Scientology Volunteer Ministers, on arrival to Haiti, did an up-to-date & on the ground assessment of the area. Based on this, the most important and urgent needs were isolated. If you’re planning on assisting with the relief efforts in any way, think with these as some of the core items needed:
These are:
VOLUNTEER MINISTERS AND VOLUNTEERS WITH THE FOLLOWING SKILLS OR DISASTER AREA EXPERIENCE:
Volunteers are needed with the following skills:
- Search and Rescue experience - Anybody with skills in setting up communication lines - Coordination skills - Crowd control skills
Anyone with these skills or who wishes to be trained to help in this capacity, contact the Volunteer Ministers Disaster Response office, and they can get you free training for this.
MATERIALS THAT ARE MOST URGENTLY NEEDED:
-Water (especially water sanitation equipment/materials) - Medical supplies - Non-perishable food supplies - Other commodities such blankets, tents, sanitation materials (e.g. soap, toilette paper, Diapers, shampoo)
Your help is definitely wanted! If you wish to help in any of these areas, contact the Volunteer Ministers Disaster Response office and they can direct you to the way you can best assist from your area, skills, and capacity to help.
You’d have to be living in a cave to not know by now that Haiti has suffered a 7.0 richter scale earthquake, and with an already-shot infrastructure, is now in a worst-case-scenario disaster as volunteer organizations struggle to coordinate their efforts and bring help to the millions that need it in Haiti.
I’ve got a little 4-month-old, so I’m not in a position to go down there and pitch in with the Volunteer Ministers already on their way there, but what I can do is help get the word out.
In coordination with the Scientology Volunteer Ministers of Washington, D.C., we now have a blog to give you the latest on what’s going on in Haiti, as well as a twitter account that will be kept up to date on how you can assist – or how you can get help if you or someone you know is in need.
Unfortunately, the wonderful Flickr map only lets you display as many points on the map (at a time) as you can fit in thumbnail photos across your screen. So, for someone like me who meticulously geo-tags every photo taken (in the hopes I’ll one day be able to locate the ideal geo-data visualization app for my photos) the closest thing I can get to a good map is the Flickr Organizr. Here’s a photo of how it looks:
You try installing the update that fixes the “Install Cancelled Issue”, and you repeatedly get a dialog that pops up each day trying to install the update, and then fails with an error of “Installation Canceled”.
Methinks they haven’t fixed the bug!
(BTW this is relevent to the HP dv7 laptop, and HP Photosmart C4580 printer on Windows Vista x64.)
I just posted on the quality & feature differences between Flickr video and YouTube, saying also that their mobile feature sets were quite similar, though video quality was about the same.
How wrong I just was, with respect to mobile video quality.
Have a look at these two samples, taken on an iPhone 3G, of the same video mentioned in my last post:
For some reason, the H.264 video that YouTube is encoding for the iPhone is of just the absolute worst quality – throughout the video, one can barely even tell what’s happening. Whereas, in contrast, the Flickr video is totally sharp and looks fantastic.
Odd – that was a comparison I didn’t expect. I’d be interested to see if that’s an iPhone-only difference, or if that’s the case on Windows Mobile and Android devices as well.
Flickr has a little known, and not oft-used ability for users to upload videos, as well as photos. As Flickr is primarily a photo site for photo enthusiasts, the purpose of Flickr videos was not to host the latest Shakira music video or Baby Bloopers w/Gangsta Rap soundtrack – but rather to augment one’s photographic exploits with moving pictures as well. Thus the reasoning behind Yahoo! putting a 90-second limit on Flickr video.
But, as photo display quality is such a hallmark of Flickr photos, I decided to do a little comparison on video quality, and compare it to the 900lb Gorilla, YouTube.
Following is a video I took of the first mountain bike ride on my new mountain bike, taken yesterday. It’s got a lot of full-screen motion, a worst-case scenario for the Flash Video encoders both at Flickr and YouTube. Here’s how they look:
FLICKR:
YOUTUBE:
Interestingly enough, it appears to me that the YouTube video is a bit crisper and has better motion details than the Flickr video. YouTube used to have positively the worst video quality, but it looks like they’ve definitely made some improvements of late.
But then, in terms of a features comparison, let’s take a look at the way these two services display video, to get an idea of which would be the better context to display such video clips in:
Video Tools:
YouTube is obviously the hands-down winner here. They offer annotations, audio change-outs (so you can swap out my grunting and “whoa nelly” with Crystal Method or whatever), the ability to change out the displayed thumbnail, closed-captioning, etc. Flickr offers no such tools – just the ability to upload, and then edit the caption, title & tags just like any Flickr Photo.
Display Context:
Probably the best reason why one would want to display your videos on Flickr is the display context of your video. If you’re in the middle of a camping trip, and you take 10 photos and 2 videos with your digital camera, it makes the most sense to be able to display all of those items in the same place. Displaying just the photos on Flickr or Photobucket or Facebook, and then putting the videos on YouTube doesn’t allow you to simply send someone to one page, and have them be able to see your trip.
To wit, see this set of my recent cross-country trip, which has a number of videos interspersed with the photo content – but the photo content all kept in order and in context.
Also, Flickr gives you the ability to display all your photos on a map, which gives yet another option for display context.
