I found myself in need of some binutils today. What do you suppose it is about this basic Apache file listing page that makes Google Chrome think it’s in French?

Opting to translate doesn’t seem to have any affect, aside from ruining the alignment of the columns.

That quirk aside, the page translation facility is actually quite nifty.

I recently read a magazine article about Lego Mindstorms. Naturally, the item that caught my eye was the mention of a bit of Lego software that converts various audio file formats to a custom format called RSO that can be downloaded into a Mindstorms project to make the creation output audio. To read different sources, one might be left with the impression that there is something super-duper top secret proprietary about the format. Such impressions do not hold up under casual analysis of a sample file.

A Google search for “filetype:rso” yielded a few pre-made samples that I have mirrored into the samples archive. The format appears to be an 8-byte header followed by unsigned, 8-bit PCM. More on the wiki. If FFmpeg could gain an RSO file muxer, that would presumably be a heroic feat to the Lego hacking community.

You have to know that I get a little nervous when I encounter something like this in my general web surfing– a video on the Amazon product page for 3D Dot Heroes:

Did I just encounter a particularly glaring Flash Player bug in the wild? Fortunately (w.r.t. my work load at my day job), I determined that there might be something wrong with the actual video encoding since I downloaded the corresponding .flv file and ran it through an independent VP6 decoder (provided by FFmpeg through VLC).

So what might be wrong with this video, class? I think this logo shot provides an exquisite insight into the problem:

This makes it pretty clear where the Y (grey part), U (blue part) and V (red part) planes begin (the green part shows where Y, U, and V components are all 0). It’s puzzling to think that this would be the encoder’s doing but it’s difficult to pin this on a particular decoder since I tried 2 different implementations.

Remember CD-ROMs? They were totally gonna revolutionize computer technology, owing to the fusion of video, audio, text, and interactivity. Or some such. It sounded like a good idea at the time and the concept commanded an impressive premium. The reason I bring this up is because I recently scavenged several in a series of outlandishly expensive CD-ROM storybooks published for the Apple Macintosh computers circa 1990. By outlandishly expensive, I mean in the range of $70-$85 per disc (about $110-$130 in today’s dollars).

I’m not usually interested in collecting very old Mac software; the only reason I snatched these up was because of the ridiculous prices on the front of each. The thrift store had forgotten to mark its own price tags on these CD-ROMs and the cashier was tempted to charge me the full $70-$85 for each disc until I gently reminded him that it was unlikely that any single item in the entire store was priced that high. We settled on a dollar each.

One of these CD-ROMs came with a vintage Apple business card, someone who held the position of “Account Executive – Education”, at an address I don’t recognize (i.e., not at Infinite Loop in Cupertino). Makes me wonder if the office predates the main Cupertino campus. Digital archaeology is a young science.

Tablet computers seem set to run with the interactive torch; Apple’s tablet computer leads the way for now. I wonder if the latest innovations in interactive applications on such devices will seem quaintly ridiculous in 10-20 years?

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