Good piece on Forbes.com about how Microsoft is trying to redefine and expand the search landscape into a battlefield on which it can defeat Google. The newest incarnations of Internet Explorer feature a different approach to search which enables the user to select a single search destination source (e.g., Wikipedia, Amazon, Facebook) for the search to be conducted against.

I predict abysmal failure. How many times do you know up front which destination is likely to have the thing you want to search for? And when you do, wouldn't you just go to that site and conduct your search using their built-in mechanisms? This looks and feels like yet another attempt by Microsoft to guess what users want in terms of search rather than observing and asking us.

The good news is that, according to the Forbes report at least, Microsoft is taking a very hands-off approach, letting destination sites manage their own search process and format results as they wish. One part of the bad news: 27 Web sites have already signed up to use the no-obligation service, greatly complicating the life of a user who might otherwise perhaps be inclined to try a particular search site or destination.

CNET.com's analysis of Joe Biden's record in the Senate bodes ill for consumers battling draconian and Dickensian policies on the part of the entertainment industry. The man who is likely to be the next Vice-President of the United States has a consistent track record of supporting the FBI and industry interests over those of consumers. He recently sponsored an attempt to authorize $1 Billion to study and monitor peer-to-peer networks.

Yikes.

Some friends of mine didn't get to watch the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics and wanted to see them on Sunday after a church event. We had recorded it but my house is small and with my eight-month-old granddaughter in temporary residence, space is at a premium. So I figured I'd just hook up my laptop to the church projection system and bring up the replay on nbcolympics.com. Should be fine, right?

Wrong.

Two problems.

First, as far as I can tell from one of the worst-organized sites I've ever seen, there is no replay of the entire ceremony. There are highlights, interviews, stories about the opening but not the entire ceremony. Stupid.

Second -- and my main complaint today -- when I did try to watch some video from that site on my OS X box, I was required to download Microsoft's Silverlight media plug-in before I could do so. Never mind that both Flash and QuickTime (not to mention Windows Media Player) are already widely installed. Microsoft (the "MS" in"MSNBC") is in a position to force consumers to use their inferior technology because of their involvement with the network.

NBC's entitled to its copyright protection which prevented the Olympics opening ceremony from being showed elsewhere but if they don't make the content available on their site without a penalty, that ought to forfeit that right.

I am looking for someone with experience using Apple's iMovie product to create composite videos from multiple sets of input clips. My particular concern is work flow hints.

I have three input videos: a live camera shot of the presenter, a live camera shot with microphone-based audio of the projected screen, and a live screen capture of the presenter's computer. Most of the video wants to consist of the second and third segments, taking the video from the screen capture and replacing its audio track with the audio from the camera mike. But there are a half-dozen places where I want to do cutaways to shots of the instructor and/or audience members from the first camera.

The problem I have encountered -- and it's a logistical thing, I think -- is that when I trim clips out of one of the videos and move it into the project panel, overlay the audio and then find a need to edit one or the other, time codes get out of whack. So I can no longer easily find a particular segment of the project in one of the piles of clips. Am I making sense"?

Anyway, I suspect there's a way around this that probably involves approaching the project in a fundamentally different way from what I've been doing. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd sure appreciate them. I'm a relative neophyte to video editing but I have spent a good bit of time learning FinalCut Pro (which I'm not using for this project only because it feels like overkill; maybe that's my first mistake?) and although I've forgotten much of it I'm sure I could pick it up again with a few days of study and practice.

If you have any ideas, please post a reply here (if you're a member or want to become one) or email me at dan_at_shafermedia_dot_com.

Here's the answer I got: A post on the imovie08 blog by a helpful guy named only Aaron.

On the recommendation of a good friend who is pretty tech savvy I bought a Blue Ant Supertooth 3 (ST3) through Amazon.com. I use an older iPhone.

First-time setup went flawlessly.

Nothing has worked since.

It turns out the ST3 and the iPhone don't talk to each other for address book upload (I blame Apple for this; how can they charge me several hundred dollars for a phone that lacks a simple connection feature that $79 phones *all* have?). I guess I could learn to live with that (though voice dialing was one thing I thought I was getting with the ST3). But then I went to use the ST3 and it wasn't paired with the iPhone any longer. I didn't do anything in between those experiences other than try to upload the directory.

Now when the ST3 is power-cycled it says "No phone detected." I try to pair up from the iPhone and even when the iPhone detects the ST3, pairing us impossible. Either nothing happens or I get asked for a code and when I enter 0000, I get an "invalid code" error.

IOW, this is a completely negative experience.

I hear good things about Blue Ant support. Guess I'll find out tomorrow.

UPDATE: I called Blue Ant support and they got me paired again. Seems that if you run into this kind of problem, you have to hold down the green button to power it on and then keep holding it until the pairing process starts again. I don't find that in their documentation or troubleshooting guide. So now it works but the address book doesn't upload. Blue Ant informed me that cracked iPhones on other networks do the upload fine, so it seems it's likely an AT&T issue.

I just talked to the local AT&T store about getting a new iPhone 3G. Back ordered two to three weeks. Ludicrous. Apple has frequently had difficulty over the years anticipating demand and finding itself with backlogs but with a product with a track record like the iPhone had before the new one was launched, this is just lousy management.

