Kostya's Boring Codec World

So, I’ve dropped out of my university because I see no use of continuing postgraduate studies I had. Now I’m a free man and should look for a means of living.

My main issue is that I live in third-world country with all consequences it can offer — no suitable work here for me (I’m picky and don’t want to learn PHP and “code” websites or do the same in Java) and no mobility (I don’t see an easy way to move into civilised country; if there was any, who would stay here?). Funny fact: worker salaries here seems to be lower than in China but prices for almost everything but food seems to be European.

Because of that my chances on getting employed by large company abroad are rather slim (or non-existent), so I hope that lesser company can invite me to work abroad. I’d gladly provide my skills and work on almost anything.

Here’s my list of countries I’d like to live and work in:

• Tier 0 — Sweden
• Tier 1 — the rest of Scandinavia
• Tier 2 — any Western European country in Schengen area except warm ones (I feed bad when the temperature tops 25ºC but cold weather is fine)
• Tier 3 — Canada (maybe the only developed country that welcomes Ukrainians)

If somebody can help me with fulfilling my dream I’d be very grateful. Even useful and not too general advice counts, but not the ones that require lying! Thanks.

Short CV:

• got bachelor degree in CS and master degree in something, diploma says I’m “an engineer, system analyst”
• more than 10 years of C experience; varying experience of different platform assemblers (x86, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS) — mostly SIMD for non-x86. I know some other languages too — C++, Pascal, Java, some scripting languages (shells, Perl, Python). I’ve tried functional languages too (Lisp, Prolog, Erlang) and I’m pretty sure I can use them too.
• more than 5 years of FFmpeg development, started it with reverse-engineering codecs too
• 3-4 years experience on enterprise development (client-server systems, RDBMS, whatever)

I prefer to develop on underpowered hardware since it makes you want to squeeze all you can from it. Looks like Gdium netbook is an ideal candidate when it comes to being underpowered (BeagleBoard is too underpowered in that matter).

What really sucks in Gdium (to my taste):

• video card performance — in MPlayer video output time tends to be more than decoding time (which mostly don’t have SIMD optimisations for Loongson). Watching something greater than 512×384 MPEG-4 video is not comfortable. Floating-point audio codecs also take a lot of CPU.
• there is an audible noise in headphones during playing audio; since video card, audio chip and some other things are integrated into single SM501 chip, I can add that it seems to be the suckiest part in netbook.

Some things are annoying too, like having 16-bit display (while chip supports 24-bit output, that does affect picture), battery charge limit of 97-98% (so it’s always charging and never completely charged — probably some glitch on my sample), fan and temperature issues (specs say that CPU dissipates up to 4 watts, where all that heat comes from?) and probably having an internal drive instead of USB key should greatly increase performance too.

I still hope for something like notebook containing multi-core MIPS or ARM with (preferably) 1Gb RAM.

As some of you may already know, I have a bit of interest in linguistics. Here I’ll try to describe an interesting (for me) fact. While some of the letters are read virtually the same in any language, some differ greatly. It looks to me that ‘g’ is the telltale letter because its pronunciation differs most in different languages.

Let’s see:

• English: djee
• French: may sound more like ‘z’ in “azure” (Je ne parle pas français, though)
• German: IIRC, in words ending with “-ig” it’s read as soft ‘h’ or something (Ich spreche Deutsch nicht)
• Hungarian: sometimes it’s read as ‘d’ (for example, in the name of country — Magyar)

And now for more exotic languages:

• Ukrainian: it’s more like voiced ‘h’ or French ‘r’. For ‘g’ sound in loanwords another letter is used.
• Belarusian: resembles Ukrainian but less voiced.
• Japanese: it’s easy — you’ll never see it alone since they use syllable-based system, not letter-based.

And finally, in my homeland (och jag vet lita svenska) it may also sound in two different ways: more like in other languages (till exempel: “gamla”) and more like ‘j’ — listen at example from Wikipedia how to pronounce Göteborg correctly (you can hear ‘g’ at the beginning and at the end of the word).

I’ve wanted to write another useless rant about idiocy in our lives as a governing policy (for example, 1st class railroad cars being worse than 2nd class but more expensive or how “express” is translated into Ukrainian as “????????????” or “???????????”, both meaning “accelerated” or “sped-up”) but I have a bit of more pleasant news.

I’ve spent the rest of GSoC money on BeagleBoard and it took about 15 days to deliver it (which is rather impressive by local standards). So I hope to start hacking on it too (I’m pretty sure it would be good for both FFmpeg and me if I learn ARM assembly and about NEON unit). In my opinion they would really benefit from having built-in network adapter (there’s a place for it on PCB too) though; since this is not Mac, saying that USB should be enough for everything is rather lame.