — or, The Guru Plague I wrote the above before — well I see before 9/11, and also before the intervening wham-bang outsourcing of all software development to Bengladesh, which has greatly upset the American programmer of late.... Also before I got around to reading Edward Yourdon’s Decline & Fall of the American Programmer © 1993, which I found in the MicroCenter bargain bin around 9/04. In this well-known landmark of the guru biz, Yourdon recommends Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) big time, only bothering to insist you first spend a few million additional dollars to dig your festering horde of savages without the light from the bleak Software Engineering Institute Process Maturity Model Level 1, which is approximately the level where millipedes and scorpions operate. Once on some decent level — only your guru can say — then you can spend the millions that CASE requires; which vast expenditures are, in any case, inevitable for any organization planning to stay in business for more than a few minutes.... The CASE recommendation alone is probably why Decline & Fall is $0.62 at Amazon; I believe it’s legal to shoot anyone who suggests CASE to Mr. Big Corporation these days.... The Million Dollar Book But Oh Dear Reader! —— it’s ALL just a scam. ... The jury is in! Occam has spoken; there is no quibble ... it’s the Million Dollar Book scam, and it goes like this: If you pay me $24.95 for my book, you will infallibly make a million dollars. To be sure, Yourdon et al would like a little more, anything from $10K to $10M and up — to implement what the guru wants, the guru’s princely expenditures; and if you spend money the way the guru likes, you’d be insane not to hire the guru also, at the guru’s princely standard rate. ... But after you buy my million dollar book, or spend guru-scale money, where are you? The envelope, please ... oops, it appears you’re screwed! If my million dollar book worked — everyone would buy it, and everyone would have a million dollars! If any of Yourdon’s — or pick a guru’s — advice worked, everyone would use it, and software everywhere would be finished on time and work perfectly. There is nothing else; all the rest is scam; it is without form or substance, it is darkness. ... Please note this is not comparison against the ideal; numerous software fads have proved-out and been adopted: C-language, to name one, is used everywhere — but I can definitely remember when it was young and innocent, and many carpers cat-called. ... C came to dominate the software biz because it worked better. Another more guruesque trend is structured programming, which also became normal — again, because structured programs are competitively superior to spaghetti code.... So I never really objected to these people soaking Mr. Giant Stupid Corporation; I mean, everybody else does, why not them? ... But I just recently realized one unfortunate side effect of this idiocy: Aging cranky lunatics like myself don’t get hired! In other areas of human endeavor — investment banking, building rocket ships, plumbing, etc. — most people dimly appreciate the primary value of experience. Not so in software, and visionaries like Yourdon and Constantine are one of the big reasons. They crank out a new system every 3 years or so, and naturally one of the primary features of all these new systems without fail is that you have to forget everything to appreciate the shining brilliance of the new thing. Naturally this is easier in the total absence of experience. .... I should note that, in a nicely complementary fashion, the seemingly-overwhelming tendency of software projects to fail — aging lunatics or no — is in itself a primary cause of the guru plague..... Now I will warm things up a bit here, and mention a second obvious result of the Guru Plague that also occurred to me: Outsourcing! Yes Ladies and Gents, where do you think giant corporations got the idea they can just ship all this junk over the rainbow? ... Why lookee here, Bengladeshi Limited’s got their Level 201/2 ISO 10000 Super Secret Decoder Ring Capability! They don’t have to know anything! They already know everything! Yup you heard it here first! You really did; I never saw anyone else dream this up. ... And it’s absolutely true! Buy my book! Two Actual Suggestions on How to Make Software Work Well, obviously you should hire aging cranky guys with experience. ... Actually when I look around at people who get this stuff to work, I see organizations like IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, all of whom last I checked value experience. They cultivate a technical culture inside the company and gladly promote from within. They probably throw the aging cranky guys in the lobby out also, but not if they already work there. So if you want to develop your own competent software department, hire some people, fire the ones who don’t work out — but try to keep the good ones. This usually means paying them more than they’re worth. Lots more. The idea is to get people with experience in your own company, with your products. If all else fails, hire some aging cranky guy who might have experience. If nothing else, he’ll entertain the young ’uns.... Actually I just realized I’ve reiterated Owen’s First Rule.... So let’s move on to the second rule, which is TEST. The gurus say this too, but it really should be the first rule, even ’though it’s Owen’s Second Rule. ... I was interacting with some corporate characters not long ago, and here is the Owen Secret to Successful Projects (drum roll).... Arrange, ahead of time, to test. If, for