I see MacWorld has reviewed the Flip Video camera. Great piece of hardware and very Mac-like. My wife uses hers constantly now that we have temporarily taken custody of our seven-month-old granddaughter Mattie. This sucker is amazing. Ease of use is unbelievable. There's literally nothing to it.

The only thing the reviewer didn't comment on is that the Flip Video has a zoom lens feature as well. This sucker's well worth the price.

My buddy Asher Snyder pointed me at TileStack today. This is a site that lets you upload your old HyperCard stacks and turn them into Web applications. They also have an editing environment for creating new Web apps and widgets using the old HyperCard paradigm and HyperTalk scripting language.

Back in the day when HyperCard was the rage in the world of Apple, Bob Perez and I had lunch one day. (Bob was the first HyoerCard evangelist and a great human being.) He asked me what I thought might happen if Apple stuck a TCP/IP stack inside HyperCard so people could share stacks over a LAN. We kicked it around a bit but the project never got any traction inside Apple. If they'd have done that, they'd have been the foundation for the World Wide Web and all of that would have happened sooner.

You just never know.

I wonder how many of the old HyperCarders are going to show up at TileStack before it's over. XCMD Guru Frederic Rinaldi is apparently already there and I'm sure Danny Goodman won't be far behind if he isn't already there incognito.

Insanely weirdly wonderful.

Yesterday, a client's site stopped working. It took a while for us to figure out what happened, but it turned out to be a decision by Dreamhost, my hosting service for the past three or so years, to install a PHP security upgrade to version 5.2.6. That upgrade -- perfectly properly installed -- broke the way my application's license for some underlying technology was expected to be referenced. Pretty obtuse stuff, at least for me.

Now I've used Dreamhost long enough to be pretty comfortable finding my way around but the recommended solution to this problem was to recompile PHP to change the way my app looked for the license file. WTF? I don't want to compile code; that's why I use a managed hosting service. And that's when Dreamhost's absolutely abysmal tech support jumped up and bit me. (More below.)

I asked one of my colleagues, who's also a developer on the code base and an expert on systems stuff, what I should do. He suggested changing hosting services. That seemed a little drastic but I was in a place where my client was rapidly losing confidence in me. So while he went off to see if he could figure out an easier way to solve the problem at DH, I went to the new service he recommended, Bluehost.

Wow. The difference in support is night and day. Dreamhost's "support" consists of posting an email from a Web form and waiting to hear from someone. No phone number. No chat. You can ask that they call you with resolution but frankly that's never worked once for me. So I posted the note and went off to look at Bluehost.

Bluehost has a toll-free number staffed 24/7. They also have an online chat support system that seems to be up most if not all of the time. I asked five questions about Bluehost -- including how to solve the problem we were facing at Dreamhost -- and got immediate answers, twice on the phone and three times via chat. Holy crap. Actual support by real people who seemed to understand my questions and know the answers. Unheard of.

In less time than it took Dreamhost to give me their unacceptable compile-your-own-PHP response, I had signed up for Bluehost, established my client's domain there, transferred all the files, and had things 80% working. We'd have had it all done by that time but we didn't take time to discover that Bluehost had built-in support for the licensing technology we were using.

My system administrator took a look at Bluehost for me. He started out skeptical. At $6.95/mo. (for a 24-month program), he sort of wondered out loud how good it could be. Then he spent about 30 minutes exploring it and announced he was moving his personal sites over to it as soon as he could get the time.

Between Bluehost and Yugma, I'm starting to have my faith in the service aspect of our business restored!

My good friend Paul Anacker is dead. I just got the news today in a letter from his mother. I am incredulous. Even though Paul had suffered for many years with a diseased pancreas and even though everyone who knew him knew he would inevitably die younger than he should after having lived far more painfully than anyone should have to, still news of his passing came as a shock.

Paul was the consummate gentleman, a great raconteur, a magician of the first rank, a technologist, a writer and a wonderful human being. And he was a great and true and loving friend.

He and I worked on numerous projects over the years, ranging from collaborating on books and magazine articles to poring over legal briefs as he defended the rights of medical patients to have access to certain classes of drugs that the FDA, in its Big-Pharma-Protecting wisdom, had deemed unsuitable for human consumption despite massive mountains of evidence. We disagreed -- sometimes loudly but always good-naturedly -- about whether software emulation could ever become a mainstream solution to many computing problems (he was right; I was wrong).

Last time I saw Paul, he was looking pretty good, dressed in a suit and tie as he escorted me and my wife and two other couples on a personal tour of the Magic Castle in SoCal. He made the tour as magical as the place and the magicians who inhabited it, most of whom he knew by first name. That was nearly four years ago; I remember because it was on the drive home from that visit that six of us sat in a car and listened in stunned as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove stole the White House for a second time.

Since then, one of the other men on that trip, my best friend Rev. Rory Elder, has also passed away.

The bad thing about getting older, my lovely father-in-law used to say, was you got to watch too many of your friends die.

I loved you, Paul. Still do. I'm glad you're free of pain. And I know you're happy. But one thing, buddy: don't try to pull any magic tricks where you are now. I think they know how they all work.

Peace