July 15, 2008 @ 01:08
Apparently it’s been over two months since I last blogged. For a change this hasn’t actually been due to having a lack of anything interesting to say but just not having enough free time. London days seem a few hours shorter than those elsewhere in the UK and my perpetual busyness isn’t overly conducive to my blogging.
My employers Mendeley have made the recent wise decision of employing some excellent other software engineers, including KDE’s own Fred Emmott who is working in my team. He’s a great guy to work with but is annoyingly productive; every time I find something to do and get on with my own work it seems like five minutes before he’s fixed the bug/added the feature and is looking for more stuff to do! Any suggestions on how to make him less productive?
It was a nice surprise to view the 2.6.26 kernel changelog and find that some of the code I wrote at Wolfson Microelectronics two summers ago has finally been merged. I can now grep for myself in the kernel! Yey!
I hope to blog more regularly now, hopefully with less self-indulgent posts and more useful ones as I’ve been having some interesting battles with the mighty CMake at work that deserve sharing.
I guess I’m signing off for the evening as it is late o’clock but hopefully see some of you soon as:
Posted in Random, Software Development
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April 14, 2008 @ 00:02
Anyone who knows me knows that I love open-source. If I could eat open-source software I probably would. If I could marry it then our children would be very odd. You get the idea.
There is something that open-source software seems to suck at and that is making good games. I play almost every OSS game I can get my hands on and the prettiest are graphically inferior to games from the average games of a couple of years ago, the audio is terribly mastered, the games are usually unbalanced and the stories are usually either ridiculously awful or involve Tux in some way.
Interestingly the freeware/mod scene on Windows seems to produce far better quality games than the open-source scene. I think this is because you where software fulfils a need for the user a game is a more creative act and needs a clear leader and a very undemocratic approach to aspects such as storyline and artwork. Games also tend to need to be “done” before they are released as no-one wants to play a story-driven game that just stops abrubtly.
I’m sure people are going to come onto this blog and complain that I’ve forgotten about all these great open-source games but I don’t really care. I’ve tried playing too many to find myself spending hours wishing I was playing even a poor paid-for game.
The only real exceptions I’ve found to the above rules are games which have been retroactively open-sourced such as Quake 3, Transport Tycoon, Tyrian and Star Control 2. These were all good games on release and open-sourcing them means they can be made more portable and keep being played for a long time. I highly recommend you check them out.
Posted in Random
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March 23, 2008 @ 23:27
I had a random but amusing thought today as I spectated the White Easter but remembering a lack of a White Christmas for years.
What if our “climate chaos” and all the weather changes we are seeing are just the fact that the rotation of the earth is at a slightly different speed so years are now the wrong length! That would explain the whole warmer winters but colder summers!
Disclaimer:
I make every effort to reduce my impact on the environment, this blog post is intended to be humour not a complex rebuttal of common scientific theory. However, I reserve the right to merciless mock the entire scientific community.
Posted in Random
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@ 21:13
I’ve now actually reordered the categories into stuff I actually use.
My past posts and future ones are/will be broken down by:
The above links point to the relevant category. I highly recommend if you read this blog and only some of the above interest you that you subscribe to only the RSS feed for that particular category or categories for your sake and mine.
Posted in My Life, Random
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