wrfblog

Valve

2010-06-28T18:46:00-07:00

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 place a very utilitarian feel. The hallways have perforated metal plates hanging from them, from which artists attach concept art with magnets for others to critique. Except for a very small (less than 20) administrative staff, there are no offices. Product groups (called 'cabals') work together in large rooms with their workstations on wheels so they can reconfigure the spaces as needed.

We walked through the space of the Portal 2 cabal, who were having a mini-meeting (possibly about level design). They had all the workstations on one side of the room, and the other side had couches and larger desks and whiteboards. The lights were off and all illumination came through shaded windows. They covered up some of the whiteboards before we came in, but still showed us some things, notably some concept art for Portal 2's Chell, who looks older but still badass, and they had us vote for which of four Xbox cover art designs we liked best. On one wall I also spied what looked to be similar to the sentry guns in Portal, but black, and on legs.

Valve eschews offices for collective spaces because of the way the company is structured -- entirely without bosses or managers. Individual employees take up leadership helms as needed, but there are no titles -- everyone works on everything. This is why when you watch the credits roll on a Valve game, it simply says "Valve is:" and then lists the names of all Valve employees. Their thinking is simple: they've hired the best people, so they don't need to be managed. Everyone collaborates and decisions are made by the group.

They explained all this to us as we sat at a conference table made of solid cast iron in their meeting room called the "fishbowl", probably because one of its walls is formed of windows separating it from their lunch room. After talking about the company and its history and answering a bunch of our questions, they gave us Team Fortress 2 tshirts, and we sadly had to go back to work.

It was very classy of them to take time out of their day to show the bunch of us around and let us peek at their inner-workings. Even though I have zero interest in working on video games at this time, I'm extremely impressed with Valve and I think it would be pretty close to the coolest thing in the world to work there.

Linode Hosting

2010-06-16T15:54:00-07:00

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 space, and can push 200GB of data per month. Not bad for 20 bucks a month!

For those not familiar, VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It's just like running your own box, where you have control over everything, from the operating system, to the software installed, to the user accounts. The only difference is that instead of being a physical machine, it's a virtual machine that shares hardware with other customers, so it's a lot cheaper than dedicated hosting. As long as you don't need the performance of a dedicated server box (and few do), a VPS is just as good. Compare this to shared hosting, which is very cheap, but you don't have much control over the server software or operating system. You can usually only access the server through a web-based control panel. With a VPS or dedicated hosting, you can connect straight to the machine's console to watch boot-up messages or open a terminal session.

The first thing I've migrated over is Codewise Blogs. If you were using http://alt.codewise.org:8080/blogs.codewise.org/wrf/ to access the site before, you can trim that down to http://blogs.codewise.org/wrf/ again. The old address will still work, but it will redirect you with HTTP 301 Moved Permanantly. If you get an "infinite redirect" error, it's just because the new DNS records for blogs.codewise.org haven't propogated to your location yet. Be patient; it shouldn't take more than a few hours.

Pet Peeve: the redundant -ic-al ending

2010-06-14T19:00:58-07:00

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.

Win

2010-06-02T09:31:42-07:00

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Brainfeeding

2010-05-28T16:11:31-07:00

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 formal argument for a function. If you need to do these things, there are arcane declarations you can put in your code to placate the compiler. There's even a background daemon that constantly checks your code for errors while you write it, before you even compile it.

Another thing to get used to is the fact that the build system doesn't use traditional Makefiles. Instead, directories have a "dirs" file that tells the system what directories to recurse into, and "sources" files with lots of macro declarations from which the build tools figure out what needs to be done. The tools use a lot of magic to figure out what to recompile and when... none of it has to be written into the sources files as you would with a makefile -- this part is very cool.

Luckily, I have a lot of documentation to refer to while learning this. Microsoft has been extremely methodical and thorough in documentation: every API, every file, every function has useful well-written comments adorning it. This is great, because I have access to the entire Windows source tree as well as all accompanying tools. A quick use of the search tool can always find me the sources to refer to.

There's also traditional documentation, but this can be a bit harder to find... the MS intranet is vast and fragmented. Once someone points me in the right direction, though, there's usually a small mountain of resources to use.

