Well, boys and girls, it's another fun-filled blog/diary entry for moi- hey, I didn't take more than a couple of months from the last one this time (a definite improvement...)!

Well, guess what, I didn't lose the house- yet. Seems there's some legal angles that I hadn't exploited, so we're still here- for now. But, keeping it (and a few other things...) is contingent on my getting a new job or the current one getting the VC money. Why, you might ask, am I even putting up with these people? Because up until October of last year, I at least had health insurance (More on that one in a little bit...) and I was getting more money than unemployment would have paid for longer- it was just inconsistent. That, combined with this sudden and largely complete discontinuance for any hiring in the industry because of the Internet Bubble bursting, has kept me where I am. Having said all of this, there may be light at the end of the tunnel and it's not the oncoming train. It looks like in 5 or less business days, the VC's going to actually get us our bridge funds as an advance on the first installment of our multiple millions they're funding us. (Please note: I did indicate that it was a crapshoot in the last entry as to when- that was nearly TWO months ago. Waiting for VC's to get their collective act together sucks bigtime...) Couple that with the very real prospects of a new job elsewhere (I recently interviewed with a major corporation that was interested in doing embedded Linux related development- they seemed to be fairly interested in my working for them. I'm not counting my chickens, but it looks good from where I'm standing right at the moment...) and things are possibly looking up for a change.

If you don't have health insurance, you may want to go way, way out of your way to get it however you can possibly do so. At the end of last month, my wife was admitted on an emergency admit to the local hospital for extreme abdominal pains. 3 days in the hospital with nothing more than an IV so that her GI tract would settle down. Her last unemployment check saw to it that we were ineligible for any financial assistance from the county or state. The total bill so far: $10k and rising. Thankfully, we've worked out a solution to the bill and everything will end up okay in the end. Keep the bill in mind, though- you will not be able to work things out everytime like we did with this little visit and you'll be stuck trying to figure out how in the hell to pay it.

The little bit I've done on the Ballistics port has been checked in (and revised several times...). Progress is moving along but we're delayed by things like my trying to keep a house over my head, etc.

On the front of my open sourced projects, I will be submitting a patch to the current Utah-GLX developers to fix the DMA support issue that they have with RagePRO chips because of changes made to the XAA drivers in the 4.X XFree86 releases (They adjust the FIFO buffer size settings on the chip, which doesn't seem to impact normal MMIO operation, but totally breaks DMA operation- go figure...). I plan on conducting a few basic experiments to the current DRI code on certain chipsets to see if there's not a better way of handling the security of those chips. Also on the hit parade of things planned is some research into ways to provide accelerated indirect 3D rendering- preferably within the current XFree86 (or Xwin- depends on how that fork goes down actually...) framework if at all possible. There's chipsets that while absolute peak speed is possible with direct rendering, the securing of the pathway eats any performance gains with respect to the direct operation. There's also chipsets out there that don't have any DMA operation so they gain a lot less from direct rendering.