Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Monty's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
5:58 pm	Denton loves TuxPaint Denton appears to be using TuxPaint to plan some sort of maneuvers near Dunkirk. I assume the penguins represent Special Forces of some kind. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
1:43 am	Lots of software released this month... 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. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 7th, 2009
6:52 pm	an open source documentary about copyright and remix culture _Finally_ available to the general public: _RiP: A Remix Manifesto_ Although this is only looking at one angle of how Copyright has been whacked way out of balance in this country by the current media powers (who want things to stay the way they are, and aren't afraid to make half of the citizens in this country Federal criminals to acheive that), it is also one of the few documentaries that manages to state its agument clearly and concisely. It's a fabulous piece of work that I had the priviledge to see last year at an early screening. Did you agree with the various "sharing" and "public-good" premises presented in "Revolution OS" but still found yourself squirming uncomfortably at the way it was presented? And then, when it was over, wonder just what exactly it wanted you to think about? I mean, it sorta felt like it was trying to broaden your perception of... something... somehow... RiP, on the other hand, left me flushed, excited, and ready to go do rhetorical battle. This film is worth seeing. (Comment on this)
12:32 pm	Blogging Theora 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. (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009
9:01 pm	The newest in bathtime entertainment! Remember when I said since Denton's turned two, no more bath pics? I lied. bathtime is just too much fun. Denton's favorite recent bath toy has been, of all crazy things, a handful of icecubes at a time. Since we often play with food coloring in the bath anyway, it's not a stretch to imagine colored ice cubes! I was a bit surprised that feezing food coloring causes it to lose most of its color. Quite a few ice cubes had gone almost completely clear. Camilla: Here's an denoised version of the pic you posted of Denton in the new shorts you made him. The noise was particularly bad so the filter's very noticable, but I think it's still an improvement: (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 26th, 2009
2:38 pm	"The ink it likes to drink is pink" (Comment on this)
1:05 am	I'll just leave this here too (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 25th, 2009
11:06 pm	"You should have seen the other guy..." [Camilla took this pic.] Denton accidentally tripped on the dog's leash and went face-first down a couple of the concrete stairs at Tufts. And yet the look on his face somehow suggests that he attacked the Earth itself... and won. Little boys. [He has told us a few times 'it hurts'.] (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, April 24th, 2009
2:01 pm	This photo of a downy woodpecker braining itself on a Toyota brought to you by.... Or, rather, it would have been brought to you by if I had a split ring focus, some time to set up the camera with a sane ISO/aperture and a more oblivious subject so I could have gotten closer. Too bad too, the composition was fabulous. (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
11:51 pm	I'll just leave this here (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
12:04 pm	First post-haircut picture Denton's cutting down to one cup a day. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 20th, 2009
9:56 am	In order to address the recent dearth of The Cute (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 29th, 2009
12:37 am	Uh... Quality Control? Woah, how exactly did that get there? And yes, it really is a stray. The other two matching boards I have don't have the stray cap, and both ends of the cap are soldered to different points of the same trace. (No the board is not missing a cap from anywhere else.) (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
9:10 pm	Blogging Theora: Thusnelda release! I was all set to write a long, elaborate post detailing some of the new/ongoing work on the upcoming Thusnelda encoder when Tim and Ralph decided to one-up me. The initial alpha of Thusnelda is out! It wasn't vaporware before, but now it's hit its first official [alpha] release. More details in a bit once I figure out where I put my writing cap. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 16th, 2009
9:02 am	Blogging Theora Today shall be the Day of Blogging in general. In this case, it even counts as much-needed documentation. There have been a couple of requests for a Theora/Thusnelda update since I have't posted one in really quite a while-- and that immediately after reporting 'rapid progress'. Because I work on Xiph code as part of my day-job responsibilities at Red Hat, I don't have complete control over my development priorities. Red Hat in general is usually reasonably hands-off, but around Thanksgiving of last year transfered me to working exclusively on a high-priority internal project, and thus transfered me off all Xiph projects including Thusnelda. This is temporary, but temporary may be a few more months yet. Yeah, 'Grrrrr' is right. The good news is that Xiph had already been working on securing funding to get Tim Terriberry working on Thusnelda full time when I got pulled off the project. Mozilla's Chris Blizzard and WikiMedia's Eric Moeller were especially keen to push development forward when we met at the Open Video Alliance's meeting in New Haven last October, and money for contracts came through in February (the $100K mentioned there is for several contracts, not just completing Thusnelda). As much of the Thusnelda work was me channelling Tim, this is an even better position to be in than we were before. It would be best if we could both work on it, but Tim is definitely a higher-powered video hacker than I am. Now... can I successfully rope Tim into blogging? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, February 26th, 2009
3:54 am	Inching toward that first haircut... This is also a test run of a new resampler I've written for the Gimp after realizing Gimp's own resamplers are all broken (except Nearest Neighbor). But more about that in a bit. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
2:44 am	Obsessive little beast [Clearing out a few pics from the last month or so that I hadn't gotten around to posting...] Denton requested a handful of raisins while he was in the bath. The next time I looked over, he'd carefully lined them up along the edege of the sink and over the next ten minutes, ate them one by one, left to right. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 18th, 2008
6:26 am	Surfing Denton's well aware that the mouse moves a pointer on the screen and when you click on things in a web browser, you might get flash slideshows of birds, or jaguars or puppies. But not on 64 bit linux, because the flash plugin doesn't work. This doesn't stop him from trying to hack a fix. And dude... clean your desk. I don't care if you're busy banging out code. ;-) (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
2:14 am	Happy 2nd, Denton! Denton turned two on the seventh, unfortunately he's been sick since and tonight's been especially rough. I just got to uploading some of the pics off the camera, but just getting this one ready to post has been two hours of interruptions, running upstairs to comfort him every ten minutes or so. Poor little guy. Camilla's taking a turn with him, so I finally got time to finish the post. Also.... hooray for noise reduction algorithms that work: The original before running it through the little denoise plugin I've written for Gimp. Almost makes ISO 1600 useful :-) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 7th, 2008
4:28 pm	Denton Caption Contest Sunday! Lime Jello Baby! Spock: "Captain, we seem to have entered an uncharted region of lime jello." Kirk: "Iz Okay Spock! We can eats it!" (I had to get these out of the way-- Denton turns two today, so he's probably officially too old for any new emabarrassing bathtub photos we can use to mortify him in front of his first date. The green is just food coloring. It's one of his bathtime play rituals at this point, he begs for a specific color almost every night.) (4 Comments |Comment on this)