Yay, we're out of embargo! Denton actually demanded I take this picture as he posed it, so I think he liked his present. ( More about the construction of the little gate below )

Commencing final assembly!

We're out of beta and releasing on time...

The first few wooden shells, hot off the press as it were.

Camilla is cool. Very cool. She can make whole new people and stuff.

What do I do with my day, what did Mr. Uber-engineer achieve? I made a throbbing, light-up internally carved pumpkin.

In case you were wondering, the answer is, "Yes, superglue will also bond pumpkins instantly."

Perhaps this answers a few questions. And I think I want a larger time constant, so I'll be swapping 1uF dipped ceramic caps into the design.

LEDs + superglue + Plexiglas + properly placed paint = RGB edge-lit waveguide pop-culture. Total internal reflection is a nifty arts & crafts tool.

The 'on' photos were made under the same lighting as the first photo, but modern 'superbright' LEDs are, in a word, 'superbright' and they completely blew out the camera even in the face of a direct overhead halogen floodlight. Amazing what 30mA gets you these days.

Some black walnut, acrylic scrap, a font, and Camilla's scroll saw lurking provocatively in the background.

....also a shipment from my very favorite Chinese LED vendor (ie, the only one I've found that seems to do actual QA, unit testing, and binning)....

Courtesy eBay, mix one gross assorted hairsprings into the fun.

A 4v 40maH rechargable LiIon coin battery, matched 1 sq inch solar cell and diode preassembled to charge when illuminated. Hmm, a small, self-regenerating power supply for $1.50....

Now, what fun could I possibly have with these?

George Elas Montgomery was born last night at 4:03am. He weighed 7lbs 4.4oz, and I didn't catch the length because I was trying to take a picture. It was another fast delivery, so fast that the poor little guy is pretty bruised up from it. Poor little purple face!

But that's the worst of it; he's another robust looking little boy, mother and son are resting comfortably, there are no lingering worries from the delivery, Denton's off with Ruth for the afternoon, and Daddy gets to catch a few hours sleep once he fulfills his solemn LiveJournal duty. Then Denton and I will go down to visit so that the two new brothers can get acquainted.

( One more pic of little George below the cut )

I owe a whole bunch of blog posts on more official Xiph topics, but tonight I present silliness.

I suppose it was unhealthy to even try to resist painting the newest server. Now off it goes to Oregon.

Camilla posted previously about going out train watching with Denton and seeing a police helicoper take off, which he was quite thrilled with. She took him out to watch airplanes at Hanscom recently and saw another chopper. I went to download pics off the camera tonight and found a few really great pics of Denton at Hanscom she hadn't posted, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to post one :-)

Coming up tomorrow, we have an IETF BoF on a proposed Working Group for FOSS audio codecs. It is one of the more... controversial BoFs in recent memory. Something of a main event... ( way more under the cut, and we'd like interested folks to lend their voice... )

Denton appears to be using TuxPaint to plan some sort of maneuvers near Dunkirk. I assume the penguins represent Special Forces of some kind.

With tonight's double-release (well... release candidates) of libvorbis 1.2.2 and libogg 1.1.4, this has been quite a month of software releases. In addition to Ogg and Vorbis, Ralph, Tim and Greg have cut a second alpha of Thusnelda and I managed to push out some vanity software on my own time-- a new release of gPlanarity and the beginnings of getting the Gimp monkey off my back. No, not the new resampler, but a number of TileCache fixes that looked pretty necessary.

Whoof. Getting tired. But cdparanoia, two more libvorbis releases and a whooole lotta documentation come next.

It's time for the latest Thusnelda encoder project update summary!

Although I haven't gotten much time to dive back into Thusnelda coding myself, Tim Terriberry, Greg Maxwell and others have continued the work along at a merry pace. In the past few weeks, they've finally replaced the leaky fDCT from the original VP3 and begun work on adjusting the main quantization matrices and, hopefully soon, adaptive quantization. These improvements all improve fine detail rendering and, somewhat unexpectedly, improve gradient rendering as well:

The screen caps above were produced by Theora 1.0 on the left and an experimental version of Thusnelda with early quant matrix optimization work in addition to the new fDCT on the right. Both clips were encoded in constant-quantizer mode and equal bitrates.

Other improvements, more details and the full update report here.