Older blog entries for xiphmont (starting at number 3)

Funny how these things get named after a while; yesterday I fixed the 'blorp' bug in the new Vorbis psychoacoustics, today I fixed a 'gravel' bug. (I hope) Two damn near impossible to find things.... introduced during code cleanups.

And now that we got slashdotted (motherfish stayed up! Woo hoo! Stayed more responsive than Slashdot itself, after I added 8M ;-) I'm realizing how time consuming writing intelligent replies to email really is (again). D'oh.

Thought for today, just to sum it all up:
"Life is about the balance between stopping to smell the roses and flat out 24/7 caffeine poisoning."

I think I'll go shake some more. That automatic espresso maker in my kitchen is the best/worst thing to ever happen to me...

Hangups always happen in the smallest details. It took no time at all to build an entire new psychoacoustic engine from scratch (once I managed to track down the appropriate research papers), but something simple like mapping the new log scales onto the existing codebook abstraction turns out to suck time because I hadn't stopped to think about it long enough...

(How do you add a number to -Inf? You don't; you find a way to avoid doing so. There went wednesday night through Saturday)

The hard part is never getting something to work. The hard part is building an abstraction you won't be ashamed of two weeks later.... especially vital in the case where the abstraction could well last 20 years. Bad way to lose alot of time when chasing an unreasonable deadline....

Anyway, the major hangups are past I hope; decode is certainly clean and I can live with well documented hacks that are encoder only. Integration of the New Stuff (tm) with libvorbis is first-pass coding complete, but totally untested. I'll do that after sleep. After making sure it works, time to build codebooks--- after adding log quantization code to the trainer. Gaah.

At least the end rush will just be for the website.

The "Long March" toward Vorbis's first real release continues. Tonight I finish integrating the new psychoacoustic engine and hopefully build codebooks. Once that's done, the new work goes on the CVS main branch.

Over the weekend, libvorbis and vorbisfile should be at First Cut. The goal is to have the libs at release, at least one player plugin (probably XMMS and maybe Winamp) at release grade and the command line 'it just works' encoder running. A website update has to happen beginning of next week. Then we start screaming for attention :-)

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