The local mockingbirds have fired up the springtime brood-vats, and I was surprised to hear fledgelings begging for food yesterday.

I was pretty sure I could hear three of them, and finally managed to catch the whole brood in one place (otherwise, not a great picture).

This also afforded some opportunity to practice driving stick on the camera (handheld shooting a manual focus long telephoto)!

( many more large pics under the cut! )

Now that we have an unnaturally early spring^H^H^H^H^H^Hsummer here in New England, I finally had a few patches of green grass against which to try white balancing the new-ish D7000 with an IR filter in place.

Persistence payed off... it will do it!

Sadly, the Sigma zoom shows a huge honking hotspot in most shots. I shall have to try the primes and ancient Tamron zoombeast next.

Alternate photo title: "Winter? What winter? Wait, that was winter?"

Alternate alternate photo title: 600mm is just not enough

(by Monty and the Xiph.Org community)

Articles last month revealed that musician Neil Young and Apple's Steve Jobs discussed offering digital music downloads of 'uncompromised studio quality'. Much of the press and user commentary was particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of uncompressed 24 bit 192kHz downloads. 24/192 featured prominently in my own conversations with Mr. Young's group several months ago.

Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space.

If you just said 'Whaa?', you may want to read the whole article.

It's fairly long... but hearing, perception and fidelity are complicated topics. Shysters and charlatans exploit that nuance (and misunderstanding) to bilk unsuspecting consumers of their money, all the while convincing them they're paying for 'quality'.

Anyway, happy reading and comments welcome!

This is a pic from last summer that I had meant to post then. I ran across it again a few nights ago, and didn't want to forget a second time.

Camilla forwarded a necessary tip for installing the XiphQT components on a 64 bit Mac OS X so that it works with iTunes. This is a reasonably well known tip, but it wasn't in our FAQ or installation instructions (well it is now as of about ten minutes ago) so I'm passing it along now too...

I upgraded to Lion, and my ogg files stopped being able to play in iTunes (silently). Here's how to make it go:

0. "show in finder" your iTunes binary (either navigate to the Applications folder, or right/control click on it in the dock, and choose "show in finder")
1. right/control click on iTunes in the finder, and select "Get Info"
2. Under General, check the box marked "Open in 32-bit mode"

You should put the above on something linked from: http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/download.html I paraphrased it from roaringapps.com.

If XiphQT can be rebuilt in 64 bit mode, and that shipped that way to Lion users, that would also be a good solution.

That last comment is actually a bit of an embarrassment for us at the moment; neither the XiphQT builds nor code have been updated since 2009 or so, despite multiple releases, fundamental improvements and new features in the Xiph codecs since. There are actually more recent beta builds of updated Mac OS X and Win32 XiphQT components than never got bumped to the official XiphQT download page, but even these builds are from mid 2009.

We don't have any high-powered Mac OS hackers in the core Xiph group at the moment. I have some relatively insignificant amount of experience coding for Mac OS X and Quicktime, but I've been hoping for a volunteer with more chops. Any takers?

Turns out I missed blogging about the latest Ghost update... back in November...

Ghost Demo4 is up on the demo list showing the sinusoidal extractor doing some very early sinusoidal tracking frame to frame, and a very early example of the analysis performing real sinusoidal/non-sinusoidal audio splitting. Pictures and interactive listening, oh my!

It looks like I'll be putting a month or two into transOgg before getting back to Ghost work (and demo 5). The work that went into demo4 raised a number of questions I'm not sure how to approach answering yet, so I'm going to let that percolate for a bit.

I made a quick change to the Xiph.Org front page that a few people have suggested now over the past few years.

The top few blog posts aggregated by Planet Xiph now appear as a five-item teaser list near the top of the Xiph.Org home page. The idea is both to get some more live content on the front page as well as to draw more attention to both the Planet and our developer community.

Comments and feedback welcome!

Last weekend I was having some trouble reliably handling thin acrylic stock, specifically putting two .220" wide .015" deep slots into .660" wide strips of .030" acrylic. This morning was more successful:

The router leaves a rather pretty moire pattern as I'm feeding by hand so my feed rate isn't perfectly steady. ( Pics of new jigs under the cut )

Quite a few otherwise interested people may not have heard that the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) is holding a panel and workshop next week concerning how patent trolls are abusing standards body processes. This is our field, and we didn't find out about it until end of last week.

Regardless, Xiph.Org has assembled an official comment document, and will be represented in person by at least Dr. Tim Terriberry and possibly a few other core members (I won't be there).

If you're interested in software patents, some of the US Government's thinking on the issue, and participating in the process, have a look at the above two links. Also, feel free to distribute our comments far and wide. It's somewhat more gripping than the usual, dry "Percy Q. Business Leader Advises the Federal Goverment".