A quickie post:
So I'm down in the States, travelling towards Colorado. Saw Yellowstone National Park, and Old Faithful today. On the road, in a hotel room now, and have to get up early. For more info, check http://roadtrip05.dyndns.org/roadtrip/.
See ya round!
I figured I'd write up this post before I got started on the books for the day.
Those of you who are my long-time readers may remember my interest in various new types of video compression technoloy. For those of you who are *really* my fans may remember back in 2002 when I was keeping track on a new promising technology called MPEG AVC aka. MPEG-4 Part 10 aka. H.26L aka. H.264. I first discovered the codec back in February of 2002, but at the time, I had thought it was dead, and wasn't going to go anywhere. Then there was some amount of revival in July, 2002, but it didn't sound as if it would be used for DVD compression. The big turnaround came in October, 2002. On the 13th, a news article was released, stating that development on H.264 was going strong, and the possibilities were promising. The next day, on October 14th, I found an announcement about a project at Sourceforge.net to create an open source H.264 encoder. Then on the 28th, an early codec comparison was done to see how H.264 performed (and it did quite well for an early alpha). Unfortunately, I haven't heard any news on H.264 since then, until the past couple days.
Leave it up to the anime encoders. The anime encoders were one of the first groups of people to adopt the Ogg Media Format, and the Matroska format. While the American ripping groups are still using standard MP3 and DivX in an AVI, the anime groups are using surround sound AAC in two languages with multiple switchable "soft" subtitles, while XviD provides the video, all wrapped in a cozy MKV. These people are right at the forefront of ripping, and know more about filters, pre-processors and post-processors than most rippers do. It looks like they are also going to start adopting H.264. I've already downloaded three episodes of GANTZ in H.264, and they look great. Unfortunately, as is nature with H.264, I am barely capable of watching the videos on my 500MHz machine. On a 3GHz machine, the video decoding takes up about 30-40% of the CPU. I don't have the capabilities to do any comparisons at the moment, but I will download the DivX version of GANTZ, hoping that the bitrates and resolutions are the same, and I will try doing some rough codec comparisons over the summer.
So far, Anime-4ever is currently in test mode with H.264 (they've got GANTZ, Inu Yasha, Spiral, Gate Keepers, Get Backers, and a couple others in both H.264 and DivX), and Zhentarim is thinking about making the switch soon.
If you'd like to try watching some H.264 encodes, and are on a Windows machine, then follow a4e's AVC Playback Guide. If you're on Linux, then go get the latest CVS of MPlayer (1.0pre6a isn't good enough), along with the essential codec pack (all codec pack is much cooler though, so grab that instead of essential). Have fun!
Now that the end of the school year is upon university students, the resident advisor has given the residents of the floor a survey to fill out. This survey is the ACUHO-I/EBI Resident Survey, by Educational Benchmarking, Inc., 1999. It is an international survey (at least Canadian and American), since it has a section that is only to be filled out by students at U.S. institutions. Why in the world am I talking about this survey? For section (E), the participant is supposed to fill out their gender, with the bubble-sheet options of
(A) Male
(B) Female
(C) Transgender
(D) Other
Now, I can understand the Transgender thing out of political correctness, as there are birth defects and surgeries for those things. Who, exactly, would be an "Other", if transgendered is already covered? Perhaps it is to fill space on the bubble sheet, but there are other places where spaces were left open. I'll let you figure that one out.
We all know that Wikipedia has come under fire by traditional encyclopedia groups about its reliability. Most of the traditional crowd say that Wikipedia will never match the quality, validity, readability, etc of the encyclopedias that are edited by professional, paid reveiwers. Byron down the hall (there he is again, two posts in a row) really likes Encarta Encyclopedia, which is owned by Microsoft. On multiple occasions we have had little "competitions" to compare the content of Wikipedia versus Encarta. I will admit that Wikipedia may never get to the same readability as the traditional encyclopedias. Wikipedia's goal is to be the repository of human knowledge, so accuracy should be attainable in tens of years, but style is up to readers, and will be difficult to format into one consistent style. Does that make it magnitudes worse than Encarta?
