I’m retiring log.lowmag.net, celsi.us, and efficienting.com on a more permanent basis. The sites will remain running for the time being, but I am unable to devote the time to posting at a rate that I find both useful and enjoyable. It’s been a great run on the web, but things like facebook supplant, in my mind, the need for personal weblogs.
This week sees the end of a sprint, a release of updated code and a push for new stories for the next round. At midnight, as scheduled, code will be going live. My first full sprint starts Wednesday in the planning phase come morning.
I’m currently learning how to use a few new technologies. The first is svn, the version control system. The second is jmeter, which is a httpd load-testing tool. I’m also starting to get into robot and selenium for UI testing. I’m still trying to get used to Trac, RHEL (I’m a Ubuntu/Debian/Slack user), etc, etc.
I’m off class tonight on holiday, so I had some time to decompress. I hit up WoW for a bit of questing, and now I’m chilling and reading some photography stuff.
One thing about changing jobs is that you get to do new stuff and constantly change up your day. I love variety.
This is the month of transition. 2010 is such an epic-sounding year, and it is only fitting that I have an epic start to my year. Beside ushering in the year of the space-fetus, I started my career shift to working at lulu.com. Today was my last day at Pharsight; Tuesday is my first at Lulu. I will likely be inundated with new information, practices, language features, and an entirely different build cycle. This should be fun.
I assume employees at lulu are called lunatics for a reason, I’m more curious whether this is a gradual process or if it happens all at once. I hope I know by the end of the month which it is. My direct manager is my former manager from Misys, Carl. Ryan, the director of development, is the guy most known for shepherding and developing a large part of Apache 2. The company is headed by Bob Young, previously CEO of Red Hat.
You have no idea how plain happy I am to be working in an environment that is both open-source and mac-based. My friends will all tell you that my least favorite thing about working in an office is the choice of Windows by so many companies. Companies with large IT departments choose Microsoft. A lot of IT people will go home to a mac at night just so they can avoid the tech rain dance that inevitably comes with windows of any vintage. Not having to deal with windows on the daily is a big bonus about my new workplace, and a significant stress reliever.
I also started classes this week. The credits cost about $350, and the books and software etc., ended up about $500. Some of the materials will carry to other semesters such as MS Office (Mac edition) and my English (MLA and general) style guides will carry between semesters at lest. Statistics I will be a challenge because it’s taught more like a humanities course than a maths course.
Expository composition will be interesting but probably not as much as a challenge to me, considering you’re reading one of my drafts. I’m not boasting, but writing isn’t hard for me. Yes, I could stand to tighten up my writing, but I’m someone who picked up Fowler, White and Zinnser for fun. Please, not comments about my grammar; I just came off an entirely too-long 3-hour class.
I’ll try to keep things updated here as I progress through the semester. It’s not something I’ve been diligent about in the past, but the practice will help my assigned writing work.
So, cheers to all my friends at Pharsight, I’ll miss you!
My 3d vision glasses, EVGA 9800 GTX+ and Samsung 2233rz came in from Tiger Direct on Wednesday. I was surprised at the promptness of the shipments since Amazon gathered the wrong tracking number for the order. Everything arrived at about 7PM. I went to bed at Midnight. Oops.
I got the 9800 in place as a dedicated PhysX card, and my GTX 295 now acts only to render video. I suppose each chip gets an eye, and they attempt to push 120 frames out between them. This is a really exciting development in gaming, despite its flaws.
For one thing, Batman: Arkham Asylum is even more amazing with depth. It’s one of two games designated ’3D Vison Ready’ on nVidia’s site. I’m not sure what this label means, but it does appear to work much better than the other games I’ve tried. It’s obviously designed with something extra since depth effects are far more convincing in AA than elsewhere.
The flaws are minor, and I’ve been able to get over them somewhat quickly. One is the ghosting. On scenes with high contrast and a near white bright condition, there will be places where you see echoes of the edges of things. While it’s noticeable if you look for it, in a lot of games it just disappears after your eyes get used to it.
There are also issues in some games with skyboxes since they’re often little more than a clever hack to render a large thing without really rendering something that takes up a lot of geometry. Fallout 3 skies are iffy, and the moons of Pandora in Borderlands are ghosty and have some cyan moire artifacts. I don’t look up much so it’s not too big a deal, but in the future I suppose games will have to test for this and find a way around it.
So far Batman is the most enjoyable game, and what I’ve played of Burnout Paradise is very clean as well. One of the things nVidia does to help one out with configuring games to avoid artifacts is a green OSD that explains what features to disable, as well as known issues with a game. Developers use a set of tricks to improve game realism such as deferred lighting and ambient occlusion, and these apparently affect the z-buffer. Some advanced shadow techniques result in odd effects like shadows in front of everything else because they are added to the scene after rendering the 3d portion. Again, this is likely to change in the future.
Now for the fanboy bit: I love my nVidia hardware, and even though ATi has a lot going for it (DX11 shipping now, Evergreen is a seriously well-made chipset) they don’t have anything like PhysX or 3D Vision or CUDA. They have similar things, but the boots are on the ground in nVidia’s camp, and the only catch-up big green has to do is get a DX11-compliant card on the market to dominate. 3D Vision really does tip the scales in the favor of nVidia, and since it won’t work with anything but their card, it also provides lock-in to the brand. If I was ATi, I’d be trying to get a deal to let me in the door on some of these tools.
