Category: Reviews

The Search for DMX Lighting Control Software.

At my church, we recently started upgrading our platform lighting system. Our original platform lights, consisted of some old flood lights on a light bar. Over the years, they have slowly died. When we replaced them, we had 3 working lights left. Our platform looked a little anemic. :)

The decision was made to upgrade, so we talked to Sweetwater, and they recommended using DMX controlled lights. That basically meant we could control those lights from a control board or software. We bought their recommendations… Full RGB and some moveable spotlights.

We chose to use software to control the lights. So we purchased the Enttec DMX USB Pro Mk2. It’s a USB to DMX device. A very nice little piece of hardware that does what it should… and does it well.

Enttec DMX USB Pro Mk2

Then began the long and arduous process of finding software to control the lights. Enttec provides a list of compatible software on their website. Unfortunately, much of the software for controlling DMX systems looks like it was designed by engineers. Drunken engineers who wanted to see how many buttons they can put on a screen. And use some really old developer UI tools to do it. I suffered through some truly horrible UIs.

After trying several tools, I found LightFactory. It had a couple of things going for it. 1) a working demo. You get a 1 minute delay on startup… and then you can use the software “unlimited” for 30 minutes. 2) it was reasonable priced. 3) it was one of the few that just worked. (you’d be surprised how many of the software options I tried just did not work)

We are now in the process of tuning and tweaking our lighting. I’ll try to post another piece with some pictures of our new lighting setup.

Taking the Plunge – Installing Windows Vista

Well, I did it. I’ve installed Windows Vista. The install went pretty smooth. I had to locate drivers for my NIC and my Video Card. Both came on the Motherboard DVD, so I didn’t have any troubles there.

Windows Updates gave me a bit of a fit. I think I was trying to install too many things at once. Once I settled down on only installing updates, then installing Office 2007, and then installing my other apps, it worked fine.

Speaking of Office 2007, I’m posting the article from within Word 2007. More of a test run to see if I like it. So far, it works ok… I won’t know until I’ve had a chance to post some articles with pictures and such.

But, back to the Vista stuff. I like the theme colors. But I’m still scrambling trying to find some of the settings that I like to tweak. One item that I really like is the new search functionality. Hit the Windows key, and start typing. It may even cause me to give up SlickRun… we’ll see…

That’s all for now. I have a birthday party to go to. I’ll try and post more thoughts on Vista later.

Chrome – As good as it seems?

Well, I’ve now spent a full day using Chrome, the new browser from Google.

There are many things I miss.  AdBlock.  Better GMail 2.  A download manager (I like DownThemAll for Firefox.) The status bar (ok, so I like to hover over a link and see where it’s going to open).  Update: DOH! You can hover over links.  It gives you a popup status bar, which goes away after moving off the link.

There are many things I like.  Chrome is fast.  It’s wicked easy to move tabs into a new window, and back to the original window.  Firefox will let you do it, but it reloads the page.  Chrome simple moves the existing process into a new window.  Or back into a tab.

The Google Chrome EULA is a bit scary.  Supposedly, it’s going to be modified.  But we’ll have to wait and see if it truly is.  UPDATE: Here is a more "authoritative" post from Matt Cutts on the Chrome EULA question.

And they did change the EULA:

Update, Sept. 3rd 2008: Earlier today, Google changed section 11 of the EULA to read as follows:

11. Content license from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

I’m looking forward to new features as time goes on.  Google is usually pretty good at adding new features based on user response, so I’m sure we’ll see new stuff soon.

I haven’t done any web development yet with Chrome, so I haven’t missed my developer tools in Firefox.  But I’m sure I will.  Of course, any decent developer uses several different browsers to ensure compatibility anyhow. :)

Chrome is here!

I just downloaded Chrome.  The new web browser from Google.  My first impression is… this thing is FAST!  I mean very fast.  Pages that took a half second to load are now instant.  GMail (which uses a lot of JavaScript) is noticeable faster.

I haven’t put Chrome through it paces yet.  I’ve only tried it with about 5 of the normal sites I use.  I’ll post more as I have more to say.  I’ll also try to get up some screen shots, and talk about their user interface.

When asked "Why build a new browser"? Google Said:

Since we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if you started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

So today we’re releasing the beta version of a new open source browser: Google Chrome.

You can read more about Chrome from the Chrome website on Google.  There are screen shots and a full digital book (comic book format) that explains the guts of Chrome and why it’s supposed to be better.  Oh yeah… it’s Open Source too… so that should make some folks happy.

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