Since I've been posting every day for a little while now, I have to admit the quality of my dribble has decreased somewhat. I think this is a bad move, because when people read dribble that is truely low quality, they decide not to come back for more dribble. Maybe I should just wake up, sit down, shut up, smell the roses, stop wingeing about this and that, . Yes, times are tough, and my dribble must be able to be separated from the rest, in a good way. And I don't mean that in a wine tasting kind of way (yes I've been wine tasting).

There are social events in the near future. A UwaLAN on the 14th, the easter long weekend, not a good move for country visitors, but they don't really care about us do they? And an Swgn (is that the current URL, it keeps moving, maybe someone should set a trap to capture it and stash it in one place) the following weekend by my calendar (the 21st). The latter will most likely have my presense, but the first is doubtful considering the weekend it's on, bugger hey. Plus it gets a bit expensive depending on where we stay, I've got a place just about lined up where a friend and myself could camp for the night following the lan, but still, about $10 - 20 for fuel, food, drinks, entry fee, bribery for quake3 tourney ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H. Maybe I should start busking somewhere, I could be a mime...

Here ya all go, a shiny new odd pic, brought to you by the letters N and T.

Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?

DivX. Otherwise known as the big wait. It seems to me the more I use my computers, the more I wait for them. Yes there are many, it's getting bloody rediculous. Making mixed mode Mpeg4's (MM4's) requires the clip to be DivXed twice, once at low bit rate, once at a very high bit rate, also to get better control over the output, it's considered good form to use FlaskMpeg as a frameserver to virtual dub, or to use MPG2AVI in frameserver mode. This allows you to use Virtual dub to do the DivXing and apply various filters to the clip on the fly. Deinterlace, crop, resize and maybe even tag with a logo if that makes you happy. (How would I know what makes you happy?) This used to be a good thing in dual processor land, because Flask would happily use one processor to decode the DVD video, and Virtual dub would kindly use the other to encode the DivX video, and where ever there were spare cycles, virtual dub would use for mp3 endcoding. Later I realized that virtual dub isn't that great at mp3ing the sound anyway, so now the frameserver is only doing video, and I use that dolby pro logic suite to do the AC3 to Mp3 stuff, but just for a laugh, I use CoolEdit to normalize the audio and downsample to 44.1kHz audio, as not everyone on the planet can play back 48k yet. 15 mins to go, on this box that is, the other would have about 20 mins to go. Even AMD duron processors aren't really that fast in the whole grand scheme of things, and yes, a single duron doesn't live in dual processor land, but the Celeron's need more of that golden gooey stuff otherwise known as RAM to DivX using flask let along flask and virtualdub together. Better get some more, because until I do, mr Celeron here is a glorified file server (with only 7 gig total disk space), burner box (with a dysfunctional burner) and internet terminal (well it does have IE5 on it, but only cause Win2k comes with it). And with all this complaining about waiting so long for these DVD's to DivX, I'm not going out to buy a Thunderbird 1.2gig cause it wouldn't exactly be a big jump in speed, maybe 20% at best, but I would lose the glory of dual processor land, which is being to DivX a movie using highest priority and still play Quake3 with a decent framerate, gooey golden RAM is good for this too. Did I mention that RAM is so cheap now, it's so cheap that people no longer have excuses, really, I'm not kidding.

And you might suggest to get around the big wait, use a different codec, well don't talk codec's to me, I've got just about all there are, 4 different versions of DivX (3.11a, 3.11a VKI, APVC's version, 3.22), I've got 3vix (a quicktime thingo), OpenDivx (a48 not fast on any machine), and a whole host more. To do this, I've had to change the FOURCC code on the codec's and hence change the FOURCC on the output files to something that other people have (DIV3, DIV4, DIVX, not DIV9, DIV8, DIV5, DIV6 (high and low, of different versions))... And all of them seem to have their uses too. Scary. Mpeg2 is good, true mpeg4 is good too, Philips have a player at http://www.mpeg-4player.com/ which is a True mpeg4 player, not mpeg4 in an AVI like the rest. And then there is WMV. Don't get me started about Windows Media encoder 8... Change of subject time.

Javascript. It's taking on some more form, but somehow 16kb of javascript doesn't seem to do all that much in the whole grand scheme of things.

This is today's fresh odd pic. I'm a sucker for punishment aren't I? Portland's ftp server came up as many things do, like car rego, insurance, tyres and other things...

Do you need a silencer if you are going to shoot a mime?

I further edited Nullsoft's Sex program. Now when it load's it is hidden by default, so when your computer boots up it will no longer show up on top hiding part of your background image. (My previous mod was so it would be hidden when closed, rather than just sent to the back of the window pile) Evidently my C++ anaylsis skillz are improving. Get it here (Source included, tested on windows 2000 and 98 first edition). Next project for this is going to be double click to close followed by an Always on top option. This has to be the best way to learn C++ in the Win32 API.

My computer is taking most of today to DivX Neon Genesis Evangelion DVD 2 into MM4 DivX (mixed mpeg 4) episode clips. Much fun for all parties involved. I'm getting 5.95 FPS using FlaskMpeg 0.6 preview (Supports SMP). I'm following The Maximum Guide with some small modifications (namely audio related). I discovered that avisynth (v1b3) can resample 48k audio to 44.1k quite easily using a little undocumented command: resampleaudio(44100). And there was much rejoicing. MicroDVD 1.1 is much improved over 1.0 ... Get it, it's good.

Javascript. Yes there's a javascript assignment to be done, and I'm not doing it. Damn.

The gallery of odd pics continues, todays installment is here. I added a link for old stories at the bottom, since the recent stories RDF file isn't working on portland anymore and clicking search with no parameters isn't that obvious... I'll upload the change file as soon as portland's ftp is running again... Bluemidit's been up for 180 days today, over 6 months, nearly half a year (BTW that was an internal link, DNS at its best).

Why is it that when you're driving and looking for an address, you turn down the volume on the radio?

Found a new dvd ripper, better than cladDVD. Smart Ripper. I got it from Doom9. This ripper lets you rip specific chapters out of the movie. Good for ripping episodes of something, say Neon Genesis Evangelion. As an added bouns, it works in windows 2000.

Last night I found myself in linux doing some video editing. Each time I do this, I find it's getting better and better. The 2 gig limit doesn't exist in this land, and the 4 gig file system limit no longer exists either, so that 36 gig DVD rip will now take up 36 gig in one file, now all I need is 36 gig of disk space. The mpeg2 encoder was fast, damn fast, pity it need's a mov file for the input. And I know what your thinking, but no they aren't windows compatible mov files, they are quicktime format compatible, but not quicktime compatible, so it's linux only. Pity the YUV 4:2:2 mov file was 20meg a second, lucky I was dealing with the bubblegum crisis 2040 trailer (1min and a bit long).

While in linux, I was playing with the whole variety of DeCSS programs. The tiniest one in C, the perl ones, and others. The C one didn't work for me, the perl ones didn't either and were very slow. The one that I found was the best was VobDEC.tar.gz I think the reason that the other ones didn't work too well (or at all) was probably the format of the command line and the vob key part of it. But you get that.

Javascript assignment is making some more progress. I had better start that big bad essay sometime, though several people, namely Adam and Kevin have said that it's not too hard but I think that is just them, they seem better at writing essay's than myself so I guess I'll have to wait and see.

Added another odd pic, this time number 102. An honest to good look at my usage of Office 97 on Windows 2000.

There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence. - Jeremy S. Anderson