Mobile Capabilities:
Now this is an area where I would have expected YouTube to be in the lead completely, but Yahoo! has been putting quite a bit of work lately into their mobile sites. If you browse to this video on Flickr using an iPhone browser, you’ll see the page reformatted for the iPhone, complete with working video links. Clicking on the video then pulls up an H.264 version of the video that is playable on the iPhone. Slick!
Kat & I had another installment of our birthing class tonight – probably close to one of our last, seeing as though Kat’s in her 38th week now.
Definitely has been an intriguing experience. I wouldn’t have thought I’d have so much to learn, seeing as though my mom was a registered nurse working in Obstetrics & Gynecology for 15 years of my life. I was the only one in my 4th-grade class who knew what gonorrhea was. And, as my momma worked for a while for a company that made educational birth videos, she’d often take home ones for me to watch, like the action-packed thriller “Birth in the Squatting Position”.
However, now that all of these things are happening to my own wife, it’s a whole lot different, and I end up with a lot more questions.
Unfortunately, due to my nerdiness, I end up belting out zingers in class like today asking our instructor, “…if the baby is not in the correct presentation when she goes into labor, is there any way to edit that nondestructively?” I later realized that my wife was not a photoshop file, and the baby’s presentation had nothing to do with the presentation layer or the OSI Model, and that my question probably didn’t make much sense to the others.
Oh well, at least I’m learning. :)
Also – here’s some more big-belly photos, so you can see the chronology.
Microsoft’s newly-branded Bing search seems to be getting faster at indexing & displaying relevant blog content.
Just a month ago, shortly after the Bing launch, I was doing some tests on how fast Bing was indexing content as compared to Yahoo and Google – especially with respect to blogs.
I put up a number of blog posts on Bing Maps and KML, and then 1-2 days later, began searching around on Google and Bing for more info on Bing Maps KML implementation. Within about an hour, Google had already indexed my KML blog posts, and had them available in the results, integrated in to the normal SERPs. Bing, however, had none of my blog posts indexed, and after a week still had none of my posts indexed. Now, these were posts I also went and threw links to on forums and all over the web, as I was trying to get a specific question answered – so both Google and Bing had spiders all over my site basically hourly. However, 2 weeks later, I was searching for more info on Bing Maps and KML, and in Google I almost couldn’t get anything but my blog posts – whereas Bing still was not indexing it. They’re showing now.
Well, now the situation appears to have changed. I made a post on one of my other blogs about a new Dianetics DVD that came out. I haven’t really linked this one from anywhere, so I thought it’d be interesting to see how they were showing up.
Oddly enough, in both Bing and Google, my posts are showing up on the first page of results when searching for “new dianetics dvd”. Bing was indexing & showing blog post results after only about 10 hours of having been posted.
In any case, I thought it an interesting observation – and one that’s probably going to get me to use Bing more – as when trying to solve programming problems, the answers are commonly on forums and blogs, something that was getting a poor hit rate on Bing but showing relevant results in Google.
Ironic that the day I finally get my home Internet installed (Verizon FiOS) I also find out that my iPhone 3G does indeed support tethering on AT&T’s 3G GPRS network, and that it works surprisingly well and easily.
Here at my home, it’s not particularly fast — about half of the rated throughput I should be getting, but it beats the pants off of the slow wifi I’ve been using at coffee shops and such. Now, at least, I can go wherever I want to and work — not just the places that have Wi-Fi.
How does one do this? Just use your iPhone Safari browser, and browse to this address. You’ll want to check your contract to make sure that if you use data, it will indeed be free. For me, I’m already paying for unlimited data, so no worries there.
But you just install the configs for your provider, and blam — you’ve got tethering.
Now, all of the sudden, the money I’m shelling out for this AT&T service is seeming a lot more worth it!
In importing KML into a Bing Maps (nee MS Virtual Earth) map, you will run into a limit of how many items or shapes it will allow you to render.
The reason for this is performance, as it’s generally understood that one will start getting degraded performance as you go up over 200 shapes being put on the map at any one time. Well, I did indeed experience such in IE8, but not in Safari, Chrome or Firefox – so, many of us may want/need to put more than their default 200 shapes on the screen.
To do this, you use the MaxImportedShapes property of the VEShapeSourceSpecification class (defined here), done something like this:
function EventMapLoad() { var shapeLayer = new VEShapeLayer(); // var shapeLimit = new VEShapeSourceSpecification.MaxImportedShapes = 500; var shapeSpec = new VEShapeSourceSpecification(VEDataType.ImportXML, http://myhost.com/myKmlFile.kml, shapeLayer); shapeSpec.MaxImportedShapes = 500; map.ImportShapeLayerData(shapeSpec); }
function CreateMap() { map = new VEMap(’myMap’); map.onLoadMap = EventMapLoad; map.LoadMap(null, 3, VEMapStyle.Hybrid); } </script>
This will set the maximum number of shapes to 500. I haven’t tested with much more than that, so performance will almost certainly be intolerable if you kick that up to 1000 shapes plus.
Scientology Volunteer Ministers, on arrival to Haiti, did an up-to-date & on the ground assessment of the area. Based on this, the most important and urgent needs were isolated. If you’re planning on assisting with the relief efforts in any way, think with these as some of the core items needed:
