Big Brain’s puzzle for the weekend of March 11-12 was essentially an anagram puzzle. Using the following 12 letters:

e c m a o n s a d e l k

form an 8-letter (English) word and a 4-letter (English) word. One word tastes good and the other carries stuff. Usually, I am at a loss to write a program that can re-sort letters and find what look to be valid words. However, I recently found an anagram generator. Go to the homepage of the GNU MP Bignum library, scroll way to the bottom and find “Demo 2 — Find Anagrams”. One day, I hope to understand how big numbers pertain to computing anagrams. Anyway, insert those 12 letters and you will find an impressive list of anagrams, including the correct answer for the puzzle! For added enjoyment, insert your name or those of your friends (the Guru’s name anagrams to “Hemimeridae larceny”).

Your reign of terror-logic will not last long, Pickover. We have technology on our side.

A few weeks ago the Guru saw fit to defend AVI’s honor. I thought this would be a good opportunity to pen this ode to Apple’s QuickTime file format. As many of my open source multimedia brethren well know, I’m QuickTime’s biggest fan in our little community.

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Thanks go to Kostya for submitting a new, open source implementation of RAD Game Tools Smacker system for FFmpeg. If you have a computer game distributed on CD-ROM then there is perhaps a 47% chance that it contains Smacker (.smk) files. Check and see.

I took a break from the Understanding AAC MultimediaWiki page to start outlining WMV9/VC-1 in (get ready for this) Understanding WMV9. It’s big. It’s really big. But totally workable. I remain optimistic that we’ll get a new implementation up and running in no time.