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– Pet Peeve: the redundant -ic-al ending
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| Valve |
| Mon June 28th, 2010 at 6:46 PM PDT |
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.
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| Linode Hosting |
| Wed June 16th, 2010 at 3:54 PM PDT |
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.
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| Pet Peeve: the redundant -ic-al ending |
| Mon June 14th, 2010 at 7:00 PM PDT |
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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| Win |
| Wed June 2nd, 2010 at 9:31 AM PDT |
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;rr;:,..,:. TM |
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| Brainfeeding |
| Fri May 28th, 2010 at 4:11 PM PDT |
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.
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| Shoutbox |
Anonymous:
lonely shoutbox :(
Mon April 7th, 2008 at 5:09 PM PDT
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Anonymous:
hello
Mon April 7th, 2008 at 5:12 PM PDT
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Anonymous:
o hai
Mon April 28th, 2008 at 12:31 PM PDT
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CHIZUBAGA:
I CAN HAZ CHIZUBAGA!!!!!!!
Wed January 20th, 2010 at 12:58 PM PST
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Not Jeremy:
o hai remember when i threw hot sauz in yer eye. lulz
Thu January 28th, 2010 at 11:28 AM PST
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JEREMY:
MOAR NAPKINS DURR HURR
Thu February 11th, 2010 at 9:33 AM PST
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Shoutbox:
I wuz on a DAtZ.. haffing chizubaga!! Om nom nom nom!!
Wed May 26th, 2010 at 1:04 PM PDT
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Totally not anyone you know:
Problem?
Thu June 3rd, 2010 at 2:09 PM PDT
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Random Randomstein:
Shitpickle.
Fri June 11th, 2010 at 6:04 PM PDT
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Blogging since March 17th, 2008.
First post was 2 years, 173 days, 14 hours, 2 minutes and 2 seconds ago.
31 posts, 12 comments in total.
Average 1 blog post every 29.13 days.
Average 0.39 comments per post.
Comments under 8 distinct names.
25% of comments use tripcodes.
9 shoutbox entries.
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