So I am bringing my post-graduation sabbatical to an end and am now fully into the creation of my engineering career.
I spent the past six months since graduation working in the construction industry with an awesome residential framing company known as LPT Construction. The owner and manager has been really great to work for while I was working through school, and was totally willing to work around whatever crazy school schedule I had.
I really have learned an enormous amount about construction, management, safety and productivity from the years of part and full time work in this industry.
Nevertheless, I am now really interested in starting my software engineering career; after all, I attained my degree for a reason right!
Anyways, so I am available for hire! If you want to take a look at my resume, please have at it!
-Ted
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Monday, December 10, 2007
Dual monitor goodness
About 2 years ago I purchased two monitors for a dual monitor setup on my home workstation. Unfortunately, I was thoroughly disgusted with the image quality of my mythtv system when I was using my traditional CRT as a monitor. So I sacrificed my second monitor and have been using it as my television for the past long while.
That all changed this week when I purchased a new 26" LCD television to use and the monitor for my mythtv media server.
Now that I finally got my second monitor out of so called bondage, I took the time to configure a dual monitor setup on my main workstation.
I was surprised at how straightforward this was with OpenSUSE 10.3. Originally I had expected that I would need to do at least a little bit of manual configuration inside my xorg.conf. Well, it turns out that dual monitors was far easier than I had expected and I am now working on httperf across the dual monitor set-up.
As a side note, I am using an nvidia 7800GS with the proprietary driver.
That all changed this week when I purchased a new 26" LCD television to use and the monitor for my mythtv media server.
Now that I finally got my second monitor out of so called bondage, I took the time to configure a dual monitor setup on my main workstation.
I was surprised at how straightforward this was with OpenSUSE 10.3. Originally I had expected that I would need to do at least a little bit of manual configuration inside my xorg.conf. Well, it turns out that dual monitors was far easier than I had expected and I am now working on httperf across the dual monitor set-up.
As a side note, I am using an nvidia 7800GS with the proprietary driver.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
OpenSUSE 10.3 Package Management and some other stuff
Well, I have been using the development versions of OpenSUSE 10.3 since alpha 5. The operating system has certain stabilized quite a bit now at Beta 3.
In one week (Sept 20) the first release candidate will be pushed out the door. I am expecting only a few changes between now and then.
One of the real big *Behind the Scenes* changes, has been with the package management system. If you have been following the development of the OS since 10.1, you will surely have heard that there have been numerous complaints with the system.
Primarily the complaints have been associated with the the integration of the red carpet technologies into the software management stack.
Essentially in 10.1 and 10.2, there were two package managers. The traditional yast stuff, and the newer red carpet stuff (zmd/rug). I personally blame a lot of the problems on the necessity to synchronize (and failure thereof) between the two technologies.
Anyways, with 10.3 looming in just under a month, the *new* package management stuff seems to have more or less hit its stride.
ZMD has been removed from the OpenSUSE distribution and the old yast and red carpet packaging stacks can finally be said to have a full grown healthy child. zypper. So far, I have no major complaints here at all, although some of the error messages are somewhat oblique.
Also in the news is that the people at AMD have released a good chunk of the specifications for the ATI R500 graphics chips. Currently the documentation (894 pages so far) mostly reflects the necessary information for implementing proper two dimensional support for applicable cards. Supposedly, the three dimensional register information will be available some point next week.
I am by no means an expert at graphics driver implementations, but from what I have read, this seems to be fairly promising. One could certainly hope that it will be possible to make the applicable cards *less evil* as time moves along.
Anyways, I won't be making any purchase in the graphics card domain for the foreseeable future.
Keep on swimming :)
In one week (Sept 20) the first release candidate will be pushed out the door. I am expecting only a few changes between now and then.
One of the real big *Behind the Scenes* changes, has been with the package management system. If you have been following the development of the OS since 10.1, you will surely have heard that there have been numerous complaints with the system.
Primarily the complaints have been associated with the the integration of the red carpet technologies into the software management stack.
Essentially in 10.1 and 10.2, there were two package managers. The traditional yast stuff, and the newer red carpet stuff (zmd/rug). I personally blame a lot of the problems on the necessity to synchronize (and failure thereof) between the two technologies.
Anyways, with 10.3 looming in just under a month, the *new* package management stuff seems to have more or less hit its stride.
ZMD has been removed from the OpenSUSE distribution and the old yast and red carpet packaging stacks can finally be said to have a full grown healthy child. zypper. So far, I have no major complaints here at all, although some of the error messages are somewhat oblique.
Also in the news is that the people at AMD have released a good chunk of the specifications for the ATI R500 graphics chips. Currently the documentation (894 pages so far) mostly reflects the necessary information for implementing proper two dimensional support for applicable cards. Supposedly, the three dimensional register information will be available some point next week.
I am by no means an expert at graphics driver implementations, but from what I have read, this seems to be fairly promising. One could certainly hope that it will be possible to make the applicable cards *less evil* as time moves along.
Anyways, I won't be making any purchase in the graphics card domain for the foreseeable future.
Keep on swimming :)
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
My iriver clix gear - Oh the joy
So I recently gave away my iriver clix cradle because it was never really mine to begin with... Does that make sense? Anyways, whatever.
