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My brain is built of paths and slides and ladders and lasers and I have invited all of you to enter its pavilion. My brain, as you enter, will smell of tangerines and brand-new running shoes.
 I'm a man version of Martha Stewart now. |
Posted - 6/29/2006 6:08:03 PM | Today I'd like to share one of my favorite recipes. It's for a scrumptious little number I like to call The Happy Geek. This is a bit of a personal thing - it only serves one - so it's great for those all-by-yourself weekends when you just want a special treat. Don't enjoy this around your friends, though, or they're liable to stop being your friends very soon.
The Happy Geek: Ingredients
- 1 geek; initial mood not really important
- 1 game development career
- 1 copy of Music From and Inspired By the Film 'Monster' by BT
- 1 DVD player or equivalent device
- 1 surround sound system
- 1 bottle IBC Cherry Limeade
Directions
- Place geek into game development career; allow to settle.
- Connect DVD playing device to surround sound equipment.
- Carefully fill DVD player with music DVD containing the DTS goodness
- Open Cherry Limeade
- Combine game-developing geek, music, and beverage in dimly lit room
- Play music and pour beverage into geek (slowly and carefully)
- Allow to sit for several hours
Guaranteed to produce good results!
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 Improvised technology FTW |
Posted - 6/28/2006 12:01:24 PM | One of my favorite pieces of tech equipment is my LCD projector, which delivers a glorious 84 inches of visual hotness. (I know for a fact the model I have can do nicely at up to 25 feet of screen space, but I lack a wall that large.) The great thing is that it's a massive display at HD resolutions, for a fraction of the cost of a more traditional HDTV - which would be smaller.
The downside is that, in order to see the projected image, the room basically has to be pitch freaking black. Especially as the bulb ages and the brightness drops a bit, it's basically impossible to see anything if there are other major light sources affecting the room - like, say, the sun. Now, normally I would solve this by simply not doing anything except at night, but that's a bit annoying and inconvenient.
Usually, my solution is to use a couple of household snack clips to hang a dark blanket on the blinds; this covers about 85% of the window's surface area and drops the light levels enough to at least see the projector image during the day. Unfortunately, it also leaks a lot of light, takes several minutes to get right (blinds, clips, and blankets don't mix very nicely), and deprives me of a perfectly good blanket which I could be using for other things - like sleep. Since putting it up and taking it down is a pain, it also means that I'll often just leave it up for several days running, which deprives me of natural light - and, shockingly enough, that gets annoying to me after a while.
So today I set out to solve the problem, and do it cheaply. I also resolved to do it without leaving the apartment. This is quite the challenge, but being a veteran of two Monkey Island games, two Rex Nebular games, as much of the cracked copy of Full Throttle I could get to run properly, and a Sam and Max game or two, I figured I could probably figure something out.
As it turns out, the puzzle is fairly straightforward to solve, but quite tedious.
SPOILER WARNING!
Start by gathering up 5 black plastic garbage bags - the thick, heavy kind like you would use for yard trash. Locate a roll of Scotch tape and three paperclips. You may or may not have to have a drinking contest with a sasquatch to acquire the third paperclip, depending on your selected difficulty level.
Once you have gathered the materials, measure out the window area, and lay out four of the five trash bags in a way that will cover the area completely. Real Men don't use pansy tools like measuring tape or rulers, so do this largely by holding up the sacks in front of the window, squinting one eye, and muttering "hmm... yep... should do."
After finding a suitable arrangement of the bags (they will probably overlap a bit), tape them all together. Everyone knows that a Good Engineer will spend an inordinate amount of time taping in bizarre criss-cross patterns as "structural reinforcement." Consume a shocking quantity of tape for this step.
Take the three paperclips and bend them into hooks: unfold the outer loop of the clip and bend it straight so that the inner loop remains, and there is just a line of wire running straight out from the loop. Then fold over the end of that line to form a hook, leaving part of the inner loop intact - you will have a double-ended hook type thing at this point. Twist the outer hook 90 degrees so that it lies in a plane perpendicular to the inner loop/hook.
Now, hold up the sheet-o-bags to the window, and mark off points to attach the paperclips. Tape the paperclips' inner loops to the sheet-o-bags, and use the outer hook to suspend the contraption on the blinds.
Note that attaching the hooks to the sheet is tricky - you can't just slap tape over it or the weight will be too much and the sheet will just drop off. You have to create a little "pouch" of tape (with the opening pointing down) and actually insert the hook into that pouch so it catches; then tape over the whole mess a bunch of times so it's sturdy. Looks like crap, but can hold quite a bit of weight.
Finally, suspend the sheet-o-bags-n'-hooks on the window. Slice up the last bag with a knife and tape random squares of it over the contraption to patch up any thin spots where light still leaks in. Apply another shocking amount of tape here, just to be safe.
