Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Open Source Attitudes

With my recent work on Fire, Adium, Perian, and A52Codec, I have come to realize several misunderstandings concerning open source software. Ask anyone involved in Open Source Software (OSS), whether it be the users or the developers, and you will find there is often a disconnect between the two groups. The users are upset with the elitist attitudes of the developers and the developer are upset with the whining of the users.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Perian Woes

Well, we had some fun with Perian today. First it started when macupdate decided that they were going to post a fake 1.0 of Perian. You can read the details if you like. Since this is clearly something we didn’t want, we had to figure out how it happened. My guess is that someone saw the new website design in development within the subversion repository, clicked the download link that was there, and noticed it download a version later than what we have on the website.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Monday, June 18, 2007

Nearing Release

Well, Perian is finally nearing a release. I wonder how much press we will get over this one, since it is finally hitting version 1.0. Chris (project manager) seems to think that Perian will be bigger than Adium (which he also manages). Considering how well version 0.5 has been received (over a quarter million downloads), I think I now believe him. Then we get to start work on version 1.1, which will include optimizations to what we did in 1.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, May 8, 2007

AC3 and Passthrough on the AppleTV and Macs

A few days ago, I managed to get my AC3 codec to do AC3 passthrough on the AppleTV. It wasn’t that hard once I stopped making stupid mistakes. Now, if you have a video file with AC3 audio along with a dolby digital decoder, you can play it on your AppleTV and enjoy full 5.1 dolby digital surround. David Conrad later sent me a patch to make it work on PPC based macs.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, April 7, 2007

Branchless Code

Apologies if this is technical, but since I learned something in this experiment, I thought I would write it up: I remember going to a seminar a few weeks ago delivered by a faculty candidate which discussed the idea of how to get around the branch mis-prediction problem present in microprocessors. Anyway, her idea was to use predicated statements to make the instructions conditional on a comparison which may not have been completed yet.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, March 20, 2007