5w+h

You have to have a Windows Live ID (e.g. Hotmail account) to retain XBOX Live … that’s almost enough for me to cancel my XBOX Live membership.  Why MSFT? Why?

• Delete Facebook account <check>
• Delete blogger/blogspot blogs <check>
• Close out auto-renewal of this hosting service <check>

Note, this blog will go away when the paid-through time period of the hosting service expires (sometime in February, IIRC).

Also, consolidating email addresses is a pain … Hotmail and Yahoo are obnoxious.  Hotmail won’t let you forward your email to a service they don’t provide (e.g. Gmail, MobileMe, self-hosted service).  Yahoo will, but they charge you for the pleasure — fuck that.

Todo:

• Delete Hotmail account
• Delete Yahoo account <check>
• Consider deleting Gmail account…

Sometimes it’s good to dust off the old cob-webs. I just finished re-reading the first part of Steve McConnell’s Rapid Development (link on the right). I enjoy reading his work because it’s funny to watch organizations make the same mistakes over and over and over again. One would think that after how many years of developing hardware and software we’d stop making the same stupid mistakes over and over again. Human beings are creatures of habit though – but seriously, if the pan is hot, don’t touch it.

Though published way back in 1996, I think this book and a few others, including The Mythical Man Month should be required reading for anyone even thinking about managing or even financing an even moderately sized software project.

Intel standard issue laptops are pretty good machines, if you’re not a graphics software developer. Generally we’re issued a ThinkPad or Pavilion of some flavor. When I re-joined the company in 2007, however, I learned about a pilot program IT was running called Macs@Intel. Long story short, I got into the program and ended up with a Macbook Pro (A1211). This is a fairly good machine, even by today’s standards. It’s got a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a 120GB HDD and an ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 graphics processor.

The standard IT build for the Apple machine is Leopard with Parallels running Windows XP, which is necessary because such a huge part of the company’s infrastructure is so heavily dependent on the Microsoft platform. This worked pretty well for me for a while, but I wanted more out of this capable hardware.

So, I bought a 320GB 7200 RPM HDD for the machine and set up a triple-boot configuration with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), Windows 7 (beta) 64-bit, and Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64. It was a little more tricky to set up than I originally thought it would be, but after (generally) following this very helpful blog entry over on GeekLimit, I was up and running.

I’m really enjoying this set up so far. Win7 is great for doing the driver development work I need to do, and Ubuntu worked so well out of the box (even better than Win7, honestly) that it more than fits the bill for another project I’m working on. Finally, Mac OS X provides the perfect platform for some future work I’m setting up to do – plus it is fun to tinker around with the iPhone SDK.

The only downside is that without WinXP, I have to be careful not to connect to the corporate network – if I do, I’ll get port-scanned, blocked and my department will get charged a fee for having a non-standard machine on the network! Se la vi.

I’ve toyed around with various blogs in the past. It can be challenging to find your online identity and even more so to manage it. I’ve settled on this site as my blog for airing what’s on my mind pertaining to topics relating to my professional interests – software development and performance tuning.

As with any blog, I may deviate on occasion, but I hope this blog will help me vent frustrations, share cool things I learn or do at my work and possibly even learn a thing or two.

So what are my primary interests in software development?

• Real-time graphics
• Drivers
• Compilers
• Operating Systems
• Programming Languages
• Optimizations

Generally, I like most things pertaining to graphics and low-level code. I’m really a very lucky person – I get to work on all these things just about every day!

I hope to post at least a short entry on one or more of these topics at least twice a month. Time and circumstance will only tell if that’s a reasonable goal. We’ll check back to this post next year with some stats to see how I close I manage to get.