And there you have it - a custom folding window cover, for less than $8.
END SPOILERS
The room is now almost utterly pitch black with the cover up - it's slightly oversized so it blocks out the entire window area except for a tiny sliver over the top of the blinds, which doesn't let in enough light to really matter. In the worst case a little strip of felt can be shoved up into the crack to totally seal it off, but I doubt I'll bother getting that hardcore.
The best part is, the whole thing takes about 20 seconds to unfold and hang, and maybe 15 to take down - so it's far more convenient than the blanket-hack solution. It also no longer monopolizes a blanket... yayy!
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 Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet relief |
Posted - 6/26/2006 4:39:54 AM | A certain substance has just hit the fan - and, thankfully, the fan wasn't turned on, so not much happened. In fact, overall, my situation is now greatly improved.
Towards the end of last week, I had a fairly long conversation with one of our other programmers about all this engine-rewriting business. To make a really boring and technical discussion short, it's just going to take far too much effort - and the real clincher is that it'll break God-only-knows how much of our existing assets and pipeline, which means we could well be setting up the project to get pushed back 8 to 10 months... all for a "feature" that we can't even put as a bullet point on the back of the box.
So we hatched a plan, and today had a quick meeting with the project lead about it. He's also been concerned about the project getting out of hand, so we all pretty much said "yep... time for this thing to die" and took a few hearty swings at it with various edged weapons and instruments of death. And now, thusly, the engine rewrite lies in a pool of binary blood and electronic entrails, slain at the hands of its own creators.
Thankfully, the engine's codename is "Phoenix," so when we do get time to do the rewrite, we just need to chuck some kerosene on the corpse and light it up, and we'll be back to where we are at this point.
Some of the code that's been created (not mine ) can actually be used already in the old engine, which will be a minor improvement and at least make a few things more bulletproof. There's also a good number of other small, incremental improvements we can make over time that will help a lot when it comes time to try this again.
I also have some sneaky plans to get out of the intelligent-cinematics system (at least for this project) and fake it with some simple hacks. It's not terribly sexy, but it'll leave me time to cook up a proper solution, and it saves me from trying to hack a really complicated chunk of AI into the existing engine structure, which frankly quite simply isn't conducive to such things.
The best part, though, is that all this lightens my "official" workload enough that I'll have a fair chunk of time to just hop around the game and do various little improvements and polishing. So hopefully this project will really have some good stuff to show in terms of content, instead of just a lot of really cool technology that (yet again) we didn't really do much with.
And now I'm off to celebrate by not working for the rest of the day!
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 And the UPS tracker madness begins! |
Posted - 6/21/2006 11:58:24 PM | Alright, this should be interesting. The DVD/RW drive has shipped and is estimated to arrive Friday. The case and graphics card have also shipped, and are estimated to arrive next Monday. The hard drive has not yet shipped.
This means that I get my hardware goodness spread out over several days, which is even better than just getting it all at once - except for the fact that I have to go through the misery of realizing I can't use each. Individual. Freaking. Part.
However, noble and self-sacrificing man that I am, I'm prepared to take one for the team, so to speak. I will endure this suffering so that others may... uh... be jealous of my computers. Wait... that didn't come out right.
In other news which you also don't care about, I have 53 open issues assigned to me. It's pure insanity.
(Of course, probably 60% of those are just assigned to me temporarily until we argue over who gets to do the actual work. But that makes it sound less impressive and impending-doom-like.)
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 Sweet, sweet relief |
Posted - 6/21/2006 1:08:51 AM | The hardware thing was just mangling me, so I went out and found a way to appease my thirst for all things electronic and shiny.
I was ... uh... surfing NewEgg... for some... totally unrelated things... and just happened by totally pure chance to see that they just dropped the price on the XFX GeForce 7900GT. I was thinking of going with the Asus EN7900GT-TOP, which is basically just a factory overclocked version of the card.
But then I asked myself, why? If the factory can overclock it, so can I - as if I'll care about the 5% boost in framerate or whatever would come out of it. And, if I get the card that's not overclocked, I save a smooth $50.
Now, obviously this sale is highly exclusive and will disappear at any moment. Therefore, like a good mindless consumer, I jumped all over it. I mean, it's not every day you can quench your technolust and save $50 at the same time, right? So all in all it's a solid win for me.
I decided to make the most of the purchase and pick up the case, hard drive, and DVD/RW drive as well. I would have gone for the keyboard and mouse instead of the hard drive (since I can actually use those right now) but stupid NewEgg is out of stupid stock. Stupidheads.
Naturally, this is going to backfire something fierce. For about ten seconds when the shipment shows up, I'll be euphoric. Of course, between now and then I can sate my greed by clicking Refresh on the UPS tracking screen every microsecond, waiting for the magical system to tell me that the package has crawled forward another inch on the Virtual Map of the World. (Y'know, a realtime "your package is here" tracker would be cool... show a little red line moving across the map like in the old movies... ahem, right.) So at the very least, for another several days I should be good.
