I know, I forgot to update ...several times. I've been preoccupied with work mostly, and unfortunately most of the stuff I've been preoccupied with is subject matter that I probably shouldn't post in public. Some things I can share, though.

Last Thursday a group of Microsoft interns took a tour of Valve Software's offices. You know, the makers of Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress, Portal, Counter-Strike, and Day of Defeat. Their offices happen to be in downtown Bellevue, Washington, right next door to one of Microsoft's office buildings. Valve has a bit of a history with Microsoft (cofounders Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington are former Microsoft employees), and of course we interns are huge fans of theirs, so they gave us a very nice tour.

Valve's offices are very well designed. The space was stripped bare and redone to suit their needs, so staircases hang from ceilings and go through holes drilled in the floor, giving the …

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I finally caved and bought some proper hosting for this site. I love running it out of my apartment, but the Internet connection I currently have is just too sketchy to support that (Clearwire is an awful ISP).

Enter Linode. I've known about them for a while now, and it was always in the back of my mind to get a small VPS and run the website right. I've done VPS hosting before, with a company called WestHost, but they were truly awful, so bad that now they outsource their VPS hosting to another company, VPS.net. I left them before that changeover happened though, because I couldn't take it anymore, and moved the site back to my apartment server.

The new virtual machine's name is nimbus.codewise.org. It's running Arch Linux, Apache 2.2, MySQL, and PHP 5.3.2, among other things. The virtual machine is hosted on a server in Dallas, Texas. It's got 512 MB of RAM allocated to it, 16GB of disk …

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poetry - Noun.
poetic - Adjective.
poetical - Adjective, and now you're a douchebag.

I'm not normally a grammar nazi, but every time I see this ending on a word, it makes me want to punch babies. YOUR babies. So please, think of the children, and stop doing this.

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I've basically spent this entire week trying to get accustomed to Windows development. And I mean that in two ways: first, I need to learn to write general Windows user-space applications, and then I need to learn about working with Windows' internals. Needless to say, this is a lot for someone who has never written a single Windows program. The environment is so much different from writing Unix applications, it's simply staggering.

The program I'm writing lives in a branch of the Windows build tree, and is intended to be built by the Windows build tools (I'm using Visual Studio to write and debug, but I have to drop to command line to invoke the build tool in its special environment). These tools are very complex and very unforgiving. Everything you write has to be perfect: warnings are treated as errors and halt the build process. It is also much less hesitant in issuing warnings; many common things are forbidden, such as constant loop conditions, and not referring to a …

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