In Memory of Randy Pausch

Not having met the man, there's not a lot I can say. But Carnegie Mellon ETC co-founder Randy Pausch passed away today. He's had a long, spirited fight with pancreatic cancer, and gave a rather rousing "last lecture" at CMU last year.

You'll find nary a soul that didn't view Randy as a charismatic, intelligent, cheerful guy. Rest in peace, Randy. As Brian Transeau says, see you on the other side.

Here are some good related links.
Randy's Wikipedia page
The Last Lecture

Using Flip Ultra Video Without Bundled Software

Macworld has a review of what seems to be a pretty cool little digital camcorder, the Flip Ultra. Small, point-and-shoot, USB. Very easy to grok. One caveat is that it encodes its videos with the 3ivx encoder, so you "need" to install the software that comes with it.

If you'd rather just use your QuickTime-enabled software (like, say, iMovie) to edit your Flip Ultra software without ever installing some OEM piece of software, check out Perian. As you can see here at their supported formats page, it rolls an open-source 3ivx encoder into Quicktime. No fuss at all.

Of course, Macworld didn't seem to have any problems with the built-in software, but why install yet another transient video program when you can just keep Perian up-to-date and support all of those formats at once?

Great Design Alongside Batman Hopes

Oh hai. Happy Independence Day, fellow Yanks.

I just got done reading Scenes from a Franchise, a piece on the upcoming Batman sequel, The Dark Knight. Includes fun excerpts from NY Times reviews of old Batman movies, as well as a hopeful wish that Batman Begins won't be the only good Batman movie.

More striking than the writing itself, however, is the design of the site. It looks like a tax form, or a technical manual, but I just can't stop exploring it. This site is a dream to navigate, with nothing more than succinct, monochrome precision. Very cool.