Once it arrives, I'll get to enjoy the bliss for a blisteringly short time, and then the dark realization will hit: I can't do a damn thing with any of this stuff. I can't use the video card, because the machine with PCIe support is currently hosed. I can't use the hard drive, because that same machine is my only SATA-capable box. I can't use the case, because I don't have anything to put in it yet. And I can't use the DVD/RW drive because I already have one in my development box.
So, here's roughly how it'll go down:
- T-minus a few hours
See that the package is "out for delivery" on the UPS tracker. Promptly mess pants; spend rest of the day until the truck arrives running around in hyperactive little circles.
- T-minus a few second
After staring out the window all day (in between hopping up and down and gibbering), finally see the UPS truck pull up. Mess pants again. Run out to meet UPS guy in the driveway.
- T-minus zero: the moment of reckoning
Receive the glowing warm boxes of pure happiness into my quivering arms. Try hard not to squeal in front of UPS guy; add false baritone to voice in order to retain semblance of masculinity.
- T-plus a few seconds
Rush inside and slam a few doors. Lovingly dump boxes all over the floor and croon over them for a moment. Indulge in a high-pitched orgy of celebratory noises which deeply resembles a flock of parakeets running through a wood chipper - except happy.
- T-plus a few minutes
Mangle a lot of packaging. Shred boxes. Spill styrene entrails all over the floor. Finally catch glimpses of The Goods. Don shades to avoid blindness from the golden beam of light radiating from The Goods.
- T-plus a few more minutes
Pile up all of the newly opened Goods in a shrine of nerdly glory and awesomeness. Consider taking pictures. Recall lack of camera. Lament over not ordering a camera with all of The Goods. Vow to do it Next Time. Forget this vow utterly within seconds. Just like the last 20 times.
- T-plus not-long-enough
Get slammed into floor by the massive, crushing blow of reality. Gymnastics in midair to avoid hitting The Goods en route to The Floor. Screw it up and smack face-first into an empty cardboard box with razor-sharp edges. Curse lack of coordination and bad luck at missing the nice padded air-bubble-thing six inches to the left.
- I'm losing track of the T-plus-stuff. So: a few seconds later.
Recover from daze and anger at slicing head open/off with said box. Finish cursing various things. Finally decide to inquire as to what hit us in the first place.
- Y'know, this is stupid. Just follow the sequence, I'm sure the timings are pretty obvious.
Confront the terrifying black orb of reality. Impending doom becomes evident. Realize that all of this stuff is just a bunch of useless boxes until you get a CPU and motherboard, you moron.
- Weeping continues for several hours.
- Contemplate suicide.
- Recover from the brink of self-destruction by thinking about getting the motherboard and CPU.
- Go insane because you're out $500 and have nothing at all to show for it - and still have to wait another month before the Conroe price drop to get the remaining parts.
- Enter Coma of Despair.
Geez... buying computers is so much trouble.
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 Oooh, triangly |
Posted - 6/20/2006 2:27:05 AM | Hit a big milestone today: the new 3D engine actually draws polygons! Yayy!
Right now, all meshes are untransformed. They are also all quads set to render at 10% of the screen dimensions (both axes). Oh, and they're wireframe, drawn in plain white.
But the scenegraph renders stuff, and that's what matters!
I've got some abstraction and cleanup to do to wrap up some things with the mesh loading (so it'll be ready to read real meshes off disk). One of the other programmers is working on abstrations for materials so we can get texture and shader stuff going again. That pretty much leaves the actual transformation composition code to do, which should go fast... the only trick will be making sure that the camera parameters behave similarly to the old system so that I don't break 99% of our art assets.
I've set myself the personal goal of having all of this ready by the end of Wednesday; Thursday I'll sit down and do a full analysis of remaining features that need to get ported forward - stuff like animation support, lensflare effects, lighting effects, etc. So late Thursday/early Friday I'll know just how screwed we are 
This has been a pretty intense push, and there's still quite a lot to do - but fortunately, since the new code architecture is just so much cleaner than before, porting forward all the functionality should go very fast. My hope is to have the engine back to it's pre-rewrite state (functionality-wise) by the end of the month, which should be possible with a couple other guys working in parallel.
Fortunately, I live for this kind of challenge and pressure, so I'm quite happy at the moment. Of course, I'll probably also be quite happy when I can sit down and relax for a few days at the end of all this 
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 Strangers with this level of trust... |
Posted - 6/19/2006 3:21:30 AM | I need a support group.
It started out with the nagging thoughts, but those weren't too bad. I told myself I could handle them. I told myself "Apoch, you're a rational adult, and you have plenty of self control; just block this stuff out." That worked for a while, but then it got worse... once the headaches started, I knew I was in trouble.
