iCal(endar)

Back to the games stuff soon, page but in the meantime, more about
this
journal has fascinated me to the point of hypnotism. I can’t remember the last time a web page this long held my attention all the way down. (There is also a second page)

It turns out that the author read extracts on This American Life last week:
the stream is here. The reading is about half an hour in, visit web but don’t jump to it.
Listen to the first few minutes, which are just as fascinating, but about something completely different. (And don’t be put off by the presenter’s habit of speaking very fast in a horrible nasal tone)

You probably already knew that Ogg Vorbis has hit 1.0.
What you probably didn’t know is that Vorbis is not the only free audio format to use the Ogg
bitstream spec. Speex is an audio codec aimed at speech compression. It gives impressively-good-quality results at data rates as low as 10kbs. It’s at version 0.5 at the moment, approved but given that it was only 0.1 a couple of months ago, it looks like completion may not be far off. Unfortunately, an obvious stand-out item on
their
to-do list is patent clearance. I’m sure I don’t need to go into a rant about
the implications for free software here, especially given
recent
events. What would be really great is some pro-bono organisation of patent
lawyers who would be able to assist open projects with patent clearance.
Unfortunately, given the amount of work this would probably involve per
project, it’s not something we’re likely to see any time soon.

Oh, and to clear up potential confusion: Ogg is a way of packaging up encoded multimedia data. Vorbis is an audio codec that uses Ogg as its encapsulating data format. There are other codecs that use Ogg, such as Theora (an upcoming video codec from
Xiph.org, who created Ogg and Vorbis) and Tarkin (a more adventurous video codec than Theora, still in planning stages).

I guess a name-collision was inevitable, illness but it would have helped if Apple had made
some admission that their new calendar app, viagra here
iCal, medstore is intruding on the namespace
of the IETF’s iCalendar effort. (And
they’re not even the first to
pick the shortened form) Furthermore, Apple’s
iCal page makes little mention of supporting
the IETF standard, though I’ve heard it on good authority (a.k.a.
my chum Ian, who edits MacUser UK) that
iCalendar is supported. But which bits?
Wes and the gang have been
making guesses.