So, today I found myself at the beginning of a much-needed 10 day mid-semester break. And what did I do with it? Sat around doing nothing - damn, that feels good.

Then I got bored, so I went and rewrote the primary interface to vorbisfile. Oh - and sped up decode by 10% by changing a single line (now THAT'S optimisation). Vorbisfile is now much more flexible, so doing interesting things like streaming becomes relatively easy.

I think tomorrow I'll sit down and figure out how to do network stuff, and implement streaming in the winamp and xmms vorbis plugins. However, I'll probably run screaming from the windows one. This could be interesting...

I've also been spending some time getting into the real technical material concerning audio coding. This is lots of fun, though it's really hard work, compared to the generally trivial stuff I seem to do at university. Two big books sitting in front of me on VQ techniques, up next on my reading list.

Some notes on advogato: Found this place pretty recently. Some really smart people, and damn high s/n ratio compared to most of the net. Pretty nice - but it's somewhat hard to find your way around, a lot of things are only linked to from obscure sub-pages. I agree with what a lot of people have been saying - the range of the certifications is overly limited, and their scope is unclear.

Keeping a diary is a good idea. I think I might try and do this regularly - writing it all down helps organise stuff in my mind, and encourages actually thinking instead of just going and wasting time doing stuff that turns out to be entirely trivial