Still, though, like a fool, I've tried to ignore it. I've tried to mask the problem, run away from it, just plain drown it out with other things. After the muscle twitches began in earnest, I knew that wouldn't work for long, but I still didn't want to compromise my pride and admit my weakness.
I told myself I could handle the spasms... just turn away, walk out of the room, whatever. I told myself I could handle the nightmares, the waking cold and yelling about horrors beyond words.
Alas, it was not to be, and I must now confess my weakness.
I'm having hardware withdrawals. After so many hours dreaming happilly - euphorically - about dual core processors, blazing fast RAM, hundreds of gigabytes of storage... I just can't cope with not having it. Even the old high of the new laptop just doesn't quite give me the rush it once did.
I don't know if I can make it another month... I really want to save some cash by letting the market do its capitalist thing once Conroe comes out, but it's just so darn hard.
Please... please, just tell me I'm not alone. Tell me someone understands.
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 Free code! |
Posted - 6/18/2006 2:37:18 AM | I originally dropped this in a thread in For Beginners, but after thinking about it for a minute I decided maybe someone else could find it handy too, so I'll stick a copy here where it will get a little better visibility.
This is a simple C++ wrapper class for handling bitmasks. It's missing a few more-or-less non-critical features (like the ability to test two Bitmask objects against each other, for instance) but the basics are there, and it works pretty well. It's certainly safer than just globbing some &|^ operator cruft all through the code, and definitely more readable. With a couple of exceptions (mainly tweaked comments) it's straight from the code library I use at work.
#pragma once
template<typename Holder, typename FlagEnum>
class Bitmask
{
public:
Bitmask(Holder defval = 0) : Bitfield(defval) { }
inline void Set(FlagEnum flags)
{ Bitfield |= flags; }
inline void Clear(FlagEnum flags)
{ Bitfield &= (~flags); }
inline bool Test(FlagEnum flags) const
{ return ((Bitfield & flags) != 0); }
inline bool TestAllFlags(FlagEnum flags) const
{ return ((Bitfield & flags) == flags); }
protected:
Holder Bitfield;
};
Here's a quick sample usage, adapting nobodynews' example from the original thread:
#include "bitmask.h"
enum WindowAppearanceFlags : unsigned
{
WA_FullScreen = 0x001,
WA_ScrollBarX = 0x002,
WA_ScrollBarY = 0x004,
WA_NoResize = 0x008,
WA_NoMinimize = 0x010
};
typedef Bitmask<unsigned, WindowAppearanceFlags> WindowAppearanceBitmask;
void Foo()
{
WindowAppearanceBitmask foomask;
foomask.Set(WA_FullScreen | WA_NoResize);
if(foomask.Test(WA_NoMinimize))
{
}
}
No idea if anyone will find that useful or not, but hey, can't hurt 
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 More hardware drool |
Posted - 6/16/2006 12:40:15 AM | Well, being bored this afternoon (I squandered the day watching football) I figured I'd do some more poking into hardware prices.
Specifically, I was curious about the price gap between the hardware I lined up earlier, and what a more "future-friendly" machine would look like. Socket 939 is venerable, but already phasing out in favor of the AM2 format, which has been touted as the next "long term" socket in AMD's lineup - i.e. it has the best upgrade potential for the foreseeable future.
To be honest, it's kind of stupid for me to care about that, because I have never once upgraded a CPU - I always end up building entire new machines, usually because motherboard/RAM/whatever technology has advanced too far to justify a mere CPU upgrade. So it's really a bit of a red herring. But I did it anyways.
As it turns out, AM2 is not a significant extra expense. In fact, it's a far better buy overall when considering raw performance - because AM2 also supports DDR2 with Hypertransport. The bottom line is I can get a completely new AM2 machine with comparable/slightly better specs than my last configuration for about $150 more.
Of course, once the Conroe thing happens, there's supposed to be a huge price drop in the Athlon X2 line - which means, obviously, that the $150 price hike to get AM2/DDR2 capability will then disappear, leaving me more or less at the same price point as my current plan, except with significantly brighter upgrade potential and a much nicer memory layout; whereas DDR400 is cheapest in 512MB blocks (meaning 2GB would fill the 4 slots on most motherboards), DDR2/800 is actually cheapest (for now) in 1GB modules, which lets me fully capitalize on the ability to put 4GB of RAM in my development machine - and that is a very nice perk indeed, considering the kind of memory load I usually run.
So, all things considered, I think I'll hold off for the moment. This gives me a few advantages. First, prices always drop, which means I'll basically save money anyways. Second, Conroe means a potentially very nice price drop, which translates to much better value-for-money on the purchase. Thirdly, I can set aside cash slowly instead of digging into my current savings, which will appease the little paranoid slice of my mind that says "yeah but what if your house burns down/car blows up/aliens invade the planet and charge everyone a fee to breathe oxygen." Finally, it means I'll have the patience to really spec out parts and check deeply into reviews instead of just skimming a few Internet articles.
