Stephen's Weblog

I’ve completed the vorbis decoder I set out to work on, mainly because I haven’t been able to think about much of anything else; It’s nothing fancy and it makes use of naive implementations of just about everything, my goal was just to make it work – which it does now… This makes me very happy because this is the first perceptual codec I’ve written completely from scratch; hopefully it is just the start of things to come :)

So, now I’m reevaluating the priority of everything agan, and will continue on the things that need to be done… Will post more soon.

Ok, so I haven’t really completed anything, but I did want to point those of you who are interested at a new wiki page in which I’ve clarified a lot of my goals and expected methodology for the “revolution” project collection that I’m working on getting started with (Wiki page for Project Revolution collection [wiki.akkit.org]).
If you want to be involved in this set of projects, of which the TCP/IP project is the first, please let me know, by any means of contact you prefer.
I’m hoping to kick off the TCP/IP project by the end of the month. It’s not essential that all developers are involved at that point, but it would help.

In other news, the number of projects I’ve been tinkering with lately is rather large. Some of them I’ll tell you about, some not – one thing I’m working on actively is an ogg/vorbis decoder.. I’m just writing a rough version for pc at the moment to verify my understanding, but I’d like to port it to DS. I’m working on an unnamed XNA game, that you might know about if you hang around where I do on IRC, but I’m not actively showing off. Some projects that I’m not working on that I should be are…. the optimization contest site, the nds test apps, and the logic analyzer code… Well, I will scrape my time together and allocate it where I see fit. I hope next post I can actually announce the completion of something or other :)

I’ve been working on a number of different projects lately, unfortunately none of them public yet.. And some new interesting directions are opening up to me, which is forcing me to rethink a few things.

In the meantime though I’ve put together a photo album of some pictures I took while the power was out here, I hope you find it interesting :) Ice Storm / Power Outage photo album (picasaweb)

Of course I know you’re just waiting for news on dstunnel, or some other project; Probably we’ll get some actual progress this month, whether it be sooner or later I’m not sure of yet.

And, my life continues to be uninteresting to the casual observer. Ah well, price I pay for not talking about things. I’m in the process of rescheduling the current tasks and deciding how much I want to make public – In a few days I’ll post some more information about when things should be done, pending the power not going out again ;)

(Not that I entirely blame the power outage; but it really didn’t help and threw a lot of things off schedule, that I now have to figure out how to rearrange.)

Also: happy new year! it’s 2008 now, which is a generally uninteresting number (factors to 2*2*2*251; is 11111011000 in binary, 7D8 hex, 3730 octal, I’m sure there are some interesting series it’s in though) I do hope this coming year is sufficiently interesting; and I expect to get a lot done.

I’m out of town, away from home for a week and a half; spending some time with family.
I have some plans to get things done, but don’t actually expect to get anything done :) Will pull things back together and (try to) put together a schedule once I get back… I would like to get the optimization contest going sooner than later, though, so that’s my first priority. After that, I have some crazy ds ideas I want to play with. But my priorities might shift by then, we’ll see. In the meantime I’m trying to enjoy myself and be lazy over the holidays, I might be around before, but will be back for sure in january.

Well, coming in on the “exciting” side of the news this week, is due to an ice storm, my residence’s power has been out since monday evening this week (presently I’ve been 85 hours without power at home)
Needless to say this isn’t really good for productivity, and I’ve got almost nothing done… I’ll be updating this post when I do finally get power back, with the duration that it was out for.

Update! Power is back, after 6.4 days without power (roughly 154 hours)

This past week has been far less stressful, though I haven’t got nearly as much as I would have liked done. Competition site is going to be done for next weekend now, so study up on ARM asm :)

I have a large handful of other projects that have occupied this weekend, but they’re not ones I really want to disclose at this time; maybe later.

That’s all for now, will post again when something interesting happens.

So, this week has entirely not gone how I would have liked; Not to say I haven’t got much done – I’ve completed a fair number of important things, but unfortunately the optimization contest site is still in the dark, and will be until I can scrape together the time to finish it. Which means, pretty soon, but I don’t know exactly when. It’s times like these that make me question whether my priorities are set the best they can be…

So… I’ve decided it’s a good idea to update the blog about once a week. Perhaps writing about things more often will make my life more clear. maybe. Not really sure where this is going to go yet.

Anyway, there are a lot of things I can’t talk about yet, but some that I can… Most notably, a DS ASM optimization contest website I’m working on… I’m currently planning to have the first contest start next weekend… I’m not going to say too much about it yet, but I hope some people find it interesting…

Well, that’s it for now. Maybe I’ll find more to talk about next time.

Hello all, I’m now going to disclose some information about a relatively secret set of projects that I have planned… This was actually the final goal in mind for the apprentice project, but I think this approach will be more useful. I’m looking for several programmers to be involved with these projects, for several reasons: first, is magnitude- this collection is much larger than anything I’ve ever attempted before. Second, is steering; I have a reasonably well thought out plan for how to proceed, but being able to debate it with other people will likely increase the plan’s effectiveness. Additionally, having more people involved means that things might go faster and bugs or security exploits might be found and resolved more quickly.
Basicly the idea of this set of projects is to build up all the required parts to build a proper operating system, and ultimately tie them together. I realize this is a lofty goal, but I think it is achievable, even if not entirely reasonable. And, if it does fail, there will still be a lot of useful code modules that could be used to improve other operating systems.
I do not require perfect programmers (if such a thing exists…) for this task, in fact all of these projects will be built alongside a rather extensive set of unit tests designed to verify correctness in a great many cases, and to expose security problems long before they become a problem.
The first of these projects is….. a new TCP/IP stack, possibly to be called sgIP 1.0; though the name is still up in the air, really. If you are interested in working on this project, please contact me… I’m still working on making time for these things, so it will be a week or 2 before the project gets off the ground, but let me know regardless.