NVidia, Premiere Pro, CUDA
Next project: do something about all those hours of HD video footage that I collected over the years. they are all clips and all in full HD, 30 Mbps/second, recorded on my Olympus EP1. The problem with the EP1 is that it records in a relatively non standard format: 30 FPS motion jpeg and until a year ago (last time I looked) there weren't many programs that could handle it. I found that MainConcept has a good codec that would work with CS4, but the graphics performance of my system was too poor to allow for any interactive editing.
Enter CS5.5 stage left.
Enter Nvidia GTX 460 stage right.
Enter new quad core upgrade .... falling in from the top.
with CS5 its possible to use the 228 CUDA cores on the GTX460 (the card is from EVGA), albeit with some help (see this the excellent writeup on http://www.studio1productions.com/) . I've not enabled it yet (I only got the card a little while ago) but even without the hardware support from the GTX460 the difference with CS5 is very noticeable, I can move back and forward in the clip and apply transformations (color corrections) in real-time and the CPU is not maxed out like it was with my previous card a Nvidia 7600 (which, I checked, was 4 years old ... ahum)
update: I enabled the CUDA processing for Premiere Pro CS5 with the little app from studio1productions ... works like a charm and it has made the system even faster.
more later.
SuisseID, OSX, OpenSC, and Quovadis
after a lot of fiddling I turns out that OSX 10.6 is not supported (at least not fully) by Quovadis' SuisseID implementation. I could not get the certificates to show up in the Keychain so that I could use them with the Mail application.
However, I did come across opensc (link) and this seemed to work wonderfully well and since i installed it I can see the certificates in the keychain and a separate chain and send authenticated emails from the Mail.app.
For some reason I did notice a high CPU spike for the pcscd application, i'm not sure whether this is a anomaly or a result of running opensc, I killed it and once I re-inserted the application it once more spiked 
update 10/05/2011: the friendly people from Quovadisglobal.com gave me a pre-release piece of software that support the SuisseID (software is called Sign!) under OSX 10.6. I instaled it and it works like a charm! nice work Quovadis!
openID, SuisseID, Clavid
in my Sunday-Project I also figured out that you can add SuisseID to a specific OpenID provider (Clavid.com). This means that you can use strong authentication via the smart card for any openID enabled site, very nice ... but a little paranoid I think.
if you are using FireFox to do this ... be sure to read the final two notes on the Quovadis site (link) otherwise it won't work (cost me a good 45 minutes ... RTFM once more)
lastpass, quovadis, and smart-card reader
I ordered a SuisseID certificate (even though i'm dutch I can still order one as long as I live in Switzerland). Its basically a digital certificate that authenticated me as me for any government site (if I choose to use it). The "me as me" part means I can only get one once they have authenticated me through my passport and the local community where I live have to puts it ID check stamp on it.
So now I've got this certificate and cardreader (link) ... now what ?!
Last week lastpass.com (which I use) thought they might have some problems with their master password data base (link) and rather than go the Sony way they announced it straight away and suggested that everybody change their master password (whcih is needed in order to decrypt the password database on your machine) good on ya lastpass, better be save that sorry (plus the fact that their whole business model runs on this ... if they were to make a mistake they can close shop)
It turns out that you can tell the lastpass site/browser extension to use a card-reader / smart-card authentication (link), which means I can only get access to the password data base if I have the smartcard on me. Very nice and very secure! note: I did have to re-install the lastpass plugin after I updated chrome, small price to pay I guess.
note: you can disable the smart-card authentication on the login prompt, this will send an email to confirm to you registered email address. So they are not in full paranoia mode, which is nice.
update: one nasty thing: lastpass shows the smart-card password in plaintext, i.e. not hidden behind '*' ... bad !!
EC2 – spot instances
1 week ago I mentioned that I had installed a blog for the 10th time, make it the 11th now., and I lost all blogs since then
The reason? well I use a spot instance from EC2 for this machine, its a lot cheaper and I set the /hour maximum price to $0.12, same prices as a normal instance. I figured that none would buy a spot instance if the price would be higher than the regular fixed price .... I was wrong, the price went above 0.12 last night and at 02:00 my node went down and all information stored on the C: drive was lost. Of course I keep external drive in EC2 for all photo, backup, etc. However, I has not had the time to backup the MySQL database that power the wordpress instance.
NOTE TO SELF: set the maximum/hour price high ... now its at $0.20/hour. and BACKUP THE DATABASE YOU NUMPTY
better luck this time.