Of course, I also read Slashdot, and noticed today an article about Encarta Adopting [a] Wikiesque Process. That's right, Encarta will take article submissions written by users, edit those submissions, and then publish them. Perhaps Wikipedia isn't so bad after all, now that a professionally edited encyclopedia is adopting a user-submitted process. Not only is Encarta trying to get closer to Wikipedia, but they will probably fail at it. Encarta will attempt to review all the articles that get submitted, fixing up grammar, style, and checking validity of the article. Now consider that on March 9, 2005 (the latest date for which the stats were updated) Wikipedia received 782 new articles [1]. In the month of February, 2005, Wikipedia had an average of 853 new articles per day [1]. I really don't think that Microsoft is paying enough staffers to sort through 853 articles per day, even if they use automation to filter out 90% junk articles (leaving 85 articles per day to go through). Oh, and by the way, these numbers are for the English edition of Wikipedia only. Average submissions for all languages are in the 3,000 articles per day range.
Another thing to take note is that Microsoft will get "permission to (1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission." [MS Terms of Use]
It also looks like attribution will be as follows: "If you choose to sign in and use a nickname when editing, your nickname may be associated with the updated article on the What's New page." [About Editing] Does this mean that MS may not put original credit on the article (only on the "What's New" page) and use your work to make more money? Hmm.
Just in case there is somebody out there that hasn't realized it yet, I'll reiterate: graphics technology has come along nicely in recent years.
Byron down the hall got his brand new 256MB NVIDIA 6600 (now affectionately called "Beast") in the mail yesterday. As he played Doom3 and FutureMark, I was just floored by how much graphics has really come along recently. I remember playing Wolf3D, Duke3D, and Descent, which were at the forefront of bringing 3D (or 2.5D) to the average home user. Other than spawning new ways of gaming, these games also brought us closer to interactive realism in a fantasy setting. While we watched Toy Story in the movie theatres, we tried to imagine a day when those things could be done in real-time. With each passing generation of vid card and graphics engine, we expect more and better effects. Remember when the original Myst came out, and then not 5 years later, it was made into a real-time interactive game. Watching the FutureMark05 demos, I expect that these graphics will make their way into games within 2 years, while Byron estimates over 5 years (I realize that they are actually being rendered real time right now, but there are things like AI, physics, and sound that need to be handled by engines as well). Then there is Myst IV, which I predict will take around 5 years, and Byron says will take around 20 years. Personally, I think that I may even be too pessimistic with those estimates, but future graphics in games will no longer come down to processing power and engines, and will be more about artists, so these things could take a while to get out the door. This is where I point you to the Unreal Engine 3 page.
When it comes to these things, it would be nice to see OpenGL pull up its socks a bit. So far, OpenGL has remained a fairly stable standard, since SGI did lots of work on it in the 80's and 90's. MS came out with Direct3D in the mid-90's, and has been trying to play catch-up with OpenGL ever since. Games like Doom3 and Unreal Tournament 2004 are still done in OpenGL, and therefore are portable to Linux systems. With DirectX 10 (going to be called Windows Graphic Foundation [WGF]), MS will probably finally take over OpenGL in terms of functionality and capabilities. There is the new OpenGL 2.0, but that was more evolutionary than revolutionary. It would be a shame to see floods of games in WGF and none in OpenGL, resulting in no ports to Linux, just when the gaming scene on Linux was starting to get good.
So, did some upgrading and dinking around tonight. This has taken up quite some time, and I find myself writing this at 1 in the morning. Technically, it's Thursday, but I'll count this as Wednesday's post.
