hey to all you xchat using mircryptors!

after someone (bt) joined #mircryption on efnet, pointing out a little bug (or two, or three, ...)
i sat down and invested a couple of hours into (re)writing some of mircryption/xchat's code

now just wait for mouser to upload the latest version so you can grab it from your trusted source @ donationcoder

you can look forward to
- key migration. if someone with a encryption key set changes his/her nick, the key will stick to the new nick (the mirc version had this since the beginning)
- more flexible theme settings (still hardcoded, but more choice and hopefully easier to understand)
- we are now catching the incoming text while it's still in RAW, thus preventing xchat from accidentally hilighting your nick within the base64 string (thanks bt for pointing that one out)
- nick hilighting! yes! finally you can get nick hilighting even if the text was encrypted

quite some work went into the message-re-issue code that enables us to use xchat's native nick-hilighting facilities even if the incoming text is (was) encrypted.
thanks to zed (xchat's coder) for giving me some very helpful pointers as to what's possible and safe to do.
since it's kinda weird if you just look at the code i spent some time to document it properly using a perverted version of a sequence diagram:

(click for full size)

well,
if it comes to audio you will have, at some point, an analog signal
and unless you're using digital outputs, you'll have these on your soundcard (aka classic speaker/line out)

while digital electronics operate within well defined limites and are fairly well to master, what it comes down to is your digntal/analog converter.

THAT's actually the part a lot of (lower to middle end) cards have a poor (cheap) design.
a lot of cards use a simple R/C combo to smoothen the signal, that's cheap (2 pieces) and easy.
but if you want a good quality, it sucks.

also, (sorry if i'm repeating something that has already been said, i haven't read _all_ of it) on-board cards are more prone to noise, that's one reason why a lot of middle to high-end cards are not even pci(e) but firewire or usb, just to get away from all the nasty noise producing electronics inside the computer case.

if you want sound = get onboard
if you want decent sound = get a card
if you want good sound = get a external soundcard

and if you're DAC sucks (simple R/C smoother) the digital part can be as good as it gets, it'll be ruined just before it reaches your speakers.

and why do a lot of manufactures use simple R/C ?
it's easy to build cheap digital electronics (you really dont have to care about noise that much if it's digital anyways)
but it's hard and expensive to build low-noise analog devices.
they also tend to use up quite a bit of PCB real estate

ok, that's all for my 2ct

that's a pretty cool find mouser!