The Mandelbear's Musings

...But this is too cool not to mention: (ganked from docbug = docbug_feed, who thus saves me the trouble of looking up the links myself. Bug got the links from our coworker Mike G., who did a lot of work on the J2K spec.)

Yesterday a consortium of the major movie studios announced final specs for a new standard digital format for movie theaters. The specification uses JPEG 2000 video compression, which (though it happened before I started working there) I'm proud to say largely came out of work performed at my lab.

It's nice to be associated with a company that does cool things, gives a damn about the environment, and is great to work for.

The cool thing about JPEG 2000 is that it's based on wavelets and so does multiple resolutions all at once. You can compress a file losslessly, store it on a server, and then request just exactly the image size and quality you want. You can even request pieces, pan around, and re-assemble the pieces into an entire image in your cache. It's going to revolutionize the Web as soon as there's a decent open source implementation that can be put into apps like Firefox, OpenOffice, and the Gimp.

Speaking of open source and my work, late this afternoon I finally got the new pluggable blob format code working in my little, soon-to-be-released miniserver. If I'm really lucky I may get permission to upload it to RiSource.org in time to have something to show off at OSCon in Portland next week. mr_kurt?

Oh, yes: we were the first major Japanese company (as far as I know) to release an open-source software project.