Jesse Ezell Blog

H.263 is a video format the is pretty similar to what you find in MPEG. Like a lot of digital video formats, the first place size reduction happens is at the color level. As it turns out, having an equal representation of R, G, and B values like you are probably used to can be pretty wasteful. For example, your eye can recognize far more shades of green than red or blue. Knowing this, YUV formats are used instead of RGB (some times called Y'CrCb). Y, or luma, stores mostly the green info, while the other two components store the r and b components. Taking into account that your eyes don't need as much distinction between all the colors in the spectrum, YUV formats will generally include less information about the R and B component. In the case of H.263, a format known as 4:2:0 is used. 4:2:0 takes the Y component and stores an array of 8-bit values (width*height) for the image. Following this come the V & U components, which are both stored in individual arrays. However, the V and U values are sampled for each 2x2 block on the screen and only contain 1/4 the amount of information. The loss of detail sucks if you need really crisp edges and you aren't working in a high res environment, but for most types of video (like the average DVD for instance), your eye won't pick up on anything...after all, did you even know they were doing this to you until I told you? :-).

The Macromedia Central team wants your input on licensing:

One of the companies I did some work for based on our SWFSource C++ library has just launched a blog:

With all the great thinking coming from Miguel de Icaza, it is no wonder that Don Box is trying to get him to jump the fence. What makes Miguel so dangerous is that first and foremost, he is a brilliant guy. However, perhaps even more important is the fact that he really truely understands and buys into the same type of thinking that has gotten Microsoft to where they are today. Unlike many of the intelligent people in the Linux community, he believes that components are vastly superior to pipes, he believes that managed languages are the only way to stay competitive in the coming years, he believes that Linux development is way to costly, etc. If his crusade is successful, Miguel will have done far more to give Linux a leg up in the coming years than Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman combined. My advice to Microsoft: “hire him before he succeeds, or face the consequences.”

Miguel explains to the Linux camp why Longhorn is such a dangerous foe:

“Ultimately, an obscure securities rule seems likely to override any possible second thoughts about a Google IPO.

“the [National Research] council recommended in its report that the patent office and Congress take seven steps to improve the patent system. Those steps include, among other things, hiring new patent examiners, creating a more open system for challenging questionable patents, and rejecting more patents on processes that are deemed to be "obvious" by people in the field.” [1]

Matt Mickiewicz sent me a few chapters from one of his company's latest books: Build Your Own ASP.NET Website Using C# and VB.NET and asked me for my thoughts. It definately seems like a book I could recommend to someone with minimal web design experience. Of course, I tend to underestimate the challenge the average person faces when getting up and running since I've been programming since elementary school, but the book does do a better job of explaining some of the basic details than I could do (even stuff I probably would have completely left out, like installing IIS, etc.). There is some potential misleading info in the chapters I read, such as the discussion of “namespaces,“ where the author says you must import a namespace to use its functionality, which leads to a very common misconception that namespaces actually do something. But, to some degree, I can understand something like this, because telling a beginner that “namespaces don't actually exist in the IL“ or something along those lines is probably counter-productive. The initial discussion of current “.NET“ applications from Microsoft is also a bit out of date for a book being published at this time, but this is also a very minor issue. So, overall, it looks like a pretty solid book for a beginner (like 99% of the other ASP.NET books out there), but if you want the technical stuff, go buy a copy of Essential .NET instead.