My brain does hurt though. I can only read so much before it becomes a wall of opaque text. Next week I hope to dive in and just start writing some code. That should be a pleasant change of pace, and I think I'll pick things up a bit faster that way.

First Days in Redmond

2010-05-18T17:21:06-07:00

Now that I have a functioning workstation in my office, I'll start by saying a bit about my environs here on the lovely Microsoft Redmond campus.

First of all, what a lovely workstation it is. Quad-core Xeon, 8 gigs of RAM, magnificent 24" 1920x1200 LCD, the works. No more waiting ten minutes for a recompile or being brought to a crawl by running three apps at once. Joy!

Second, YES, an actual office, with an actual door! No more half-desk in an intern pit. It's a shared office (not shared with anybody yet, but a second intern will be arriving shortly), and of course not a window office, but it is a nice office.

When I came in there was a sign on the door that said "ACDC Dev Interns", and today I learned that "ACDC" means Application Compatibility and Device Compatibility, which is my working group. It exists within a larger group called ESC, which stands for Engineering System & Compatibility, and that is within the general Windows core group.

One of the things I got done today was replacing that handwritten sign on the door with something a little better: a printout of the AC/DC heavy metal logo with lightning behind it, and "DEV INTERNS" below that in 200pt Impact font. Much better.

Other than that, I got my dev workstation set up with necessary software (we have access to every version of every MS product ever released, and a few unreleased ones too), and explored the extensive company intranet.

Lunch was some very good Indian food from the cafeteria in our building -- chicken, rice and spicy curry sauce and another green sauce that I couldn't identify, but it was delicious. I'm going to miss the 3 weekly free lunches at Novarra, though, even if the food quality is better here, it costs moneys.

I also miss the epic coffee selection that I had at Novarra. There they had at least 30 kinds of coffee in little single-serve cups ready for brewing. Here it's just Starbucks regular, and Starbucks decaf, and they both suck. Seriously, in Seattle, the coffee capital of the world, this is all they have? Guess I'll just stick to cans of pop.

I'm just starting to get brought up to speed on the activities of my group here at Microsoft, and over the course of my 12 weeks here I'll have to complete a number of well-defined goals, which I will be setting for myself shortly. But that's for another post.

Temporary (?) Server Roadblock

2010-05-17T23:31:15-07:00

Now, I was going to make a post about arriving in Seattle and my first day at Microsoft, but something else has been holding my attention.

I've moved into an apartment which already has an Internet connection all set up, but unfortunately, the ISP is Clearwire, and they are very bad. The main problem right now is that they block port 80, which is what all web servers run on by default. So if I am to run a web server from my apartment like before, I can't run it on the default port, and you can't just go to http://blogs.codewise.org/ anymore; you need to type the domain name, followed by a colon, followed by whatever goofy port I choose. It's annoying for you and me.

I came up with two solutions for the problem, both of which rely on an external server I use from time to time: aeflex.codewise.org:

Have the domain point to aeflex, and use it as a proxy. When requests for www.codewise.org come in, they go to aeflex on port 80, and it talks privately to my server, smokey, on port 8080, and relays the results of that conversation.

This is bad because it consumes twice the bandwidth as normal and makes it very slow.

Have the domain point to aeflex, and have it point you to smokey on the correct port. When requests for codewise.org come in, they go to aeflex on port 80, and it redirects users to smokey on port 8080, then they talk to smokey on port 8080 and everything proceeds as "normal".

This is bad because any time a link refers to the full URL without the port number, browsers have to be redirected again. This wouldn't be a huge issue except that if the post URL for a HTML form is one of these full URLs, the post data will get sent to aeflex instead of smokey, and things will break.

I tried the first one first, since it's the most transparent to users, and the performance was unacceptable. That, and the fact that aeflex was a gift to me, makes me not want to abuse its currently unlimited bandwidth cap. I'm trying out the second fix now, and fixing the problems as I find them. One such fix was required to make Codewise Blogs work, because it uses absolute URLs everywhere, so form data would get lost. It's been reconfigured to know about the new URL.

