malvasia bianca

Last year, I upgraded this computer from Red Hat 8 to Fedora Core 2. It was a bigger OS jump than I would have perhaps liked (skipping two OS versions), but now I’ve stuck with FC2 for a while, even though FC3 has been out for several months. At first, I was planning to skip […]

Even though I’ve been blogging for half a year now, I get the feeling that I’m not doing it “right”, or at least I’m not doing it the way normal bloggers do. Whenever I read other people’s blogs, they’re usually taking part in actual conversations: I dipped into several blogs a couple of weeks ago, […]

I recently read an article by Herb Sutter that claims that the long rise in processor speed is finally coming to an end. I certainly believe that this is going to happen eventually, maybe within the next decade, because we do seem to be approaching some physical limits; I didn’t think that it was happening […]

I used to play go a lot, and I collected a lot of go books. In fact, by the time I was in grad school, I had copies of all but 10 or 15 or so of all the go books that had ever been published in English. (Just under 100 at the time.) The […]

A few random iPod-inspired thoughts: The first time I imported a CD with iTunes, it reported doing it at a rate of about 5x. But the next time I imported a CD, it reported a rate of under 2x, and stayed there. And it was a real problem: it took all evening just to import […]

Whenever you rip a CD with iTunes, it looks up information about the contents of the CD in Gracenote’s CDDB: as hard as it is to believe in this world of digital information, a CD contains no information about its contents other than the number and length of its tracks and, of course, the music […]

I hope that Atlanta fans are happy right now; I’m certainly not. Was that really the best we could get for Tim Hudson? Was that really better than keeping him around for another year, or for that matter signing him long-term? Sigh. (And the Yankees seem to have wriggled out from under the Jaret Wright […]

About a year ago, I started toying with the idea of getting an MP3 player: I’d recently taken up jogging (and I’m still doing it, a year later), and jogging is really boring. But after toying with the idea for a while, I gave it up, because none of the available players seemed to have […]

I learned about blog spam today: a spammer tried to add comments to most of the posts here. The bodies of the comments were random quotes; the goal is to get people to click on the spammer’s name, which linked to a web site. Actually, that may not be the main goal: apparently blog spammers […]

One of the reasons I upgraded my computer a month or two ago was to make it a little easier to easily install new software. Like, for example, mplayer. This is a video player for Linux, and it’s great! I actually learned about it first at work: I needed to look at some movies, and […]

Here’s another fun (?) aspect of MPEG. As mentioned last post, TV (at least in the US) isn’t really 30 frames per second: it’s 60 half-frames per second, where half of the time it shows the odd-numbered lines and half of the time it shows the even-numbered lines. (This is called interlacing.) Since MPEG both […]

I’ve been reading through the MPEG 2 standard recently, specifically the video parts. It’s pretty interesting, in a weird way; makes me want to go out and write an MPEG decoder, just to experience that particular sort of complexity, except that doing so would take years with no real reward at the end. I’m used […]

Welcome to my blog. It’s implemented using WordPress, which seems pleasantly nice to use. (And is GPL‘d.) Many thanks to the good folks at Red Bean for their assistance, especially Ayse Sercan and Karl Fogel. (While I’m mentioning people, I’ll say hi to Jordan Ellenberg, since he promised to read the thing.) Great things await. […]