Category Archives: General

Foreign Languages

While I was in Sweden there was an active advertising campaign whose tagline was some variant of “Would you sell your mother?” and a link to sellyourmother.se. This seemed to be a sort of “mystery campaign”, where the company doing … Continue reading

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Oh, Microsoft

You are always good for a laugh. Before: In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only. After: In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user … Continue reading

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Laptop!

I have a laptop! My new Latitude 13n arrived at the office while I was away, and I picked it up today. It’s nicely designed, with a solid-feeling all-metal shell. I’m willing to pay the small weight penalty for rigidity. … Continue reading

Posted in General, Xiph | 2 Comments

Now I’m on CNET

The web is super weird. Now I’m on CNET. The article, by Stephen Shankland, is fairly even-handed, and a good introduction to the licensing problems, with solid quotes from the MPEGLA. Of course, it comes from a philosophy of who’s … Continue reading

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Lessig

On Thursday night I attended a great lecture by Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Free Culture movement. His lectures edge into the realm of spoken-word performance. The recording, if you’d like to see it, is here. Flumotion did a great … Continue reading

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No, you can’t do that with H.264

A lot of commercial software comes with H.264 encoders and decoders, and some computers arrive with this software preinstalled. This leads a lot of people to believe that they can legally view and create H.264 videos for whatever purpose they … Continue reading

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Semiconductor prediction: long term

Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about this stuff. I mostly code Python. Setup Computer chips (that includes CPUs, GPUs, RAM, and solid-state storage) are expensive. They’re expensive because they’re made in ultra-high-tech lithographic fabs that cost over a billion dollars … Continue reading

Posted in General, Xiph | 2 Comments

Old bugs fixed

In the process of testing Cortado on old operating systems, we discovered that using a recent compiler produced bytecode that wouldn’t run on Sun JDK 1.1. Instead, we got IllegalMonitorState exceptions in an infinite loop. A little bit of searching … Continue reading

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Drainage

As I was running to my car this evening I lost my grip on my keys, and they sailed directly into the mouth of a waiting storm drain. I laughed deliriously for about ten seconds, then tried to see if … Continue reading

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Cortado

A project I’ve been playing with recently is Ogg Theora’s Cortado, a free video player designed to be able to run on an extremely wide variety of computers, including old, obsolete systems. How old, you ask? Really old: This is … Continue reading

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