Cody Russell

mp3 Decoder Licensing Fees

Today Thomson Multimedia and Frauenhofer Gesellschaft, owners of the mp3 patents, changed their licensing terms so that decoders must pay $0.75 per decoder in addition to whatever they were charging per encoder before. Everyone seems to be really upset by this, but I think it seems like a pretty cool thing. This seems like some potentially good publicity for open standards and may push people give a little more thought to things like Ogg Vorbis.

Open standards are good, m’kay.

VoIP

raph: Have you looked at GnomeMeeting at all? It’s been awhile since I used it, but it seemed simple enough to use and it’s compatible with Microsoft NetMeeting so you can talk to people who use Windows. I’ve never had any real need to use it, but I talked to Sopwith one time just to see how well it worked and it seemed pretty good.

QuakeCon

As I expected, QuakeCon mostly sucks if you’re just going to observe. The real fun there is bringing your computer and getting on a huge-ass network to play against a lot of other people you don’t know.

I did get to talk to John Carmack for a couple minutes, and I’ve got a couple photos of me with Carmack. I also took several photos from the rest of QuakeCon, mostly just photos of all the really weird cases people have their computers running in. I’ll post photos sometime in the near future.

I got to see Doom 3 a little bit, and it was really exciting. I like the in-game editing features a lot. The graphics are really nice, both because of the game engine itself and because id has some really talented artists there. We saw a demonstration from one of the modellers and saw sort of how they develop their models. The one in the demo started as this absolutely amazing 800,000 polygon figure designed in Lightwave. We saw how they’re animated. They have a former Pixar guy there doing this stuff now, and it’s definitely looking amazing.

Downloading..

I’m up at school downloading Gnome 2.0 so I can finally check it out. I got Red Hat 7.3 installed the other day finally. I also downloaded Mono, because I’ve been dying to check it out.

QuakeCon

Tomorrow David and I are going to QuakeCon. It’s probably not going to be worth the trip, but we have nothing else to do and we want to see the Doom 3 demo.

Weddings

My cousin Rachel was married last weekend. She and her new husband Donnie moved out to California. I’ve got a couple photos from her wedding that I’ll post sometime, but now isn’t such a great time.

My best friend Gerry was married yesterday. Gerry and I have known one another since third grade. It’s really cool to see him get married. They’re on their way to Hawaii now, then I guess they’ll be off to Austin when they get back. Gerry has one more year at UT Law School, and he’s been offered a really good job at a big law firm in Dallas for when he finishes. I’m really happy for him.

/dev/sda is hosed

I’m not sure what’s wrong yet, but one of my hard drives is totally whacked. Linux fdisk and mkfs.ext3 appear to work, then when I restart the machine it appears exactly as it was before, which is to say a fucked up /dev/sda1 and a fucked up /dev/sda5. This is especially odd since I used fdisk/mkfs.ext3 to remove all partitions and create one really huge-ass /dev/sda1 and format it. Windows XP’s Computer Manager can’t delete the partitions because it says they’re ‘write-protected’. Normally, I would find it very comforting that Windows can’t screw up my Linux partitions but now this annoys me.

Fucking weak..

So I see that Rockstar is releasing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in October. That’s cool. However, they’re only releasing it on Playstation 2. That’s fucking not cool at all! I also noticed that Bungie is making a Halo 2. That’s not even cool considering they still haven’t released the PC and Mac versions of Halo. And, furthermore, they’re not saying shit about making the sequel for PC/Mac at all.

Fuck you guys. I don’t want a pansy-ass console game machine. That shit is for 10 year olds and fucking frat boys.