Game Programming

Wow, where to start. Though I had had played around with graphics programming early in my career, that was a long time ago. I had a basic understanding of 2d and a vague one of 3d, hehe I had a crash course. Anyway I'm proud to say I was the lead for a shipped DS triple A title and am now the lead for a big budget Wii title. Learning is fun , but games deadlines are a bitch.

Joel is getting some heat over this

Joel was getting some heat over this comment, but he's dead accurate. Martion headsets: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/. These aholes are trying to trash him .http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/03/18/translation-from-ms-speak-to-english-of-selected-portions-of-joel-spolskys-martin-headsets
I really can't see Joel as a MS apologist here. What he says is true, "IT'S THE USERS STUPID". Sure we would all like to get rid of past baggage and go to real "standards" (whatever TF they are), but that is not practical. Backward compatility like it or not is a MUST. If you haven't been writing software long enough to know that then go change your diapers. You may not like MS, you may despise them. That doesn't change the fact they OWN the browser market by a large margin. I don't use thier browser, but that doesn't matter and I'm smart enough to know it. Is Linux a free and BETTER OS? I think there is no doubt, is your mother or aunt using it? NO way. MS "OWNS" the desktop as well and shows no signs of quickly losing it ,despite the Vista setbacks. So stop blasting Joel for what is obviously true. N00bs.

Carmack's look into the future of Gaming hardware

John Carmack is the De facto king of the 3D engine. A brilliant mind and actually a pretty nice guy. Here is his latest take on the future of gaming hardware. He speaks in a DSl that most of us barely understand, but I can gleam enough to find it excellent food for thought.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=532&type=overview

Down to the metal

This a great presentation by Herb Sutter to the Northwest C++ Users Group about modern PC architecture and how it can affect the performance of your code. I never thought I would say this , but I do miss my days of hand optimizing 8086 assembler code.
http://nwcpp.org/Meetings/2007/09.html

How I started programming

My first exposure to programming was a few programming courses (on cards) at the University of Tennessee. I enjoyed them , but soon left school to go and work for my father in Florida at his jeans factory. I thought, well I had dreams of grandeur, lol. He started me at the bottom and I ended up "turning jeans" for about 6 months. In retrospect I would rather shovel raw sewage then do that job again. At any rate we were raided by the FBI for making counterfeit Calvin Kline's, poof , end of stupid dream.

I quickly got a job as a waiter and enrolled in one of those "be a computer programmer" in six months trade schools. It was surpizingly expensive, but probably one of the best investments I ever made. I did well and was hired 4 months into my term by a local software developer. He actually hired 12 of us. At the time we didn't know he only intended to keep 2. Needlessly to say I was one of the 2. The app was a retail management system that ran on a now ancient mini-computer I' sure few of you have heard of, known as a Qantel (if you look carefully, the termials used by the goverment guys in ET, were Qantels). The language was an odd FORTRAN/Basic hybrid know as '*QicBasic'. The language was actually pretty sophisticated for the time in the way it handled strings and it's formatted I/O. The hardware was pretty innovative as well. It used a bit slice processor with a very flexible instruction set, but I didn't learn about that until much later. Anyway I fell in love with computers and they have been my hobby ever since.

I later joined a company that completely emulated the Qantel OS on a PC, but that's another post.

Background Checks

A large percentage of companies now use background checks to determine your "eligibility" to work there. These often include credit reports as well. A friend of mine recently took a position for two whole days before coming into work on the third day and being "escorted" out of the building for failing the background check (oddly they didn't do the background check until AFTER he started). His offense? A 35$ bounced check in 2001 (long since paid). It didn't matter that he had worked for a large credit card processing company dealing with highly sensitive data for the last 10 years. To these clowns he was a criminal. Now he has to start the whole f'ing process all over again, I feel for him.