Older blog entries for robla (starting at number 8)

Just posted an article about campaign finance reform to Kuro5hin. My contention is that it's a big ol' red herring, and that we really need to get rid of the two party system.

At any rate, we'll see what others think...

I started an interesting discussion over at the MPEG4IP list (well, interesting to me). The MPEG4IP project is a group that is working on end-to-end MPEG-4 interoperability, per the ISMA specification. I started by asking about widening the scope of their project to doing H.263/MP3/RTSP/RTP interop. Still early, but I think there's some definite possibilities there. While I don't agree with the tactic (promoting MPEG-4), the spirit of the project is a good one. They seem very interested in talking about interoperability using whatever means possible. The thread concerns asking them to widen the scope of things.

I just posted an article titled HTTP and MP3: The Only Streaming Media Standards That Matter at a new community site for streaming media called Ubergid.

Migrated over to Evolution this weekend. I think it's getting there. In the process of doing that, I wrote a script to migrate my Eudora filters. After getting that done, I decided to finish the job, and released the script: eudora2evol.

A couple of projects I'm working on just shipped: the RealOne Player and SMILGen. XMLhack covers both of these.

SMIL 2.0 becomes a Recommendation -- Woohoo! This is a pretty substantial revision of the specification that we've been working on for 2 1/2 years. Lots of new goodies in there (animation, transitions, etc.). Should be interesting once the implementations are released....

Ooooo....I just got certified as a "Journeyer". Do-o-n't stop, belie-e-e-vin'! Err....I'm not sure I want to be that kind of Journeyer.

Well, anyway, I just submitted a new version of svg2swf. Fixed a few bugs, did some more damage.

A couple of things going on:

• Just posted info on svg2swf. Converts SVG to Flash, which could be really handy, given how widely supported Flash is. I just did it as a learning exercise for SVG and for Ming
• I'm heading to the London IETF meeting in a couple of weeks (Aug 5-10). Ought to be interesting...I thought I was going to just lurk, but I got pulled in to present XMCL

Hmmm...seems obligatory to do a first post. I wanted to comment on a couple of articles, but it seems that discussion is limited to at least apprentice level (assuming I'm not missing an obvious "reply" button). Oh well. Here's my input, both based on the nuggets I picked up at the last IETF meeting I was at:

• TCP Splicing -- Seems like an interesting area of pursuit, although I'd say that many NAT box administrators consider the idea of inbound TCP connections not working a big plus. My rudimentary grasp of TCP negotiation isn't going to make my critique any easier, but this idea should probably be floated with the folks who set up the MIDCOM BOF at the last IETF (presumably with the goal of forming a working group).
• Simple Multiplexing Protocol -- This idea came up so much, the IETF actually got around to defining a couple protocols for this domain space. There's SCTP, which is on the same layer as TCP, and provides framing and reliability without enforcing order, and there's BEEP, which is currently under the name BXXP until the IETF actually advances it to Proposed Standard (which is RSN). BEEP tries to do for protocols what XML did for file formats: it defines structure and a ruleset. It would have been really handy to have had it been around when we were defining RTSP.