Anyways... here's what I'm looking at for the moment. This will almost certainly change over the next month and a half, and likely just get sweeter.
- AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ Windsor AM2
- ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe motherboard
- ASUS EN7900GT-TOP (overspec) video card
- Seagate Barracuda 300GB SATA3.0Gb hard drive
- Silver XBlade case w/ 450W PSU
- Cheap DVD/CDRW combo drive
- Saitek Eclipse keyboard and Razer Diamondback Plasma mouse
All told I'm looking at around $1350 with current street prices; after the Conroe frenzy and a month worth of price decay, that'll likely drop to around $1200.
I nixed the ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe/Wireless Edition motherboard for an extra $70, largely because I don't need the onboard wireless or extra features at all, and also because I'm cheap. I may well end up having to put that money into a better PSU though, so it all evens out.
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 Unprecendentilliarifizicated! |
Posted - 6/15/2006 7:36:39 AM | I'm doing something I've never done before.
Since my debut in the world of Internet forums back in 1998, I've always used the same avatar, everywhere, with no exceptions: the Lunaris from FF6. It's gone through a couple of variants, including a transparent version and the present blue background, but other than that it's always been the same - comforting, familiar, and ready to rip the lungs out of wayward thieves treasure hunters.
But now, in tribute to Stompy's bizarre find, I must do the unthinkable: for a short time (read: until I get scared and revert), I will be changing my avatar to....
ASPLODEY ROCK MAN!!!
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 Upgradelust |
Posted - 6/14/2006 3:19:59 PM | Well, the final barriers are breaking down. It all started back when I asked GDNet to persuade me to buy a new machine. The first campaign was startlingly successful: I went out and got myself an Asus W2JB notebook. It's a delightful little box, and I've dribbled about my infatuation with it at great length in the archives of this very publication.
Unfortunately (for my wallet at least), there's still a void to fill in the soul of my inner geek.
Originally, I settled on the laptop because I was about to do some travelling. I've now finished the travelling, and have no plans to travel for at least the next three hours, so a laptop is no longer all that useful. I mean, it's still awesome for sitting on the sofa and surfing while I watch the World Cup - but it just doesn't hack it for work.
The way I see it, the problem is simple. There are three aspects to computing: work, gaming, and mobility. I've got the gaming covered, and the mobility. (I'll resist the urge to thump my geekchest about the specs of my gaming and mobility machines; if you really care you can find them in the thread linked above.) That leaves work relatively unsolved.
Up until now, for the past several years, I've been working on an AthlonXP 2400+. I only recently managed to convince myself to spring for the RAM upgrade from 512MB to 1GB. It sports a jaw-dropping GeForce4 Ti 4800, which was hot when I bought it, but now can barely even handle the stuff I work on when set to minimal quality. Heck, I'm stuck back in the era of EIDE hard drives.
That wasn't really a huge problem for most of that time. When I needed Shader Model 2.x support, or framerates with more than one digit, I'd just sidle over to my gaming machine at the other end of the apartment, and use it. The only downer there was that I have no display for the gaming rig aside from my LCD projector, and writing code on an 84" wall is not exactly pleasant. This equates to a lot of trotting back and forth between my two machines. It also means I can't do anything color-sensitive during the day, because even with the window blocked out the sunlight makes it hard to see subtle shades of color on the projected screen.
I could have lived with that. I did live with that. It wasn't idyllic, but it got the job done, and more importantly for my inner miser, it was cheap.
But then came the W2JB, and I discovered the bliss of Dual Core processing. And developing on a machine that can actually run the software you're writing. And SATA hard drives. And so on.
One of the niggling inconveniences of my current workstation is that, for some stupid reason, I've kept it rigged with a crap generic keyboard that came with an ancient IBM machine I had ages ago. The keyboard has horrible tactile feedback, is loud as all-get-out, and has the Home/End keys squished up between F12 and PrintScreen for no apparent goddamn reason. Needless to say, it's annoying. Yet somehow I never got around to replacing it with a keyboard that's... shall we say... not total crap.
Anyways, recently my gaming rig "died" (northbridge fan bearings decided to go on vacation to Mexico or some such). That left my nice Saitek backlit keyboard unclaimed, along with my really, really, really nice Razer Diamondback Plasma mouse (which has a BLUE LED and infrared sensor, so it looks really slick). For the heck of it, I've connected them up to my workstation. Bar a little futzing with the sensitivity on the 1600dpi mouse, it's been pure bliss. I especially like having the extra mouse buttons for various macros and hotkeys.