It all started when I wanted to watch the ClearType team and what they're all about over at Channel9. Of course, MS didn't have the downloadables going, so I was left with an MMS stream. Having compiled the latest MPlayer and the latest codecs (so that I could get Windows Media 10 sound) just last night (as in Tuesday night), I was happily watching on my computer. Then some quiet guy came on (Scoble should invest in a $2 microphone, seriously) so I tried to rewind. Rewind a stream, in MPlayer, when you're dealing with MS codecs. Not a good thing. So I had to restart my X server. Restarting my X got me into a new KDE that I had installed several days ago, but never booted into. So that got me thinking: why not point rpmdrake towards Cooker (unstable) and get the latest KDE, now that I'm here (in a state of not having anything open on my desktop). So KDE 3.3 and gcc 3.4.3 get thrown on the system. Then, with the new KDE all fired up, I'm browsing around, checking out the new features in my menu, and the stuff that I can get from Cooker. Then I see Monkey Bubble, which is one of those "fire a ball and try to get three of the same colour connected to get them to fall down" games. Like Frozen Bubble, only Monkey Bubble uses SVG for its graphics. Seeing as how I've been interested in Scalable Vector Graphics for quite some time, I figured it was about time that I tried out this Monkey Bubble. I must say that it is quite good! Graphics are good, could use some spit-shine, but the scalability is nice. Going from a small window on my screen to the full 1280x1024, the game maintains its graphics clarity and resolution, just as good SVG should (try running Frozen Bubble at 1280 - yuck!) The game seemed to run fast, and I am confident that simple SVG like this game can easily be put to use in games. SVG rendering engines are still not very optimized, as there are few people interested in the technology (Windows LH Avalon will use it though). With some good render engines (come on Cairo!), and some great vector artists, SVG is a plausible way of doing graphics for games. Go get Monkey Bubble!
So now that I have my own blog, I've been searching around for other blogs that I can add to Liferea. Unfortunately, I don't know of any good Linux sites where they list a bunch of blogs, but MS does have some good ones. Now, many people have been asking me if I'm a big convert going back to the dark side of MS. The answer is a resounding "No!" The reason why I have been adding some of the MS feeds is so that I can keep an eye on what they're up to. I'm sure Sun Tzu said something to the effect of (I haven't reached this part of his book yet) "Know thy enemy." On that note, I've been watching the vids over at Channel 9, and some of them are pretty interesting.
Does anybody else out there have some good blogs that I should read? I've got a soft spot for eye candy, so any blogs owned by developers of Gnome, KDE, or x.org would be nice. You can check out the list of feeds (not just blogs) that I read here.
Saw this little story this morning, and couldn't help but laugh. Of course, we all know about Ubuntu's official icon, and their desktop themes (one of them even got Ubuntu in a bit of hot water, since some people don't like the human body). When you look at the MSN Spaces Logo, you can't help but wonder where they got their inspiration. Doesn't it kind of remind you of [W/L]indows? Maybe MS will pay $20M to buy this icon now....
While some media outlets are trying to stifle online media (MGM v. Grokster is going on in American courts right now), there are others that are actually trying to support online media, and open source projects at that. Some time ago I found out about Dirac, an open source video encoder using wavelet compression for some high-quality video encoding. It is funded and researched by none other than the British Broadcasting Corporation. Their hope is to use Dirac to do future online video feeds for BBC viewers.
Then there is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I've known for some time (and written about it before on FvForces.net) that they have their geeky radio show "Quirks and Quarks" available online in .rm, .mp3, and .ogg audio formats (for some reason they have reduced the ogg to only certain segments of the show). Today I was browsing the main page of CBC.ca, and found out that they are doing podcasting trials. Use an RSS capable music player (or a audio capable RSS aggregator) to listen to "Quirks and Quarks" or "/Nerd". The podcasts are only available in MP3 format, but they'll eventually figure it out ;) Head on over to the CBC site, show your support for online media, courtesy of the CRTC!
I know there are a lot of people who have been asking me about my exam schedule. Since I don't know it off the top of my head, I figured I'd post it here. Here it is. The date for the "Leave for Colorado" thing is not set in stone, that is just the earliest date that we can leave.
