Last week, I read a paper on how to partially encrypt MPEG Audio data. That is, modify an existing audio file that it is still syntactically correct, but sounds more or less broken. For example, imagine an online music shop that offers free, but partially encrypted music downloads: The files are in bad quality, and you have to pay to restore the full fidelity. But I digress.
The point is: that paper was inspiring. I decided to try the presented method using MPEG-1 Audio Layer II (»MP2«) as a basis. I chose this format because it’s the simplest audio compression scheme that is still in broad use today (for example VCD/SVCD, DAB and most prominently DVB). Layer III (»MP3«), AAC and Vorbis are considerably more complex. And, it just so happened that I got a copy of ISO 11172-3 (MPEG-1 Audio) on my hard disk :)
While working on the project, I thought that it’d be cooler to write a full decoder instead of this mere proof-of-concept »look what I can do to my MP2 files« hack. So I developed a small MPEG-1 Audio Layer II decoding library called kjmp2 which eventually evolved into a less-than-4k MP2 player application …
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Not even three months after the Beta 2 version, Microsoft released the first Release Candidate of its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system to the public. My Beta 2 test lasted only one week, because Vista simply wasn’t ready for everyday use back then. But according to numerous other reviews on the net, RC1 made much progress since. I was a bit sceptical about that – how far could they have come in just twelve weeks? So it was time to do another test with the current public pre-release version. The bottom line this time: Vista has indeed become a somewhat usable system. I’m not going to ditch XP in favour of Vista soon (simply because I’ve already installed too much applications on the »old« system), but in a year or so, I think that will be an option.
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There has been quite some hype about this movie: Having a title that is both straightforward and funny (because »snakes on a plane« seems to be some American proverb whose true meaning I haven’t found out yet), it gained very much popularity in the Internet. The huge fan response even made New Line Cinema re-shoot some scenes so that it got a R rating instead of a modest PG-13. There were even some dialogue lines written by the movie’s fans.
All in all, »SoaP« is said to be a B-Movie with an »A« budget. I expected exactly that when I entered the cinema, but the movie turned out to be completely different – in a positive sense.
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