it’s overwhelming, really. i thought the end of the year is supposed to slow down and we are all supposed to enjoy the holidays, but man, let me tell you, i have been stressed, tired, and overworked.

i’m not sure when things’ll slow down, but i’m hoping it’ll be soon.

when i work from home, the office upstairs gets really hot. partly from the desktop that is furiously blowing hot air into the room and partly from the two other laptops that i have in the room.

it’s freezing outside, but i have the window open in the office because it is sweltering in here.

a long, long time ago, i worked at a company that was interested in making .3gp files. the ultimate goal was to be able to take video, encode it, and have it streamable to mobile devices.

being a big fan of open source, i elected to try to do this using only open source tools. it’s much easier now, but back then it was a bit of a mystery how to make .3gp files.

the ffmpeg project is the project for video conversion on the linux platform. its rather daunting list of parameters takes pages to display. but even before you get there, you need to compile the blasted thing. it has many dependencies, some of which are harder to compile than others.

back in the day, you had to hack, patch, and compile in AMR codecs which allow you to make the 3gp files. it used to be such a daunting task that people would actually pay other people just to install ffmpeg onto their systems.

earlier last week, i spent the better part of a day or two compiling ffmpeg w/ all of the codecs that our product at work requires. there were a few hiccups along the way, but it looks like everything is finally working smoothly now. it’s about time.

as hard as ffmpeg is to compile, mplayer/mencoder is actually extremely easy to compile. so armed with ffmpeg, mplayer, mencoder, and a few other choice programs, i am now ready to convert any video you throw at me.

it felt like a herculean effort, but i’m glad that it’s done.