Monthly Archives: March 2006

HD-DVDs Delayed

It came across on the IMDb Studio Briefing today that Warner Bros., who had planned to first out the gate with HD-DVD movie titles on March 28, won’t be: Warner Home Video Delays High-Def Releases. The brief article doesn’t indicate when Warner Bros. intends to go ahead with the releases. Thus, for those of you ordering your new HD-DVD-capable Toshiba Qosmio laptop (when Toshiba slaps a model number on it and announces shipment), you have a little more time to make sure Linux runs on it before you try reading a next-generation optical disc.

What are the launch titles supposed to be? According to Wikipedia’s entry on the matter (is there anything the grand oracle Wikipedia can not tell?), Batman Begins is one of the handful of titles slated. Figures. I just got that on DVD a month ago. Now I will have to re-buy it on HD-DVD.

About that Qosmio laptop, Linux on Laptops’ Toshiba page lists entries for models E15, G10, and G20. The 2 Qosmio models available at ToshibaDirect.com are the G25 and G35. The specs of the G35 sound similar to what’s on offer with the new, HD-DVD-equipped, model-number-not-yet-announced Qosmio.

AAC Puzzles

You thought those Pickover puzzles were inane? Well, you were right. But it does help to keep a programmer sharp on pure computer science skills. One reason I have been having such a good time reverse engineering the FAAD2 source is because it represents a bunch of little puzzles. Only they’re considerably more straightforward and grounded in reality than the Pickover puzzles. If these puzzles were on a Pickover calendar page, they would be worded along the lines of,

“There are 8,192 numbers stored in a table called iq_table. 0, 1, 2.5198420997897464, 4.3267487109222245, all the way up to 165113.4940829452. What is the common property that connects all of these numbers?”

The answer (thanks to Jindrich Makovicka for pointing this out on the ffmpeg-devel list) is that each number is its index (0..8191) raised to an exponent of 4/3: iq_table[index] = index4/3. Here are some more puzzles:

Continue reading →

Beaten By A Puzzle

It pains me to admit that I couldn’t even produce a computer program capable of solving a Pickover puzzle (update: But Aurel Jacobs could; read on). This is another graph traversal puzzle. The setup is that you have an 8×9 graph with 8 blocked nodes:

* * * * * * * *
* X * * * * * *
* * * X * X * *
* * * * * * * *
* * X * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
* X * * * * * *
* * * X * * * *
* * X X * * * *

Find a path that begins and ends on the same node that covers every unblocked square without crossing itself and moving only vertically or horizontally.

Continue reading →