QSP16, tools, FPGA, and John Rible's classes

[Jeff Fox <fox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear MISC readers:

I know there are people interested in details about people's
work on chips and plans of such things here so I am posting
a follow up to a message I sent here last week.

I posted John Rible's presentation from last week's Forth Day
at SVFIG.  He talked about QSP16 and his plans for his class
next semester.  He intends to give a more detailed 2 hour
presentation next month on it at the morning technical session
at FIG. the file is http://www.ultratechnology.com/jr111100.rm
and is a 27MB streaming video file.  The address of the streaming
video theater is http://www.ultratechnology.com/rmvideo.htm
I apologize to those who don't have the available bandwidth to 
view video files this large.

The quality of the sound is better than the last ones where the
noisy camcorder left quite a bit of noise on the soundtrack.  Since
I have several tapes of his presentations to FIG on QS4 and QS5,
the tools, and his class from last year that I have not converted to 
streaming video format but which I could post in small pieces as
streaming
video files if there is interest in that.  He described these as
miniRISC
not exaclty MISC but it is related.  The information about the tools and
FPGA I think is useful for those who haven't done this stuff yet.

So far I haven't had much feedback about the streaming video files
that have been available this month, nothing except a comment
about the times and dates being specified in relation to a
particlar time zone.  I can see from log files that the files that
were posted earlier this month were accessed about 40 times
each.  I think from the total transfer amounts that the video
files were completely viewed or downloaded maybe about ten times each
but I am not sure.  From my system downloading or viewing
the files is quite fast (5min) though not as fast as from CD-ROM
or hard disk but uploading them is relatively slow (~30min) so 
I do know that it would be very slow with dialup modems and 
prohibitively slow a slow modem.  9600 baud would take
what, seven hours? That's an expensive short subject...

The size of the files are adjustable and I could post much smaller
files but the quality of the files would suffer.  There has
been almost no feedback from you viewers or potential viewers
about whether you would like smaller files with lower quality,
more files that are smaller, longer play periods (I have been
using 4 days), shorter play periods, or for requests for
specific videos or presentations by specific people or whatever.
If you have an opinion and you care about it feel free to let me
know what you would like.

I have tried converting some MPEGs to much smaller RealMedia files
that might be viewable by people who find the current files ~25MB
simply too large to view.  I found their quality dissapointingly
low but then again I have the 25MB RM files locally as well as the
huge 250-1000MB MPEG files to view and so I may be just spoiled in this
regard.  I do worry that if they are compressed to much that the
things people write on the white board would not be readable.  Someone
at Forth Day said even the 100MB RM files on CD-ROM look jerky.

I have not yet decided what I should play after the assigned 4 day
play period for John's Forth Day presentation ends.  Perhaps I should
replay the 1993 Chuck Moore interview that I first played last month.
I also could play Chuck's morning presentation from Forth Day on
the Blue Tooth wireless protocol.  He said he put in quite a bit
of work digesting the documentation to figure out how it this
protocol works and after organizing the information he could now
implement code to do it.  They are for you, not me so let me know.

I already posted the transcript the html transcript to Chuck's
Fireside Chat 2000 so I figured that there would be little
interest in playing it on video in pieces.  If you have any opinions
let me know or discuss it in the MISC list.

I thought it interesting that I ran into Michael Montvelishksy
at the FIG meeting and he said that he was currently working
on the implmentation of streaming video for their browser
where he works at Enreach.  So needless to say he has some
in depth knowledge about the details and internals of these
protocols and we talked about that a bit.

Jeff Fox