PSIG 41: Thursday January 4th, 2001

I tried out something new this meeting: book reports. The idea is folks along bring the book they are currently reading, or one of their favorites. Then we go around the room and give an overview. It went swimmingly.

I finally broke down and bought two large pizzas for the meeting (at the last meeting, folks went away hungry). Both pizzas were gone by the end of the meeting!

Darrin Cardani, president of Buena Software, gave us a presentation on optimization (QuickTime, 250K). Using one of his filters from his Effects Packs, he did timing of the original, unoptimized filter. It took about 32 seconds to process a 30 second clip.

Darrin then started optimizing and timing his filters step by step. With almost every step, the processing time would drop (with one notable exception when Darrin turned on instruction scheduling for the AltiVec code he wrote). At the end, Darrin brought the processing time down to around 8 seconds.

All in all, a great presentation.

Thursday, January 04, 2001
12:00 AM