Oodle Hydra and other Bloom goodness

[SolidComp]

Hi all – You might find Charles Bloom's recent posts interesting, especially his intro to RAD's Hydra, a "meta-compressor" that makes block-by-block decisions on whether to use Kraken, Mermaid, or Selkie depending on user-specified tradeoffs for size vs. decompression speed.

He also has some fascinating posts on strtod, some low-level features Android needs to add to help performance-critical developers, paging and block size tradeoffs, his creative process, etc.

I always enjoy his posts – he's a righteous dude. But I'm not sure if people know where to find his posts. The complication is that he has two blogs:

• His Blogspot blog: http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/
• His paleoblog: http://www.cbloom.com/rants.html

The Blogspot blog has only seen one new post in the last eight months, something about a Nintendo "Switch" (I don't know what that is).

Everything I mentioned above is at his paleoblog, which has seen many posts in the last two months, so I guess that's where he puts most of his work these days. I'm calling it a paleoblog because the whole blog is just one giant HTML page, with distinct posts marked only by bolded titles/headings. There's no way to link to specific posts – the posts don't exist as separate pages or URLs. You just have to scroll down.

(FYI, his units are sometimes screwy. He'll use mb and MB interchangeably, and I think mb always means MB to him. If Kraken was really only decompressing at 1,000 mb/s, it wouldn't be exciting to anyone, so that's why I assume he means MB/s.)

[fgiesen]

Hydra's been out since last August; the write-up was in the run-up to GDC (Game Developer's Conference) which is when a lot of our marketing materials get updated.

Nintendo Switch is their newest handheld gaming device (released last week).

"mb" in rants.html and the various graphs always means MB. That's a mistake/original bit of sloppiness that has been copy & pasted into various pieces of code that generate stats and produce graphs. That mistake used to be everywhere, the chief offenders are fixed now (and it shouldn't show up in any newer posts), but it was definitely frequent in the older posts. (Middle of last year was when we started hunting these down.)