another weblog

So I haven’t really kept up with Theora much, having become addicted to H.264, but a slashdot comment posted today showed me some experiments xiphmont has been doing to improve Theora’s video quality that, so far, seem to be yielding very substantial results. It’s definitely got my interest back in Theora.

I don’t know if the results rival what (say) x264 can produce in terms of quality/size ratio, but compared to baseline Theora the improvement is very obvious.

Worth a look, especially by all you video people (in the context of this weblog: AMVers) out there.

I removed my blog entries from LiveJournal because I don’t want them there anymore.

If you’d like to do the same, you might find this very quick and dirty Ruby script useful. It requires Ruby 1.8.6 or a compatible Ruby implementation.

The script expects a range or array of entry IDs. I was kind of lazy and didn’t really want to write much code, so I used LogJam to download my journal, extracted the entry IDs from the generated XML, and pasted the result into the script. It’s certainly possible to have this script pull out those IDs directly, though.

Moving here. LiveJournal’s getting too big for me, and I don’t like the way it’s going, so I decided to jump ship.

Switchover chores

All my picture galleries have been backed up. I don’t really know where I’ll post them — I have a server available to host them, but no suitable gallery software yet. I may end up just adapting FotoBilder (LJ’s photo software), since I’m used to it, it’s open source, and I already have a lot of data in its format.

Pan-Fried Salmon in French Dressing with Bed of Rice and Lamb’s Lettuce

(frankly, that makes it sounds a lot cooler than it is)

• Sockeye salmon, one pound, cut into 8 ounce portions
• French dressing
• Short-grain rice
• Lamb’s lettuce (mache)
• Tarragon
• Brown sugar
• Olive oil

Marinade salmon in dressing and tarragon for a few hours. Add brown sugar to taste. Prepare rice; when rice is almost done, pan-fry salmon in olive oil, skin-side-up, for about 5 minutes. Flip salmon and cook until skin is crispy. Cover plate or bowl with mache, put rice on top of mache, place salmon onto mache.

I didn’t actually make this with brown sugar; I threw that into the recipe in retrospect. It would have complemented the French dressing quite nicely.

Another reminder to self: take pictures of these things before eating them.