lardbucket: technology

So, today at Google I/O 2010, Google announced that, along with a number of other groups, they were releasing WebM, a video container and codec. (WebM itself specifies the container, which is a variation of Matroska, as well as the video format, the newly-released VP8, and the audio format, Ogg Vorbis.) I won’t get into the technical details of the codec, as I’m not really qualified to do so, but a developer for x264 has a reasonably thorough review of a prerelease version of the code here.

The interesting part of VP8 / WebM is that it is a reasonably good video standard that may be theoretically free to use. (The currently popular “best” video format, H.264, is riddled with patents and requires licensing for most uses, although encoding video that’s available for free doesn’t require payments until at least 2015¹.) It doesn’t appear as though anybody is claiming that WebM is the best video format available, but it’s reasonably good, and potentially free to use. (It’s impossible to know whether someone else has patented parts of the standard, because that would require examining every software patent ever granted, which is not going to happen.) For some background, the video codec, VP8, was produced by a company named On2 before Google bought them last year. Its predecessors, VP6 and VP7 were used for video in Flash² and the video in Skype³, respectively.

Most of this will be fairly boring to anyone who normally reads this blog, but if you’re interested in a way to encode WebM videos yourself in Ubuntu, read on.

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A few notes on setting up PvPGN (the continuation of bnetd) for a private LAN. (The reason I’m setting it up is that I don’t expect to have an Internet connection for connecting to Battle.net proper, and would like to have the capabilities it provides, especially ladder games.) This post is generally much more technical than most of my previous posts, so you may want to skip it if you’re not really sure what’s going on. You won’t miss much.

So, my setup involves a router with DD-WRT, and an OLPC XO. The XO is set up using Ubuntu Intrepid on an SD card.

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In under three weeks since it was launched, GraphSketch has now been used to create (over) 10,000 graphs. It also has had over 3,500 visitors, coming from every continent except Antarctica, though many visitors haven’t graphed anything (and many visitors have graphed far more than average). Work on new features (parametric and polar graphing, among others) will likely resume after school is over, as I still have three finals remaining, and am now off to continue studying for a math final.

At any rate, thanks to everyone who has promoted GraphSketch in one place or another for making it so successful.

Andy Schmitz

P.S. If you have any suggestions for GraphSketch itself, the original post on it is still probably the best place to leave them, as I’ll check back there for ideas when I’m working on it. Thanks!

Well, this was written way back when it seemed like a good idea, and it’s finally polished enough to actually release. Yay, something I actually finished!

On the off chance you might have some recycling that needs to be taken out (and you should..), this random little tool will let you set up a weekly reminder (an SMS message, actually) to actually get it out to the curb. It’s been working for me (and a few others) for several months now, so I’m fairly sure it’s stable.

So, if you’re (partially) responsible for getting your recycling out, go head over and sign up right now at Recycling Reminder. You’ll need a standard cellphone of some sort. It’s completely free, though clicking the ads now and then gets me a few pennies, if you’d like.

Please email me or leave a comment (or something) if you happen to find it useful, have a problem, or anything else. Thanks!

Andy

What happened to the old, existing protocols for everything? Why did JSON and Web 2.0 replace lightweight protocols for chat, discussions, and communication?

It’s not that the new alternatives aren’t necessarily any good (though some of them are missing features or tend to be unavailable), but that their functions already existed, for the most part. Strange.

Andy

Edit: Added Chatterous. Also, okay, “Y’all these days.” As apparently many of y’all aren’t kids.