It's been a bit since my last journal entry; the lapse is mostly due to travel. Woof! So here we go...
Added a few new features to the journal client: you can now preview your journal entry in lynx and/or netscape before submitting it. I'll probably add one more option to run HTML tidy (either automatically or manually -- haven't decided yet).
Spent this past weekend at Notre Dame. I was supposed to meet some friends, of whom one is entering ND's law school this semester. Signals got crossed (read: I had the wrong time in my palm pilot --
DOH!!!) and I missed them. So I spent the weekend with Suzanne and Ed, and helped them buy a laptop, second hard drive for their desktop (for Linux, of course), and a new monitor. Spent much of Sunday afternoon/evening installing stuff on the latop and desktop. The desktop's modem was flaky under linux; it was most frustrating. I think I have a spare to send to them.
I found out that I definitely don't have text paging enabled on my cell phone. I got back to a digital area (why is Verizon/SBN still analog? Grumble) and tried to page myself from their web page. It said that the page was sent, but it never came in on my phone. I guess I could pay more for such a thing, but I really don't think that I need it.
Saw Lummy on Friday and Monday; had some good chats with him. The Big News is that he's going to stay at ND. He accepted ND's offer, and we're just going to reap the benefits from it (read: lots and lots of funding!). Some side effects: guaranteed post doc funding (woo hoo!!), a new computer for me (800mhz soon-to-be linux box). Rock on!!
I noticed today that ND's college of engineering started giving out engineering rings this past graduation. I want one! Luckily, I've got a graduation left at ND, so I'll likely get one. :-) Pretty cool things, those rings.
Started looking at Vorbis as an alternative to MP3. I've had a disappointing show of contributions and whatnot from the bladeenc community -- Jeremy Faller and I still have some unanswered questions about MP3. Ogg/Vorbis appears to be a much cleaner process, and an active development community. It is supposedly Much Better than MP3 in terms of quality, documentation, legal issues (i.e., there are none), and encoding speed (the beta encoders are already faster than real time). They even have an XMMS plugin, which means that it's good enough for me!
I started a "has anyone thought about parallelism?" thread on the vorbis-dev list today and got several immediate replies. Talked to one of the dudes who is -- I think -- one of the main contributors, and we came to the conclusion that it should be possible to do a similar thing to the vorbis encoder that I did with parallel bladeenc (although there are still some unanswered questions). So it might be interesting.
Must continue with minime hacking now... must code minime... must code minime... must code minime...