Hi! What have you been up to? Me? I’ve just been working on a new, “open” AAC spec by reverse engineering FAAD2. Why? Oh, I don’t know. I just have this obsession with documenting multimedia technology. I imagine it could prove useful if someone wished to, for example, implement a fresh AAC decoder.
Yearly Archives: 2006
Meet mlbms
Janusz Dziemidowicz has been making some nifty progress with his mlbms program for mounting game resource archive format (GRAF) files. Check this out:
$ mlbms bms/alg-lib.bms resource-files/alg-lib/maddog.lib mount/ $ ls -al mount/ total 1 dr-xr-xr-x 2 melanson users 0 Feb 26 23:05 . drwxr-xr-x 7 melanson users 1120 Feb 26 19:07 .. -r--r--r-- 1 melanson users 305172 Feb 26 23:05 alg.mm -r--r--r-- 1 melanson users 24912 Feb 26 23:05 credits.mm -r--r--r-- 1 melanson users 314245 Feb 26 23:05 ibmlogo.mm -r--r--r-- 1 melanson users 338277 Feb 26 23:05 scen110a.mm -r--r--r-- 1 melanson users 278177 Feb 26 23:05 scen112a.mm [... ad nauseum ...]
Slick, huh? I knew you’d think so. This command mounts the LIB GRAF from Mad Dog McCree as part of the normal filesystem.
Graph Traversal Puzzle
Pickover came through with a slightly more involved brute force challenge. As usual I’ll spare you the flowery setup (though I did find it curious that it involved a character named Ben trying to reach one named Jennifer) and distill the essential details. Given this graph of values:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
find a path from any square in column 1 to any square in column 5, moving up, down, left, or right, such that the sum of all squares traversed tallies 90.
I liked writing this program because it is the most algorithmically interesting thing I have done in a long time, even though I originally solved the wrong problem. The way I originally read the problem, the task was to move from node 1 -> node 5, traversing up, down, left, or right, and find a path where the values sum to 90.
Send More Geese
Pickover’s puzzle for the weekend of February 4-5 challenged the reader to find 8 numbers to stand in for the letters D, E, G, M, N, O, R, and S such that the equation SEND + MORE = GEESE would be true. Again, there are multiple solutions. I’m pleased to report that I found 3 orders of magnitude more solutions than the big brain himself.