OK, I admit it; I became addicted to Tom’s Hardware Forums! In my defense, I love helping people, and I love a challenge. And Tom’s also has those cool and addicting medals and points. . .Good, but very bad!
So, now that my forum status is officially Addict, I will try to back off a little and spend more time on programing. I think I have some interesting things in store for you.
First, there are some speech codecs which are now likely unencumbered by Intellectual Property (IP) rights, in other words, patents. Many speech related patents have been expiring over the last few years. Others, like GSM Half-Rate, have IP that is either tied to the GSM cellular network protocols, or are so vague they are likely unenforceable; more about that another time.
Second, I have been rethinking fixed point math. It is just TOO hard to convert anything other than small trivial programs from floating to fixed point so they run on ARM and other CPUs without hardware floating point (also called vector instructions). There is a LOT of time involved converting code, testing, tracking down under and over flows, etc. Yes, I can do it, and have done it, but I am not sure I want to spend the time to converting another project. However, there ARE other ways to speed up floating point calculations by an order of magnitude; more on that another time.
Third, I still love 3D graphics. I miss programming in OpenGL, but I want a useful challenge also. Despite the ever increasing availability of 3D hardware, even on such things as phones, I still feel there is a need for a small fast software OpenGL library. My inspiration is from TinyGL, but mine might be more like OpenGL ES. I also envision some options like no copy of textures to reduce memory use, and to force all memory allocations to be approved and made by the application. More on this also.
Fourth, yes, I have disabled comments. The bots were becoming annoying, and you can easily email anyway. So don’t be shy, send me an email, and tell me what you think about some of these potential projects.