So last sunday I was moping around with no way to listen to music without an external set of speakers or headphones and feeling generally sorry for myself. To rectify it, I hopped onto eBay to search for a new cradle to call my own. Sure enough, I found someone in Canada selling one of these rare beauties and put a bid down on it. Not even a minute later, I discovered that this seller also had a matched FM Transmitter (AFT-200) up for auction as well. So I bid on it too!
Anyways, a few minutes ago, they both arrived safe and sound, and now I am relaxing with blissful tinny (is this a word?) music echoing around my apartment.
Thumbs up for the iriver clix, a great product.
Thought you should know.
-Ted
So last sunday I was moping around with no way to listen to music without an external set of speakers or headphones and feeling generally sorry for myself. To rectify it, I hopped onto eBay to search for a new cradle to call my own. Sure enough, I found someone in Canada selling one of these rare beauties and put a bid down on it. Not even a minute later, I discovered that this seller also had a matched FM Transmitter (AFT-200) up for auction as well. So I bid on it too!
Anyways, a few minutes ago, they both arrived safe and sound, and now I am relaxing with blissful tinny (is this a word?) music echoing around my apartment.
Thumbs up for the iriver clix, a great product.
Thought you should know.
-Ted
OpenSUSE 10.3 and mythTV and how to do it
I was recently passed a link as to how to install mythtv on OpenSUSE 10.3. As I migrate from my current SUSE Linux 10.1 setup to a shiny new 10.3 installation I will be submitting contributions to that page.
Come to think of it, I had better migrate to the schedules direct tv listing service pretty quickly here because I only have scheduling information left for 3 more days... eep!
-Ted
Come to think of it, I had better migrate to the schedules direct tv listing service pretty quickly here because I only have scheduling information left for 3 more days... eep!
-Ted
Sunday, August 12, 2007
openSUSE bug slashing weekend wraps up
So the opensuse bug slashing weekend has wrapped up. The original purpose of the exercise was to get a lot of community involvement into addressing persistent older defects in earlier editions of the distribution. However, since the release of opensuse 10.3 beta 1 was on friday, the weekend also focused on testing.
The builtin reporting abilities of bugzilla are unfortunately quite dismal so producing accurate reports on the number of bugs opened and closed is a little difficult. However, I estimate that approximately 200 new bugs were filed, and about 160 were closed against all products since 10.0. Pretty good if you ask me.
Hopefully we can do this again before the release of 10.3.
The builtin reporting abilities of bugzilla are unfortunately quite dismal so producing accurate reports on the number of bugs opened and closed is a little difficult. However, I estimate that approximately 200 new bugs were filed, and about 160 were closed against all products since 10.0. Pretty good if you ask me.
Hopefully we can do this again before the release of 10.3.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
How soon is too soon?
I have a small confession to make.
I am unfortunately one of those folks that rather likes new features in their software...
Since I have been developing httperf, I been trying to find the balance between modern and historical features that I should reliably be able to depend on.
The httperf tool was primarily written in the late 1990's and probably was developed against the GCC 2.7 or some version of EGCS, in conjunction with the HP C compiler. Obviously, things have moved quite a bit since those days, with the EGCS/GCC merge, and now the most recent release of GCC 4.2.1. Moreover the auto-tools have taken big steps since those times. New elegant features abound, and I am very much tempted to use them.
But should I?
While openSUSE doesn't mind the bleeding edge of gcc 4.2.1 for the upcoming 10.3 release, the OpenBSD project will be sticking with the gcc 3.3.x compiler for a while. Moreover, some prominent users of httperf are still using FreeBSD 4.x with gcc 2.95.x.
This puts me in a vaguely tough position. For one, I believe that more modern compiler features can dramatically improve httperf on a whole. But this is counter balanced with the need to not alienate existing users that are locked to an older platform for the time being.
So my decision? No change... Sort of.
For the time being I will commit to maintaining existing (working) code enclosed in conditional compilation flags to make sure existing users can still use the software. Along side with this I am developing new functionality which I will try to integrate into the old code base as feature compatibility permits.
Check out httperf cvs
-Ted
I am unfortunately one of those folks that rather likes new features in their software...
Since I have been developing httperf, I been trying to find the balance between modern and historical features that I should reliably be able to depend on.
The httperf tool was primarily written in the late 1990's and probably was developed against the GCC 2.7 or some version of EGCS, in conjunction with the HP C compiler. Obviously, things have moved quite a bit since those days, with the EGCS/GCC merge, and now the most recent release of GCC 4.2.1. Moreover the auto-tools have taken big steps since those times. New elegant features abound, and I am very much tempted to use them.
But should I?
While openSUSE doesn't mind the bleeding edge of gcc 4.2.1 for the upcoming 10.3 release, the OpenBSD project will be sticking with the gcc 3.3.x compiler for a while. Moreover, some prominent users of httperf are still using FreeBSD 4.x with gcc 2.95.x.
This puts me in a vaguely tough position. For one, I believe that more modern compiler features can dramatically improve httperf on a whole. But this is counter balanced with the need to not alienate existing users that are locked to an older platform for the time being.
So my decision? No change... Sort of.
For the time being I will commit to maintaining existing (working) code enclosed in conditional compilation flags to make sure existing users can still use the software. Along side with this I am developing new functionality which I will try to integrate into the old code base as feature compatibility permits.
Check out httperf cvs
-Ted
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