There are few things that annoy me quicker than a licensing war erupting on a free software project mailing list. Self-righteous geeks with dubious grasp on legal matters tediously dissecting the minutiae of different licensing terms. But I could not believe what I found when I asked Google to bring up the text of the GNU LGPL:

Sure, there are those who claim that ‘GPL’ is more commonly searched for than ‘LGPL’. But I see so few good conspiracies to latch onto, can’t you just give me this one?

Hi! My name is Mike. I do a lot of multimedia technology hacking. I have an entire website dedicated to this pursuit, which is probably how you got to this blog in the first place. I spend a lot of time thinking about multimedia technology and helping to make sure open source software can play all kinds of common and obscure multimedia formats. Strange enough hobby, but it keeps me off the street and out of trouble.

After doing this multimedia stuff long enough, I actually got invited to a technical conference to talk about this stuff. I gave 2 presentations at The 2nd Swiss Unix Conference in Zurich, Switzerland in early September, 2004. The first presentation was entitled “Multimedia On Unix: Past, Present, and Future”. The slides are available here. However, slides never make much sense by themselves. So, if you have a fair amount of download capacity and about an hour to kill, you can watch or listen to this presentation by downloading the .AVI or .MP3 files from here.

The second presentation was entitled “Trash Multimedia And The Evolution Of Full Motion Video”. The slides for this one are available here. There is no video for this one which is probably good because it was 3 hours long. This presentation was not specifically Unix-related but just showcased a lot of different examples, good and bad, of multimedia technology I have encountered during my studies. Eventually, I may do write-ups of some of this multimedia in this blog.

So I am finally surrendering to the trend and starting my own blog. My goal is to keep better track of developments in multimedia technology, both in the closed/proprietary, and open arenas.

For the curious, this blog’s title, “Breaking Eggs and Making Omelettes” is a reference to the aphorism, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.” This is in reference to software reverse engineering (RE). RE usually has to take place in order to create open source multimedia software that is interoperable with proprietary formats. The mention (and practice) of RE makes a lot of people squeamish. The broken-egg aphorism always comes to my mind in such discussions.