I’m working on the Design:Code:Unlimited aka DCU website pages. Sounds like a university, doesn’t it? Almost like the University of Washington, D.C. *grin*

Dear Lord! I was talking to somebody earlier who doesn’t have an RSS reader!!! What’s WRONG with these people?

Let me explain something, ladies and gentlemen. All of your favorite sites nowadays use RSS or Atom feeds as a way of transmitting news and updates. If there’s a popular (and some not-so-popular) site that you like to visit, there’s a good chance that the site is syndicating (broadcasting) an RSS feed.

Using RSS/Atom feeds is a way of getting news from all of your favorite spots in one place. It saves bandwidth, gives you a general idea of what’s going on…and most importantly…it saves you time. You don’t have to go to each separate site, just reading the main headlines is often enough to tell you if there’s something interesting worth going for.

RSSOwl is SourceForge.net’s Project of the Month. I encourage you to give it a try if you don’t already have an RSS reader. http://my.yahoo.com also has an RSS reader available to you if you have a Yahoo! account.

Go ahead. Syndicate me.

Today, I was processing something in the background while I slept. I’m pretty much in bed for most of today and I will be for most of tomorrow. I was trying to convert a movie that I enjoy, called “Vampire Hunter D”, from one AVI format to another. The original avi format was called DIV3 or MP43. This is Microsoft’s hacked-around version of MPEG4 video + MP3 audio for low-motion videos. Most animes can fall under this category, I think. However, the Microsoft DIV3/MP43 format is so old and screwy that it’s almost impossible to find something to decode it correctly.

You can know the format for .avi files (maybe other movies, I don’t know) by something called a FourCC code. In order to change this movie from one format to another, the best way with the most options that I have found is to first install codecs (I used Nimo Codec Pack) for compressing/decompressing the movies. Then, take a program such as VirtualDub(1.6.3 at the time of this writing) to change from one format to another.

Inside of VitualDub, when you go to open a file, there is a setting to show advanced options for that file. Check the first “force FOURCC box” and type “MPV3” into it. This will make it so that VirtualDub reads the video as a different format, basically the same as DIV3, and will let you re-encode it as a different AVI format.

This is not my end goal, though. After changing it to an AVI with uncompressed PCM as the sound format, keeping the same video stream, I’m going to code the AVI into MPEG1 format for viewing on our home theater.

To do this, I’m using TMPGEnc. An excellent program, it lets you set all kinds of things in regards to MPEG files.

Where does SSE come into all of this? Well, while doing research to find appropriate converters for the old-format AVI file, I came across something called “ffdshow”. It had a regular version, an SSE version, and an SSE2 version. With this new computer and new processor, I can now use things with SSE2, where before I couldn’t even use regular SSE.

What is SSE?

The Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) were introduced in the Pentium III processor. The SSE extensions consist of a new set of instructions and a new set of registers. These instructions and registers are designed to allow Single-Instruction Multiple-Data (SIMD) computations to be made on single-precision floating-point numbers.

Click here to find out more.

I’m on a lunchbreak from work. Still no voice. I was checking my e-mail, and this link was on a page on a link that was sent to me by you-know-who.

Google pagerank

I’m not really sure if this even still applies, but it certainly sparks some thoughts in my mind. For instance, does my putting the link of deBoerderij on this page mean that people who search for lunchbreaks will find a reason to vacation in Iowa? I wonder…

In other news, my roommate and friend ordered a heatsink/fan combo for my build-it-myself machine. I hope it fits!

Okay, I can’t sleep. I haven’t had a voice with which to speak (yes, I’ve lost my voice) since the 7th. I’m having a midnight snack and surfing. I came across this rather strange page while searching…

ludickid

Yep. Strange indeed. But not as strange as this:

Coors put its slogan, "Turn it loose," into Spanish,
where it was read as "Suffer from diarrhea."

You can find that and other such weirdness at this page.

Peace.