instance, you’re planning on connecting your giant factory floor assembly line to a fancy database for your Enterprise Resource Planning and heaven knows what all, why not plan ahead to spend money on a mock-up test system? You know, somewhere where you can see why it doesn’t work, that doesn’t involve shutting down your expensive production line? ... No, no, I must be wrong, that’s too EZ. ... And after all, software always works the first time. ... Right, spend months on the flow charts and UML, capability maturity model, ISO-90002, but don’t spend the $10 or $20K — heck, how much do microcomputers cost these days? — to build a test system.... Inspirational Conclusion There you have it! And you didn’t have to buy my stupid book. ... Sadly, however, my advice will not infallibly guarantee success. Au contraire, the best I can do is warn you off folly. ... To succeed, you gotta do it yourself; sorry, no magic no tricks.... ... The Last Days ... And then, in the end times, Dr. Dobbs, a major purveyor of Guru plaguery in its days on the earth, in its after-death zombie state ran an “article” about “Agile Development” — an exciting guru movement championed by a frequent writer in the magazine when it walked the earth, Scott Ambler, whose voice I must admit I thought had been silenced forever!... The article (“Agile Processes Go Lean”, Dave West, page 32 Information Week 4/27/09) was pitiful and hilarious. ... It seems that fully “30% of the respondents were following an Agile method” in a Forrester Research poll. Which, after 37 years of relentless Agile propaganda seems pretty unimpressive. And then author Dave West reveals at the end of the story that he is a “senior analyst at Forrester Research”! ... What a coincidence, eh? The story is that even ’though Agile is the most wonderful way on earth to produce programs, in some organizations trouble arises; darkness, strife, confusion. ... This, we are informed, is because the organizations aren’t “lean” — “lean” being another guru cult that non-programmers — that’s right, everybody else in the company! — must follow so that their Agile programmers can fly like eagles. ... So when any of the 30% of top corporations doing Agile projects might attempt to throw the guru out the freight door on a trucking sledge, it’s only because they aren’t lean-enough!... And thus, the Dobbs zombie eats our brains. ... Or at least the brains of the very few people who got past the first paragraph of the article without laughing and laughing. ... But their brains probably aren’t that good anyway. ... The article was followed with a short interview with the Agile guru himself Scott Ambler, who sniffed at the 30% figure, revealing that “69% of organizations were doing one or more agile projects” right now! ... And that “over the next couple of years, we’re going to see a movement away from the Level 1 processes to the more robust and mature Level 2 processes”. ... Oh my goodness, can we bear to wait? But It’s Just Corporate Software, Owen!!! And then I read the invaluable Spolsky who had this to say (@ 5/6/02!!): Whenever you read one of those books about programming methodologies written by a full time software development guru/consultant, you can rest assured that they are talking about internal, corporate software development. Not shrinkwrapped software, not embedded software, and certainly not games. Why? Because corporations are the people who hire these gurus. They’re paying the bill. (Trust me, id software [famous game company] is not about to hire Ed Yourdon to talk about structured analysis.) And I have to admit, I didn’t realize this! Right here in 2009! ... I mean I sort-of grokked these people hung-out in places with dubious atriums, and they were out to fool “Mr. Businessman”, but I missed for all these wandering years the central focus of the scam. ... One reason for that would be that their magazines and books never ever admit it and always pretend they’re talking about totally general global eternal principles. ... That is, they lied.... But it does provide a kind of relief; my “million dollar book” critique still applies, but I always wondered how they got away with it year after year — and the answer is, it happened in “secret” in the inner depths of the corporation, where no-one could see, except for idiots like myself who read these scammy magazines. ... In these latter days, you will find Microsoft software executives or even Brian Kernighan (The Practice of Programming, Kernighan, Pike) writing guruistic tomes — but only because there appeared to be free money around!

The End of the Guru Plague? But all things pass in time; maybe sooner than I thought. What with the failure of computer advertising and, consequently, computer magazines, the gurus are on the run. We may not see their like again! Without computer magazines, where can they run their resume enhancers? I’ll miss the magazines, but I just realized the unanticipated benefit: these guys’ll have to work for a living! ... Of course they can goto the web, but it’s not so easy there; you have to compete with any wandering blogger who may well be far more competent than you; your grandiose claims and important theories will have to stand alone, without four-color witnesses on all sides! Of course the web is at least as cute as any magazine presentation, so if you’ve got an idea, you’ve got just as much chance. But being a great buddy of the magazine’s management is totally unimportant. ... Bon voyage, arrogant know-it-all mystifiers; enjoy your retirement.... — Wednesday, August 9, 2006 1:23 pm