Kostya's Boring Codec World

Today (new style, otherwise it’s March 21st) is 325 years since The Composer was born.

While there are many composers — gifted, talented, geniuses — there was only one Composer who wrote Music. This Music deserves a capital letter because while it was originally written for certain instruments it is actually can be played on virtually everything (and it’s de facto test for new instruments). While it was a common practice for Baroque music to re-arrange music for whatever instruments were available, this Music can be translated to be played on almost any other instrument — usually exercising all possible sounds that instrument (and player) can provide.

Here is one example (violinist test is even more obvious):

Organist proficiency test

I’m not into music (I don’t play any musical instruments nor even know the musical notation beyond “it’s notes”) but I can value music by certain parameters. Two main factors for me are complexity (here it’s explained formally) and melody. The stuff you can hear on radio here usually lacks both. Contemporary instrumental music usually lacks one of this (yes, it’s mostly either total cacophony to my ears or melodic and quite primitive). And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I both like to program and reverse-engineer and to listen how melodies get intertwined together, how quite simple tunes form one big piece of music, how the whole theme changes both logically and unpredictably at the same time.

Without The Composer’s Music this world would be much crappier and there would be significantly less happiness. And while 2010 is Chopin Year, every March is The Composer’s month.

How would you call the following situation: a man who has never travelled alone and never been abroad suddenly appears in a foreign country. He does not know local language nor customs. And all that happens on 1st of April.

Well, sounds like a prank indeed but it were the best days of my life. I don’t remember whose idea it was but I quite suddenly decided to visit Sweden (okay, blame those subtitles in Monty Python and the Holy Grail ) and first half of April was the time when I could do that.

What’s a first thing any tourist should do in Stockholm? In my case it was wandering in Sundbyberg. I did a lot of things every tourist should do — visiting a dozen of museums (first two of them were Post Museum and Royal Coin Cabinet) and no art galleries,going to Skärholmen and not visiting any big shops there, not buying any elk toys or T-shirts with silly inscriptions, going to churches to listen to organ music, being at city centre and shopping only at two places there (Teknik Magasinet and Hemköp); as an extra I’ve been to Copenhagen for a day and have not seen any mermaids or castle interiors.

Also I’ve attended FFmpeg developers conference (Swedish branch). It was very nice to see all those people in person. One of them was very kind to give me a short tour on Stockholm (Odenplan – KTH – Stureplan – Norrmalmstorg).

I’ve lost my heart at Sweden. This country style is “simple, beautiful and effective” applied everywhere. And if you heard the saying “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach”, it took place too (a sure sign is that when other developers’ commit messages start with “10l cola: …” mine start with “10l trocadero: …” and thinking of Emmentaler as “Swiss version of Grevé”).

And I can’t fully express my gratitude to Benjamin Larsson without whom all of this could not happen.

Enough with reminiscences, I’ll try to produce some codec material to write about.