Olivier Langlois's blog

AAC is a new audio codec standardized to supersede the MP3 codec. When I hear about new technologies, I am always a little skeptic since I have long understood that newer technology is too often not synonym with better technology. However, at the company that I am working for, StreamTheWorld, we have developed the first system that stream AAC through Flash players. On StreamTheWorld website, there is a demo where the player connects to one MP3 stream and to one AAC stream with the same bitrate of 48 kbps. Both streams contain the same song and the demo consists of slider that allows you to switch between the AAC version and the MP3 version. You must absolutely check the demo! (PS: Make sure that you have the latest Adobe Flash player installed as AAC playback as being added only in the latest release which is 9.0.115) The difference is so convincing that you will probably want to start converting all your music to AAC!

One note about AAC, is that there exist many versions of AAC. I am listing them in the order that they have been released:

• MPEG2 AAC
• MPEG4 AAC
• AACPlus
• AACPlus v2

All versions provide improvements over the previous versions and also provide backward compatibility. That is you could listen an AACPlus v2 stream with an MPEG2 AAC decoder. However, the additional information contained for AACPlus v2 will be discarded and the resulting audio will only be as good as an MPEG2 AAC audio stream can be. Players supporting AACPlus v2 includes:

• Adobe Flash player
• WinAmp and every player using the open source AAC decoder FAAD2.

iTunes support AAC but not AACPlus v2. Sony with its PS3 and Nintendo with the Wii gaming console have made AAC their official audio codec but I do not know which version they are supporting.

After having reported the bug to MySQL and after a lot of patience trying to explain it to the MySQL developers, they have finally verified the validity of my bug discovery and have classified it as serious!!

For the gory details of my discovery, you can consult the bug report.

Jason T. Roff, author of many books including ADO : Activex Data Objects, visited my blog and left a comment in the blog entry reviewing his book.

I am quite happy as this is the first time that I am aware that one of the authors of the books that I reviewed actually read the review of his book. I have invited Bjarne Stroustrup to visit this blog when I have reported to him the bug found in the latest edition of his book 'The C++ Programming language' but he is a very busy man and I have not received any feedback whether he came here or not.

I just want to say that if you happen to be an author of one of the books that I have reviewed, your feedback is highly appreciated!

Today is my last day at Quazal, the online gaming middleware provider. I have been working there for the last year and a half and have been involved in many projects such as the Relic Company of heroes lobby server, Supreme Commander, Atari Test Drive unlimited M.O.O.R. (Massively Open Online Racing) and Ubisoft Splinter Cell Conviction.

I am also the person who designed and implemented the generalized routing system that enhances peer-to-peer connectivity in Net-Z that Quazal should announce in the next few days. There are many purposes for this new feature. First, it allows developers to create online games in a client/server topology. Secondly, routing can be used in a peer-to-peer setup to enable the connectivity between players in the event that they would be behind NAT routers that make the connection impossible (any combination of strict and moderate NAT routers). As an extra bonus, Net-Z bandwidth usage has been optimized during the implementation of the new feature.

In two weeks, I will start to work at Stream the world on their audio/video streaming server. Its going to be very a very cool challenge!

Hurray,

I have moved away from my free personal web page to a real hosting solution. It took a lot of time and energy and that distracted me from writting about programming but I am quite happy of the end result. It was well worth setting it up for the last week. Also as a bonus, I got a fully functionnal blog. I still have to tweak a small visual glitch on each side of the blog frame but after that, I will return to the main program that is writting about C++ programming. As a small teaser, the next covered topic is a small omission in the book C++ Templates from David Vandevoorde and Nicolai M. Josuttis that I reported to the authors which resulted to a nice exchange with Mr. Vandevoorde. Needless to say that this topic does not have a lot of coverage.

That being said, I must say publicly that I am totally impress with my new web hosting provider. The competition is probably ferocious but I could not beleive that I could get that much for only 6.95$ per month. This whole blog engine was part of the deal and on top of that, they have a very good and quick technical support be it ether on the phone or by e-mail. Anyway, I will stop the suspense in case that you would be curious now, I am talking about Bluehost.com