Programming on Thoughts and Ramblings

Text Compression

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 20:32:46 +0000

As outlined in the original post, I wrote a text compression routine using huffman encoding on words which achieved a higher compression ratio than gzip while being more usable for decompression of segments. I’ve finally packaged the code together under the MIT license. I ask that those who find it useful credit me with the library and submit back changes (though neither is required under the license). Anyway, on to the details of the library:

Perian

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:00:49 +0000

I started work with Perian back in June of 2006 when Augie asked me, “say, any interest in updating the the ffmpeg based quicktime component?”. I admit, I was hesitant at first, but after a bit, I helped him set up a repository. At this point, I was hooked. I helped work on the following parts:

Made a script which could build ffmpeg as a universal library
Changed the data path for ffusion to expedite decoding
Worked out big and little endian issues
Increased the speed of ffmpeg’s decoding of H.264

Please check out my work on Perian’s main web page.

Fire Development

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 22:33:09 +0000

I started using Fire back in the days of Mac OS X Server (before the public beta). It was the only IM client for the mac in those days. In 2002 or so, I created a small patch that fixed the get info within AIM and added the box to display profile information. After that, my development exploded to include the following items

Switch AIM back to the OSCAR protocol and added buddy icons as well as file transfer(first OS X client to do this)
Enabled Tabbed chat windows, and wrote two of the three different tab styles
Used xhtml as the logging format to save all the data and enable future expansion
Enabled multiple logins per service (much needed feature) for version 2.0
Wrote a new and more efficient buddy list for version 2.0
Massively optimized sections of code and reorganized the class hierarchy to a better design for version 2.0

The main webpage is located at http://fire.sourceforge.net

Kyocera Ringtone Converter for the Mac

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 22:28:29 +0000

Download The latest version of the Kyocera Ringtone Converter for the Mac.zip

About this Program This program was written by Graham Booker. I wrote this program shortly after getting my Kyocera 7135 in 2003 and being annoyed by the slight that was given to mac users by Kyocera not creating a ring tone converter for the mac. It is now 2005, and I got emailed by a nice user requesting some documentation, so I decided to write some.