So now I'm spoiled. I've done development on a non-suck machine, and I've swapped out my generic $10 peripherals for quality Human Interface Devices. I'm sure you can guess where this is going next.
That's right, ladies and gentlemen, I've started pricing a new development machine. Yayy for me, perhaps. It's hard to communicate why this is such a big deal to people who aren't familiar with my epic reluctance to part ways with my cash. (To give you some perspective, I currently have an estimated $55 US in loose coins sitting on my desk. I'm that anal-retentive about money.)
Here's the parts I'm looking at:
- AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ (Manchester core) CPU
- Asus A8N-E motherboard
- 1GB Crucial Ballistix DDR400 performance RAM (quite possibly 2GB)
- Asus Radeon 7900GT [EN-TOP overspec model] video card
- Seagate Barracuda 300GB SATA3.0Gb/s hard drive
- Silver XBlade chassis
Plus of course I'll need a new Saitek Eclipse keyboard and another Diamondback Plasma. Scrounge up a few cheap miscellaneous bits like a DVD/CDRW combo drive, and I'm all set.
I'm facing about $1250 in damages, all told, courtesy of NewEgg (as usual). That's a hefty chunk of change on top of the laptop, but somehow I'm convincing myself that it's justified by noting that I'm getting better spec for half the price. As absurd as that is, somehow it works on my psyche.
I'll probably end up sleeping on this one for a fairly long time, but I've already specced and priced parts, which means chances are good I'm going to eventually break down and buy it.
And when I do, I'll be developing like nobody's business. The productivity will be blinding. (And it'll have to be, because I just spent all day shopping for computer parts instead of working...)
[Update: the inner stingy bastard decided to price a 6600/256. I can pick one up for $75 off NewEgg, bundled with two games. So it's almost like buying the games and getting a free video card... tempting.]
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 Sleeping (or not) |
Posted - 6/13/2006 6:02:55 PM | There seems to have been some confusion about my sleep schedule in my last post.
So let be briefly clarify how my sleep schedule works:
- When tired, go to sleep. This often means snoozing in my chair, or, sometimes, stumbling over to the couch. Maybe once a week I'll actually make it into my bed.
- When no longer tired, get up and do stuff.
I literally cannot remember my sleep patterns from the last several days, partly because they're totally arbitrary, and partly because I just stopped caring. It's a little weird being totally out of sync with the rest of reality, but I haven't been this consistently rested and alert in literally years, and I generally tend to manage quite long runs of work before slouching back off to zzz-land.
It sounds insane at utterly unhealthy, but so far it's been going great. Working from home has its benefits.
The only currently recorded side effect is pondering hot elven women at 4:30 AM. I'm still not entirely sure if that's a bad thing, though.
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 Epiphanies feel like electrified chocolate |
Posted - 6/13/2006 4:33:19 AM | Proactive de-funk step one: chug about 75% of a can of Monster. Guaranteed to at least make your skin tingle, if not actually correct motivational deficiencies.
I know this is annoyingly soon after my last post, but I just have to brain-dump it, and it's too important for an edit. Plus, an edit would totally ruin the dramatic tension I left at the end of the last post. This way is better for all of us - many rainforests will be spared. Or something. (The caffiene and sugar are really starting to kick in.)
So I was thinking about how cool and awesome my new laptop is, and how I always get motivated to do lots of work whenever I get expensive new toys. The only problem is, compared to my regular workstation with a regular comfy keyboard/mouse combo, the laptop just isn't comfortable. Sure, in a hotel room in Europe it's great; but back in my Lair of Power it's merely good, and outstripped by the Better that is my desktop machine.
One of the things I really enjoy about desktop computing is dual monitor configurations. I swear, after using dual-head systems for a while, going back to single-screen is like being strangled to death and drowned in damp sand at the same time - and without hot elven women there to help assuage the pain. (See what I mean about the sugar and caffiene? I may also be slightly feverish, and the associated brain-cell-barbeque is likely not helping. I sure hope to God this is as funny tomorrow morning as it is in my head right now. Although I'll settle for it just not being bizarrely pathetic.)
So right... I was talking about something meaningful, supposedly. Laptops and such. The thing I like about this laptop is the übersexy 1440x900 WXGA+ resolution, which is just so much more awesome than 1024x768. The whole 17" thing is pretty hot, too. Unfortunately, it still gets trumped by dual 17" 1280x1024 LCDs, which simply provide far more real-estate-power. And Billybob knows it's all about the real estate.
When I code, I fill up a metric buttload of space. I often run two instances of VS side-by-side, one on each monitor. Even in less severe scenarios, I almost always have a stack of documentation, note-taking, and assorted web-browser windows open on my secondary monitor. Real estate is amazingly valuable.
