Work
Offers, offers, offers. Do I stay, or do I go? Well, the
short answer is that until I see a proper offer, I
keep doing what I'm doing. Money, terms, conditions, and
work details. Company A's offer is attractive, but their HR
people are veritably cthonic and seem to need to be pushed
every step just to stay on the right page. Company B wishes
me good luck and has bailed out of the bidding (as far as I
know). Company C is dragging it's feet a little and may yet
make an offer.
Exult
And now we are seven. Ryan Nunn joined us, and has been
doing wonders with xmidi->midi conversion, and mt32->general
midi conversion. Sterling work.
I've implemented my audio streams, and they've largely blown
up in my face. They work so very well, except that
there seems to be some bizarre memory corruption. Maybe the
mutex lock() call is non-blocking. That might be a cause.
Must check return value more closely.
Jeff is working on finalising barges (wagons, ships, magic
carpet, etc). If I can fix the audio streams, and we can get
sound-effects in there, which looks like a real possibility
then we'll be feature-complete on the next release. Wooo!
We've crept back up onto the front page of Sourceforge's
Most Active list, just below FreeCraft. Working on this
project is so much fun, that I don't really care
either way. I just wish I had more time to do it. An hour or
two over my morning coffee satisfyeth me not so much.
/dev/urandom
Xfree86 4.0.1 debian packaging is started, I am told. I
salivate with anticipation.
Myself and Paul are corrupting Justin to the ways of ADOM (Good lord, ADOM's going
commercial?? Eek! Well...good luck to them,
anyways)
"X must die. Linux is shoddy" - Maybe. But it's what we have
at the moment. Poorly engineered, buggy, badly designed
operating systems and UI's are the norm. I daresay they will
all improve, regardless of their commercial or free status.
We all drive each-other. And militance is everywhere. Things
get louder as they pass into and out of the fringes of
mainstream. The noise will come from other parts of the
field as things continue to jockey position in the public
mind. Shrug This too shall pass. What operating
system will you be using in 40 years? Whatever it's
name is, it won't much resemble what we've got now, I
figure.
DVD - Hmm. I should have gotten a DVD ROM before January 1,
it would seem. Word is they're all internally region-locked,
and (of course) half the stuff I want to play is only
manufactured in other regions. Grump. I don't doubt that
somewhere in Australia there are units being sold that
aren't internally region-locked. When I find one, I'll buy
one. Until then, I think I can miss the scene.
Broadcasting - Our Minister for corporate communications
puppetry, Richard I-can-bore-the-socks-off-a-stone Alston,
as a followup to the internet censorhip act, would
apparently like to have the ABA class streaming audio and
video as 'broadcasting' and require providers of same to
have a broadcasting license (and no, you can't have
a broadcasting license, we're not making any more for the
next 6 or 8 years). Quite whose tune he's dancing to today
is a good question, though just occasionally he is able to
have stupid ideas of his own. This could be one of them.
Game developers in Oz appear to be having trouble getting
and keeping their staff. This is apparently attributed to
the skill-drain (which is, I understand it the new term for
brain-drain). It's not unique to their industry...apparently
they have no idea why perfectly good coders would go to work
for other companies that treat them and pay them like human
beings, when they could stay on and get treated like scum at
poor pay. Maybe they'll learn.
A little ranty today. Maybe that's a good thing. Not enough
sleep, and low-grade sleep at that. Time for more coffee.