GeoProf
Downloads: 702
Posts: 256
Smile Score: +152 
About Me
I am a Free member
Gender: Male
I'm a professor of Geography and chair of the Department of Geography at a Southern California university. I study the political economy of natural resource development — especially water and fossil fuels — and most of my research and publications have focused on Turkey in particular and the Middle East in general. Early in my career, this led me to spend two years as a visiting scholar at a highly regarded university in Istanbul, and another year at a university in Turkish Northern Cyprus.
An interest in Geographic Information Science (G.I.S.) has led me to a second Ph.D. and research agenda in software engineering. Though G.I. Science theory was originally developed within the American academe, its contemporary evolution is now the focus of scholarly research at institutions around the world. However, Southern California is arguably the most productive locus for the development of open source and proprietary Geographic Information Systems software. The concentration here of so much interest and talent in the field has undoubtedly contributed to my own interest in G.I.S. research, spurring me to develop a number of software applications and techniques for the acquisition of geographic data and the normalization of remote sensing data to other layers of locationally referenced data within a G.I.S.
My wife is also a professor, but at a different university nearby. We have a son in elementary school and a daughter in middle school.
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Member Since: 09 Nov 2009
Profile Views: 3,195
I am a Free member Gender: Male
I'm a professor of Geography and chair of the Department of Geography at a Southern California university. I study the political economy of natural resource development — especially water and fossil fuels — and most of my research and publications have focused on Turkey in particular and the Middle East in general. Early in my career, this led me to spend two years as a visiting scholar at a highly regarded university in Istanbul, and another year at a university in Turkish Northern Cyprus.
An interest in Geographic Information Science (G.I.S.) has led me to a second Ph.D. and research agenda in software engineering. Though G.I. Science theory was originally developed within the American academe, its contemporary evolution is now the focus of scholarly research at institutions around the world. However, Southern California is arguably the most productive locus for the development of open source and proprietary Geographic Information Systems software. The concentration here of so much interest and talent in the field has undoubtedly contributed to my own interest in G.I.S. research, spurring me to develop a number of software applications and techniques for the acquisition of geographic data and the normalization of remote sensing data to other layers of locationally referenced data within a G.I.S.
My wife is also a professor, but at a different university nearby. We have a son in elementary school and a daughter in middle school.
Visit Stats
Member Since: 09 Nov 2009
Profile Views: 3,195
GeoProf's Posts
Average Rating from GeoProf:
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Displaying 1-10 of 163
Copyright © 2012 MacUpdate LLC
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MPEG2 Works 4 Advanced
MPEG Streamclip
MovieConverter Studio
+1
Permute
+2
Permute
1. After successfully stitching together 6 WMV files (with VC-1 video & 64 Kbps WMA audio) to a single new WMV file (though the stitched file somehow ended up with 31.9 Kbps WMA), it would never again stitch together those same 6 files no matter what preset I used (multiple attempts with and without modifications using each of the following presets failed, despite that it worked fine the first time: WMV, MKV, Remux to both .mkv & .mov and Remux with Audio Conversion to both .mkv & .mov).
2. Using the Remux with Audio Conversion preset (to .mov & AC-3) on the same 6 WMV files mentioned above failed repeatedly, but finally yielded working files — with AAC audio! After fixing permissions and repairing my startup disk with Disk Utility and then rebuilding and replacing the root directory with DiskWarrior 4.4, I repeated these tests a second time to confirm that Permute was indeed creating AAC audio streams despite being set to make AC-3 streams (though it did remux the WMV’s VC-1 video streams correctly into the .mov containers).
3. Using the newly remuxed .mov files from #2 above (the ones that Permute made with VC-1 video and AAC audio despite being set to make AC-3 audio), I then used Permute’s WMV preset (set to copy both streams) — because every other preset threw errors — and again the “Stitch video files together” setting to make one big file, which unbelievably yielded a .wmv with MPEG-2 video and WMA v. 2 audio!!!
Later, using completely different .avi and .mkv source files, similarly bizarre results were obtained.
Attempts to stitch, remux and remux/audio convert the same above-mentioned source files using the $10 iFFmpeg 3.0.2 (using the ffmpeg 0.102 64-bit binary) each worked as expected with no anomalous/unexpected audio or video stream bitrates/formats or FFmpeg errors and all resulting files played flawlessly, so Permute’s problems are clearly not FFmpeg’s fault.
Having paid for Permute a long time ago, I have tested each new version only to discover that it’s getting more and more FUBAR. Nevertheless, I’ll try this new version (1.3.10) and hope for the best
[All conversions were performed on a Core2Duo 2.4 GHz Unibody MacBook Pro with 4 GB of RAM running OS 10.6.8. Selected Permute 1.3.8 conversion attempts using the same source files were again performed on a Core2Duo 2.16 GHz iMac with 3 GB of RAM also running OS 10.6.8 with equally puzzling results.]
Hands Off!
GeoProf reviewed on 12 May 2012
+2
MKV2M4V
But, even if I were to find a FLAC stream in a movie file, there are several free tools that can be used to quickly and easily demux the stream (I like MKVTool), convert the audio independently to AC-3, AAC or whatever (my favorite is XLD), then remux it with the video stream into an MP4 file (I like Subler). Though some apps will only mux/remux to the .mp4 extension, if you simply must have the .m4v extension for iTunes compatibility (which, IMHO, is a horrific way to watch media, so I never use it), just change the .mp4 extension manually to .m4v (because the only difference between them is that Apple made the stupid decision years ago to force its native apps (like iTunes) use a proprietary extension.
-4
Microsoft Office 2011
GeoProf reviewed on 08 May 2012
This is a corporation run by monkeys who hire the most halfassed engineers available, and I will never, ever buy another Microsoft product again.
+1
+152
+152
I understand that you like Office, but I'm guessing that's because you're a recent switcher from the PC world and so have a soft spot for M$ products. For those of us who've been Mac users for decades, the experience has been decidedly less pleasant because Balmer et al. purposely engineer their Mac products poorly to make the Mac OS less appealing to the masses, though they've already lost that game. That's why your fanboy praise of Microsoft falls on deaf ears here (as evidenced by Office 2011's 2.5-star rating above).
+1
Tidy Up
Pref Setter
+1
keka
+2
+152
+152
Join Together
An app this mature should have a more sophisticated method of determining if QT 7 is present than simply looking for it only in the Utilities folder, especially since 1) that has been this app's biggest source of trouble from the beginning, and 2) a heck of a lot of Snow Leopard users have moved QT 7.6 to the Applications folder in a misguided attempt to make it the default QT app instead of QT X.
+1
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