Naturally, then, one thing that just made me hot and bothered at the Egosoft office is the artists' display setups: a 21" widescreen LCD with a second 19" on the side for spare stuff. They run some ungodly resolution with a large number of digits in it. It's very little short of orgasmic for someone who, like me, can never acquire enough screenspace.
So anyways... back to the whole buying-toys-to-get-productive thing. Obviously the new-laptop toy is great, but it has limited usefulness here at home. I also want a new development workstation, because after a dual-core system, going back to an Athlon XP 2400 is murderously slow. The little glitches while I try to web-surf and do large compiles never really bothered me before, but the laptop's Core Duo power gave me a brief taste of life without those hiccups, and that taste was better than cocaine.
That got me to fantasizing about tech hardware, which is never healthy. I figured, heck, if I'm dreaming about dropping $2500 on a blazing-hot new development rig, why not do it right and buy a screen upgrade, too, seeing as I'm always so short on screen real-estate and all? This of course brought back to mind the awesome potential of the widescreen/dual setup.
Unfortunately, I realized that that just won't cut it. Because what I need isn't more pixels. What I need is smarter software.
VS2005 is nice. It really is. There are some hiccups with it still, like the fact that 9 times out of 10 if I double-click a workspace in Explorer VS will just deadlock and presumably go do something unspeakable with itself in a dark corner somewhere. I really don't know what happens. Oh, and the Intellisense background update is still horridly broken.
But it still does one thing bad, and that's dual-head support. I'd really love to be able to tear off windows and slap them on another display for a while. I can do this to a limited degree with things like toolbar windows, but there are some bad Z-order issues that arise when working with other apps on the second monitor. In general, it just doesn't work.
I'd settle for one of two things, honestly. The first solution would be the easy, cheap hack, and make me happy for at least a while: hide a little toggle-switch in the IDE somewhere that says "when I click Maximize, I really want you to inflate over all available monitors instead of just the one you're on right now." I can do this if I un-max the window and resize it by hand, but that leads to ickiness of its own. It also makes it a pain in the ass to write code, because code windows fill up two monitors when what I really want is to have a code space on each monitor.
The second option would be far more complicated to build (I suspect) but infinitely cool: open two IDE "parent windows" that are actually the same instance of VS and act on the same open workspace. As it stands, if I try to open the same workspace in two separate instances of VS, one will barf because it can't access read-only stuff like Intellisense databases, which the other instance has locked. This makes it more or less worthless; I may as well just open Notepad on the other monitor for all the benefits that VS retains in that mode.
So if I could just have VS intelligently handle dual-monitor setups, that would be so damn cool. I know art packages have done that for years; Photoshop does it nicely, 3DSMax does a reasonable job, and Final Cut Pro on the Mac is undoubtedly one of the best dual-head-aware pieces of software I've ever seen. When VS can do it, too, I will be one happy geek.
... yeah, all that was pretty much pointless. Except to say that VS has crappy support for dual-monitor setups.
(And someone please, please, please tell me that this magic switch already exists and I just suck because I haven't found it yet.)
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 Cross-platform ports FTW |
Posted - 6/13/2006 3:52:59 AM | X2 has just been released for Linux. Woohoo, etc.
On a less corporate-shill note, this week sucks. I started out this weekend fighting off a nasty runny nose. Mysteriously, it dried up overnight and hasn't been back since, but it left behind it a mild fever and the general achy malaise that tends to go with being sick. I also have some wicked bad sinus headaches that keep flaring up every few hours, making it basically impossible to get work done.
So instead I've been reading through my Foxtrot comic book collection, which is sadly sparse. I'm down to one last book, and then I may have to fall back to my Calvin and Hobbes stash. As much as I enjoy C&H, starting a marathon would be decidedly unwise - seeing as I own virtually every strip ever published in some format or another, it usually takes me a solid week to get through my whole collection, and that means a week of not getting work done. As much as I want to procrastinate a whole bunch right now, that's kind of not really a good idea, seeing as this 3D engine rewrite thing is sort of critical to finishing the game we're working on.
Lé sigh.
I feel a little swamped at the moment. There's this engine stuff for work, plus the Epoch project which I really want to get moving on, the rewrite of the TKC software (which, seeing as I'm still getting a steady stream of faithful donations, I feel like I really should work on again someday), a stack of domestic chores to get done... and that's just "work" stuff. Reading comic books for a day and a half has really, powerfully tempted me to get back into all the other reading I want to do, which I frankly just can't afford the time for right now.
(So why I'm burning time posting this crap is beyond me...)
All in all, I'm in a dangerous funk at the moment, and I really, really, really need to break out of it. Normally at times like this, I'd inspire myself by gaming for a few hours. Unfortunately, the northbridge fan on my gaming rig's motherboard died just before I went to Germany, which leaves that machine unusable. Replacing the fan is fairly easy, but it's one of those "urgh I really can't be arsed" sort of mundane tasks that just keeps getting put off. So, bottom line, I either game on my workstation (urgh for crap hardware specs), my new laptop (urgh for bad ergonomics... hey, that's poetic!), or in my imagination.