So for at least a little while now, all of codewise.org will redirect to alt.codewise.org:8080 which is an alias to smokey. Let me know if you have any problems with the site.

New Idea: Post Regularly

2010-05-05T14:22:33-07:00

Pat Swanson, a good friend and former coworker at Novarra, suggested that I start doing regular blogging now that I'm going to be 2,000 miles from most of my friends and doing some pretty interesting things, and I think it's a fantastic idea.

So starting today, I'm going to endeavor to make at least weekly posts to this site.

Backstory: in a sequence of events that began this January with a resumé seminar at UIC, I've been hired as a summer intern at Microsoft. Next Monday, I'll be leaving Chicago and driving my car 2,078 out to Seattle, Washington so I can work as a software developer on Microsoft Windows. I'll be there for three months, and then I'm coming back to Chicago for my last semester as an undergrad at UIC. Yesterday was my last day at Novarra, where I was an intern software developer on their BREW mobile web browser product. I was working on their next version of the browser for our customer Verizon Wireless.

Asgard

2010-02-11T09:32:58-08:00

The new machine is complete!

Asgard:

Intel Core i7 920, overclocked to 3500 MHz
EVGA X58 SLI LE motherboard
BFG GeForce GTX 275 OC video card
6GB DDR3-1600 7-7-7-20 Corsair RAM
30GB Patriot SSD
3x 500GB Seagate 7200RPM drives in RAID 5
Cooler Master V8 CPU cooler
750W Antec power supply
Cooler Master ATCS 840 aluminum full tower case

And then, just for giggles (and because they were on sale) I got a new monitor and stereo:

Hanns-G 25.4" 1920x1080 LCD
Polk Audio Monitor 30 bookshelf speakers
Polk Audio 10" subwoofer

This machine is fast like woah. This is the most top-of-the-line machine I've ever owned, and damn it feels good to be able to run literally any game at full resolution with all the goodies turned on. I can run Lightroom, Photoshop, Chrome with a hundred tabs open, and watch blu-ray resolution video all at the same time with no degradation in response time. SIIIIIIIICK.

PHOTOS:

New Skin, New Classes

2010-01-26T01:39:49-08:00

Yeah, new skin. Same layout as the old skin but not red, and not fixed-width font. I'm not sure I like this better, but it does have some nice improvements.

So, a new semester is upon me. With work and all, I'm taking a lighter courseload -- just 14 hours of classes:

CS 440: Software Engineering I
CS 473: Compiler Design
ECON 121: Macroeconomics
EAES 101: Intro to Earth Science

CS 440 is more about diagrams and documentation than programming, which might suck. Other than that, it's like CS 340, but in groups. Same prof even (John Bell for those who know). One big project that matures over the semester. When I took 340, I ended up with a 6000 line Java and C++ adventure game program, which subsequently went on my resume and helped me get my current job.

CS 473 is what I'm really looking forward to. I have grand plans to develop a groundbreaking C compiler with super secret technology of my own design, so this class will provide me with the necessary knowledge to do hard-core compiler work (hopefully). I'm already learning how to do parsing properly, and it's been an interesting exercise to thoroughly analyze the skin parsing code for this site, which I wrote in high school when I knew nothing about formal parsing theory, and see what I got right. Surprisingly, I got quite a bit of it right. w00t!

EAES 101 is about rocks and stuff. Sleepytime. Actually, we got into global weather patterns today, which was pretty interesting. But mostly this class is about rocks, so I struggle to stay awake. However, it has possibly the easiest lab section ever, and it fulfills my lab sci requirement, so SCORE.

ECON 121 is turning out to be a fascinating class. The professor is one of the most enthusiastic teachers I've ever had, which is very good because our textbook and the subject matter in general are quite dry. I'm really getting into this course. Who knows, maybe I'll learn enough to become a brilliant economist and make a killing in the stock market. Yeah right. Very useful knowledge nonetheless.

That's about all I've got. Things at work are mostly super-secret right now, so I won't broach that subject, but I'll just say that I'm having a good amount of fun, so Good Times.

_WRF