Microsoft pays a lot of money to keep their research arm busy, and one of the things those PhDs do to keep busy is create new codecs that aren’t encumbered by existing patents. This has worked well for their media player in both the audio and video arena, and apparently they intend to do the same thing when it comes to Voice over IP.

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Motorola has a new bluetooth headset, and shows themselves to be total boneheads by advising us to use it in the two worst possible ways: while driving and when in confined spaces with other people who don’t particularly want to hear us yakking on our cell phone.

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You know how when you buy something that has “batteries included” and you think, well, isn’t that nice? Take a look at those batteries and you’ll often see some off brand that you’ve never seen before. I learned my lesson about that when the crappy Toshiba batteries included with an expensive Schwinn exercies bike filled their compartment with toxic goo, basically ruining it.

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There are a lot of classic papers in Computer Science, Information Theory, and so on that aren’t commonly availably outside of university libraries. That is, unless you happen to visit Babar K. Zafar’s web site.

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The world is full of people who make remarkable claims about their ability to compress all sorts of data - including data considered by most to be random, and thereby incompressible. My Million Random Digit Challenge gives those people a chance to put up or shut up - I’ve got a random data file that can’t be compressed without resorting to the well known cheat of information-hiding.

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Matt Mahoney may not be a full-blown compression god, but he is certainly a minor deity. This article talks about Matt’s new compression corpus that attempts to get past the shortcomings for the old school Calgary Corpus and the like. Matt is thinking BIG!

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Putting together a RAID-5 server turns out to not be as easy as I had hoped. Was I duped by Fred Langa? Probably.

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The JPEG standard is hurting for various reasons. It’s not on life support yet, but there is reason to worry. The ITU is attempting some therapy, which may or may not be a good idea.

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Microsoft has released an API for delta file compression, meaning it is well suited for use in patch and install programs.

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