I know that if I don't get up off my butt soon and start getting work done, this is going to turn into a long spiral. Feeling sick tends to make me want to bum around a lot and read, which in turn gets me sentimental, which makes me dig up old games, which makes me burn a lot of time. Generally, this also means I don't rest very much, which means I stay sick for a while. And I'm sure you can see where all this leads.
The problem with being in a funk is that you don't want to get out, even if you know you should. Blargh.
"Of course, maybe if I read Masters of Doom again for the bajillionth time, that will motivate me to get going!" Yeah, except it won't, and all it will really do is waste time. The problem is, every time I manage to Alt+Tab over to Visual Studio, my eyes just kind of glaze over and I end up back on GDNet or reading webcomics or whatever.
I need a shot of testosterone or something... anything to get my psyched up and in a "RAHHR FOURTYEIGHTHOUR CODING MARATHON TO DESTROY ALL OTHER GAMES FOREVER GRAHHHH!!!" sort of mood.
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 Music |
Posted - 6/12/2006 3:37:35 AM | I'm a fairly big addict of Digitally Imported's Internet radio service. The bulk of my time is spent in the Chillout channel, as I find the selection there (for the most part) to be an incomparable backdrop for late-night hacking sessions.
The mixed blessing and curse of a service like DI is that it's crammed with extremely rare tracks. I know of one or two cases where the track played by DI is the only existing copy of the song in the world. On the one hand, the nominal (and voluntary) subscription fee is a bargain considering the ease of access one has to such works. On the other hand, it can be incredibly hard to listen to a particularly masterful track and know that you'll never be able to go down to the store and buy the CD. Some of this stuff is literally so rare that you can't even find it via certain... shall we say, less than reputable Internet sources.
I keep a list of tracks that I've heard that I want to try and find someday. Several I've been able to buy, and some can only be had by resorting to more extreme methods. In every case I'd more than gladly give a tidy portion of my income to the original author for the priviledge of listening to their music on demand.
I could turn this into a lengthy rant of ire about how modern music distribution encourages crap to be churned out and jostle for position on some self-important "Top X" listing-du-jour. I could vent my considerable frustration about how I'm expected to pay ridiculous sums of money and submit to idiotic terms-of-use just to listen to garbage, while in the meantime the labels refuse to sign genuine talent and brilliant artists like Marco Torrance. I could say a lot of very unhappy things about trying to enjoy music in this day and age - things which shouldn't have to be said, given the unprecedented and truly remarkable ability our modern civilization has to distribute media like this.
I'm really not in the mood to rant, though. I'm mostly just sad, and the usual rip of nostalgia is making its routine surge. I've said it before, and likely will have occasion to do so again several times, but I'm far too sentimental for my own sanity 
I sort of feel vaguely dirty and foolish bringing it up, but it captures my mood so well, and has come to mind repeatedly this evening. I'd love to be able to say that I drew this little slice of my soul from some great writer like Shakespeare... or... some other great writer. But, frankly, I don't really know that many great writers, and I haven't read that much of the "great literature." So with a mixture of shame and geekish pride, I have to reveal that one of the most powerful pieces I ever read on this subject was a Star Wars short story.
I don't recall many details, and those I do remember are likely butchered. The vast majority of the other short stories in the book were total crap, as is par for the Star Wars course (Timothy Zahn excepted). This one stuck with me not at all because of the franchise branding, but because of the subject material itself.
As I remember it (which again is not particularly reliable), there was some legendary mass-murdering psychopath alien who had comitted horrendous acts of genocide during his military service. There was some explanation of this, but I don't recall what it was. The interesting thing was that he had escaped justice for decades, and had hidden himself away on some obscure planet or whatever, living in an underground hovel.
The pride of his life was a literally priceless collection of music. In his subterranean lair, he had collected thousands of recordings - literally the last music surviving in most of the universe. (Apparently the Emperor was not fond of tunes, or whatever. I don't remember that, either.) In the end, something dramatic happens, and he dies listening to the only existing copy of some famous song in the entire galaxy.
Or maybe he didn't die, or something. Heck, I don't remember at all. Just that there was a lot of rare music involved, and he was the only one with access to it. I suppose it loses all of its dramatic punch when recounted without any of the actual details of the story.
But believe me, it was deeply moving. Especially when one gets done hearing Lluvia del Verano and knowing that, chances are, it'll never get signed onto a label, despite the fact that Torrance is a borderline-genius artist.
DI offers an amazing chance to enjoy some of that artwork; it's a chance that, even 15 years ago, would have been totally impossible. The hardest part is knowing that that short glimpse is all I may ever get to have.
But really, isn't that just part of what makes it so special?
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