I knew if I waited long enough, I could get the Burnout Paradise game for < $10. Awesome. Just in time for my 3D display, too.
I ordered a 3D monitor/glasses combination after trying the system out at the CompUSA. (formerly TigerDirect Outlet) I have to say this is the best home 3D will be for a while, aside from spherical projection with curve correction with a 120Hz DLP projector.
So yeah, almost every game I play is already 3d, so this should be good. Real good. :)
It ended a week ago, but I want to say what a relief it is to be out of my first class at Wake Tech! I just checked my grades, and I got an A for the class. I’m guessing I did the final mostly right despite one or two areas of concern.
Going into the class, I worried that it was too long since I last learned anything in a formal manner. I was able to keep up despite some lax study habits on my part, and got the grades to move on. I do need to work on those study habits, however.
The new campus is a well-designed set of buildings with lots of ample indirect lighting and a lot of energy-saving features we expect from all but the dumbest architects these days. The southern faces are covered in solar baffles about 4 meters away from the building which casts a long shadow through the majority of the days in summer, while letting the low winter sun in. The buildings are all clad in reflective material to reject as much IR absorption as possible. A nice lawn (still patchy from construction) sits in the middle of the campus. In total, it’s a relaxing place to take classes.
Next semester is split between the North and main campuses. I have Statistics I (yaay) and English 112 (boo) on my schedule for spring term. I’ll probably be dumping my English stuff on the site as I write it.
yaay! good luck next semester
A number of games that were planned for one platform or another as ‘exclusive’ to that platform have gone multi-platform. Bioshock 2 was supposed to be 360 only but is going to be PS3 and PC at the same time. The only reason I’m keeping my 360 at the moment is Crackdown 2 and Alan Wake, the latter possibly being a ‘timed-exclusive’ to release on PC later.
The PS3 has the Excellent Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, which I am keeping permanently. It is highly entertaining, and there is some replay involved as the game is very immersing. Online play can be fun in co-op as well. Demon’s Souls, while not my cuppa, is another interesting exclusive. God of War 3, while about as unimaginative as Devil May Cry series, is coming soon and will be popular. I don’t care about it too much. I may or may not play it. I didn’t play the second because the first felt rushed to release (anyone stuck on the Hades level will probably agree here)
The big thing is that even with all these exclusives, Windows gaming is more appealing to me. I can customize my fallout or oblivion with thousands of community mods. I can play Dragon Age: Origins as a RTS/RPG instead of as a shallow action game. Borderlands looks great at 2560×1600 with all the bells and whistles enabled. In other words, what I put into my gaming system really pays off in game quality and fun.
I really do love the first-party console games though, with the exception of HALO and Killzone. They can kiss my ass. FPS/TPS on Console is really hard to do ‘right’ by me when I’m used to my Razer and WASD.
MMOs are addictive. No shit. An interesting story about a guy who Evercracked out. I’d like to think I was never this bad with wow, but my played on my main was something like 72-80 day range. So yeah, maybe I played a bit of wow — over 4 years, with two hiatuses.
But I took two hiatuses, and I did other things in the real world. I now take a maths class Tuesdays and Thursdays, and of course there is the photography (my favorite lens is currently broken so I need to take care of that) and other habits like reading to do.
I try to never let any of this get in the way of work. Too dangerous. No point ruining your livelihood for a bunch of people you will never meet in real life. That’s the main reason I’m reluctant to join a legion in Aion. Right now I’m able to dump a group if they’re a bunch of idiots. That’s harder to do when you a main heal for legion raids of Elyos space. Not cool. I may not make it far in that game because I don’t want to sink unrecoverable time better spent on other things.
The whole problem with the mmo gaming isn’t the money spent per month (I don’t have cable, so it’s entertainment cost to me to have some sort of subscription going) it’s the finding of will-power to not play. I’m doing better with Aion than I did with WoW. It seems Blizzard really likes hooking people with daily this and that in order to keep server population and month-to-month numbers high. Aion relies on the promise of ‘great’ PvP to fill that void. If you’re a carebear you can ignore this, however.
The most frustrating part is dealing with the online guilt for having a life and missing out on a raid on xyz. Sorry, IRL>game, thanks.
I’m still playing WoW, but generally only when I have time (or during the world events to get the achievements). I never joined a guild, especially one that has set times for raiding (like Thursday through Sunday 8-midnight.. Uh.. hello, I have a life!) I maybe fit 1-3 hours in per week if I’m lucky, sometimes less, but I’m OK with that.
Finally finished the big level 20 quest last night in Aion. First group didn’t need it, so I logged off for an hour and finished Monkey Island episode 3. BTW, it’s similar to Sam n Max S1E3 in that it’s extra long compared to the others, and also similar in that long doesn’t always equal good.
This is me: Liall – Asmodean Cleric
lowmagnet 13:02 on 2009/12/29 Permalink |
Got a UPS tracking number but it currently isn’t in the system yet. Ships tonight is my wager. Arrives anywhere from Dec 31 – Jan 6. Once it’s in the system, UPS is good at providing the estimate.