Older blog entries for walken (starting at number 26)

Free Software

Lots of updates since last time.

I worked for a while putting together a new liba52 release (well two actually), and moved the project to sourceforge. The newer code has better downmix, is 2-3 times faster, and has a few added features too.

I also did some work on libmpeg2 - Well not as much as I should (vektor is waiting for a new release), but I wrote asm code for altivec (about a 2.6x speedup) and I'm starting to write some VIS (ultrasparc) code too. We'll see how it goes.

Life

I broke up with my girlfriend. About 3 monthes ago - well, we first did it 3 monthes ago, but then we've been together on and off again. Weird.

I've been pretty depressed too - like, for some time I couldnt sleep normally, and I had very persistent dark thoughts, and everything seemed to suck - the job, my life, everything. So now I'm taking some light antidepressants, and well, it seems to work quite well on me. I'm even starting to get a life :) This evening I'm going to some friends place for dinner, and then to a stanford students party. And I had to refuse some other invitation too. Like, that never happened before. I hope it keeps going that way for me.

Been inactive for some time: looked for a new place, started with my new job (which I find quite interesting), etc. Got my cable modem today. Should get active again soon. Hopefully.

23 Mar 2001 (updated 23 Mar 2001 at 03:54 UTC) »

Took two weeks of vacation in france and switzerland at my girlfriend's place. Yay :)

Flied back to california monday and started working at vmware tuesday. Yay ! I'm having a lot of fun already.

Still a bit jet-lagged though.

The mpeg2dec side is on standby for now, I've just been too busy last few weeks. I should be able to start again in one or two weeks I guess.

Busy switching jobs.

At the office I've spent last two days writing docs for the stuff I had written lately. Things are pretty polished now, so I think they will be able to use these after I leave.

Going to france for two weeks for vacation time. Well, I'll probably spend more time in switzerland with my GF anyway :) taking plane tomorrow in the evening, and coming back on the 19th.

Not found an appartment yet, so I will have to do this when I come back from vacation. This will be a huge mess, but oh well.

I have not done much on mpeg2dec last 10 days, and I dont expect to do much next 3 weeks either. I think things should get a bit better after that though. Crossing fingers.

Resigned today. I will start working at VmWare in 4 weeks. Yay !

sh: videolan currently has more features than oms or mpeg2dec, but wait till we get sync :-) I still hope that someday you might want to plug libmpeg2 inside vlc. Just need to keep coding until it makes a convincing case :)
16 Feb 2001 (updated 16 Feb 2001 at 08:34 UTC) »

Xmas holiday was nice - my GF came from switzerland for 3 weeks. Of course I only miss her more now. Long distance relationships are not nice everyday...

Spent more time on mpeg2dec, and actually made a 0.2.0 release earlier this evening. Now that we have all mpeg-2 "main profile" features working I guess I should work on synchro and on robustness against bogus input streams - they still make us segfault currently. I'm happy how the project goes. It's a time eater - I would guess 2-3 hours per day ? - but heh, my GF's not around anyway, so I dont have to feel bad about spending time coding :-)

saw david and omega joined. Nice to see more video people joining the ranks :) David did a great work for the livid release yesterday, and omega's gstreamer project looks quite promising.

Greedily upgraded my self-certification to master. Yes, I'm that proud of my new mpeg2dec release :)

Hmmm. After looking more for the g450 thing I found some more oddities. I now have X working :-) But, this card is dual head and half of the time it displays on the wrong (second) head. I still have to find the setting that makes X display on the right head all the time. Doh :-)

Got my new machine, an athlon 950 (with asus a7v motherboard). Works nicefully :) I got a few minor problems with it though, installing a debian (woody) system on it :

- The two ATA/100 channels were not recognized by any of the debian rescue discs. So linux would not see my hard drive at all... for now I just plugged it on one of the ATA/66 channels, I'll try to see if linux can support the ATA/100 thing when I have everything else working. The controller is a promise PDC20265.

- I cant get XFree4 to work yet :( I dont know if this is because I have a matrox G450, or if it is because of debian. The best results I got till now is to get a garbled screen (the synchro frequencies are apparently very wrong) and have the X server quit, while leaving the screen garbled. Ctrl-alt-del from the keyboard still works. Huh :-/

If anyone else has an a7v or a g450, I'd love to know how to make it work :)

On the mpeg2dec side, I implemented support for field pictures, so now I want to do some video output lib changes and then releases 0.2.0. The libvo changes are a major subject of dispute on the livid lists, which is just not fun for anyone involved :-/

15 Nov 2000 (updated 15 Nov 2000 at 21:47 UTC) »

Sam (sh), I just love your new hammer design.

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