Yearly Archives: 2009

FATE of BeOS and Haiku

Once upon a time, all the way back in 1998, I remember downloading a demo version of BeOS on some kind of live HD partition hosted under Windows. I booted into it twice and couldn’t find a good reason to do it a third time. However, there is that bustling community of developers developing the clone of BeOS named Haiku. This article at Ars Technica leads me to believe that the Haiku OS has reached some kind of development milestone (R1 alpha1).

Of course, this all reminds me that FFmpeg does have 1 or 2 developers who like to make sure that the application still builds and runs on Haiku. But are there any takers for running FATE continuously on Haiku? I installed the ISO image in a VMware session but was unable to connect to a network. I’m a little surprised Haiku doesn’t at least support the VMware network device (or does it? Perhaps I need to manually configure it somehow).


Haiku terminal and logo

I think I may finally understand the compelling reason to continue supporting gcc 2.95 in FFmpeg: that’s the default one installed in BeOS. This strikes me as odd since BeOS was alleged to be based largely on C++ and gcc’s C++ language support as of 2.95 was known to be less than stellar. Perhaps the OS builders simply limited themselves to a sane subset of the language which could conceivably make Be programming halfway tolerable.

For my part, I’m wondering how to program Haiku/Be in the first place. Haiku is supposed to reimplement Be’s C++ API, but where is that defined? Is O’Reilly’s online Be programming book the last word on the matter? I should check my boxes and see if I still have a giant book of Be that a friend gave me a long time ago for no good reason. He must have gotten the impression I was interested in hacking operating systems or something.

Reddit On Treasure Master

I have never really figured out what role Reddit plays in the grand scheme of things. But someone over there has taken an interest in figuring out the Treasure Master code system, something on which I have previously hypothesized.


Reddit logo
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It’s a determined bunch and I’m impressed with the headway they seem to be making. I never had time to get to the bottom of this. I’m eagerly watching to see if they can crack this ancient and useless puzzle.

Apple Screen Codec

In reading Ars Technica’s lengthy, thorough review of Apple’s new Snow Leopard, I noticed the addition of screen recording to QuickTime. The screenshots indicate that it is configurable for “medium” and “high” quality. Naturally, I bring this up because I wonder what format the video is saved in. QuickTime’s extensive suite of default video codecs does not include a lossless, screen video-oriented codec (per my recollection). And since the feature is out there, people are going to expect FFmpeg and all of its descendant apps to be able to transcode it.

The Freezing Point of Brussels Sprout Soda

In the interest of using the internet to facilitate original scientific research, I am publishing the results of my inadvertent experiment regarding the relative freezing points of various novelty sodas.


Jones holiday soda

Revenge of the White Elephant
At a white elephant gift exchange a few years ago, I received a re-gifted set of novelty holiday-themed sodas created by the Jones Soda Company. They created several of these over the years. This one had pumpkin pie, cranberry, wild herb stuffing, turkey and gravy, and — sigh — Brussels sprout flavors. I never got around (or got up the courage) to sample them and they have languished in my bachelor refrigerator ever since. The reason for the “bachelor” qualifier is that it stays fairly empty and I generally keep a pretty good mental inventory of its contents. Imagine my surprise when I noticed a strange, light green liquid on the bottom.

It smelled strange but I figured it was coming from a plastic container containing a friend’s homemade pickles. I removed the pickles from the equation and cleaned up the liquid. Later on, I noticed some more liquid had collected. The inside bulb is burned out (remember, bachelor fridge) so it’s a bit dark inside. However, I eventually spied a shard of clear glass.


Jones brussels sprout soda bottle, broken

Results
So it seems that the Brussels sprout soda had frozen and expanded until the glass bottle could no longer contain the block. That explains the sound of crashing glass I recall hearing the night before which emanated in the general vicinity of the kitchen.

The bottle was in pretty bad shape but much of the soda was still frozen inside what remained of the bottle. That it must have been gradually melting explains why there was more fluid sometime after the initial cleanup. I immediately, but gingerly, removed the other 4 bottles for fear that they might be ready to burst as well. But none of the 4 showed any sign of freezing.

What to conclude? Either the brussels sprout soda has a significantly higher freezing point than the other 4 flavors and was adversely affected during a freak temperature drop; or the Brussels sprout soda was situated in a colder section of the refrigerator. It’s also possible that all of them were affected by the temperature event but the others didn’t make it to the breaking point before the event reversed.

Impact
I can theorize about it all day. But in the end, I need to clean it up. How does this pertain to multimedia hacking? Well, I was going to add long-overdue test cases to FATE tonight, but that may have to wait. Fortunately, I was at the end of a shopping cycle and all I had to toss were some soda-saturated bananas. I’m keeping the butter since I don’t think it was affected, much. To any coworkers reading: if my cookies taste vaguely of Brussels sprouts over the next month, then, well… I happen to know that’s the closest some of you will come to consuming a vegetable all month.

And I never got to taste the Brussels sprout soda. Actually, that’s the part about this episode that bothers me the least.