Finally the long awaited Personal.SethEden.com Sub-domain is online!

Basically at this point the page is only a template for other topics of interest on the same sub-domain. I haven’t done any work yet on any of these menu links yet so all the links except the one back here to the blog are dead. I will be working my way down the list adding them as I get them done. Enjoy and feel free to let me know what you think of the site!

If you haven’t already noticed, I’ve posted all the new site graphics that I made while I was in Thailand. This comes with a special thanks to my girl friend for taking the time to upload all the files from her laptop since they didn’t burn properly on the DVD I made just before my departure. I couldn’t have done it without you Mahal!

Hope you like it, I do.

Cheers

Seth

Well the game engine has been coming along nicely. I’ve been working with a guy named Charles and we’ve developed some really cool core engine components so far. Up to this point it’s been nothing but the core windows components and basic support for the DirectX SDK API.

I wanted to have full support for dynamically switching between full screen and windowed mode while in the game. So we got that feature running, also there was some other related features to being in full screen and clicking on some other window in the event that the user has multiple monitors but the game is only active on one monitor. Similarly the game engine must also handle an ALT+TAB out to another application or window, and from windowed mode the game should pause rendering when the game is minimized or placed in the background.

We got it to pause the game rendering but the game itself is still executing and eating up the CPU. When the game engine is not active of course it should not be eating CPU power because the user might have to do something important like writing a blog post, or responding to some important e-mail or making a quick edit on some web page. Since most video games require the full attention of the computer hardware games are developed with a very high priority setting for executing on the CPU. Just because the rendering is paused doesn’t mean the priority level has changed so we still need to implement a system that will drop the priority level thus not requiring large amounts of CPU time to do nothing when the user wants to work on something else for a bit, or step out for a quick lunch between levels or whatever.

In my day job I work work as a government contractor for the Dept. of Revenue. I’ve been working really hard now for 10 months to develop a fully integrated Sales & Use Tax Calculator Audit Management System with a back-end TeraData Database Management System driving the SQL system. This is for the State of Missouri.

Last month they finally signed the change request document that says I get to move forward developing and testing all the key changes they wanted to make from the system I had developed up to that point.

Basically the tax calculation system I designed to manage the loading of data was designed to load using one method, and the Missouri Dept. of Revenue decided they wanted to change the way the data is loaded requiring a complete end-to-end redesign of the loading system. I worked really hard all week long to try and find a way around this debacle!

To make a long story short I thought I would never get the whole thing pulled together! I even went so far as to say that the entire concept of revamping the design was completely out of line, and nearly refused to develop it since doing so would put me to blame when it didn’t work or cost to much time to maintain. I really believe that it is important to stick up for proper design considerations that can affect the cost of development for the project within the company. I would hope that others see that as a strong point when the alternative is the repression of open minded design considerations. In the end I can say with pride that it actually worked! Furthermore it worked quite well, well enough for me to be proud of my work with is all that matters in the end!

Apparently my boss knows something that I don’t, that I must be better at programming software then I think. Don’t get me wrong, I think I’m pretty darn good!! But now, after this, I’m starting to think that he might be right! Let me tell you that is really an amazing thing for someone to believe in you that much after you’ve come from the situation that I’ve come from. For instance most people probably wouldn’t believe that I was told I was so stupid that I would never finish grade school. I was also told I would never finish high school, and I was told by many professors at several universities that I was to stupid to ever graduate from college, also that even if I did happen to graduate from college I would never be able to compete in the professional market place.

I don’t mean to get a big head or anything, they just keep putting stuff on my desk that I think I’ll never get to work, and then I get it to work in record time and its amazing! Like I’ve got some kind of magic fingers or something. I have nothing else to say…because it’s beyond my understanding…

Seth

Current mood: accomplished
Category: Jobs, Work, Careers

Well here we are again. After that last spat of time off while the company I am working for was busy negotiatin contracts with the Dept. of Rev. I had 7 weeks off work. It was nice because I got TONS of stuff done that I desperately needed to finish. However, at the same time I now have 2 months with only minimal pay.

To make up the difference I just landed a retail holiday night job at the local Circuit City here in Burnsville. So it looks like I’ll be working 80-90 hour per week for the next two months since I fly to Manila for 2 weeks and on to Bangkok for 3 more weeks after that right at the start of the new year.

I’ve also got a series of operations to have done between now and then! So needless to say I’m going to be, *Just a little* busy!!! *Understatement of the Century*

Well now to the topic at hand, last week I was contacted by a career agent that I posted my resume on a long time ago. (Like 2 years ago, just after college graduation)

The job

Current mood: chipper
Category: Jobs, Work, Careers

Ok, so I screwed up, it wasn’t just the fault of Nero. The main problem was the Memorex disks, which….Kids cover your ears….suck donkey ba11$!!!

I found this out after trying that other piece of software I mentioned earlier also with the Memorex disks and it still failed! So I tried Nero again with a Verbatium disk and it worked perfectly. That was when I wrote a scathing letter to the Memorex tech support about the quality of their Dual Layer DVD’s and I gave them all the specs of my system, including the drivers I’m using. The make and model of my DVD burners, and all the other jazz that matters.

They sent an immediate reply offering to replace the Disks, and I couldn’t help but think, “Well that’s nice of them, but I don’t want to replace disks that don’t work with more disks that don’t work.” So I told them off, and took the spindle back to Best Buy and got my refund through them. That’s when I got some Sony Dual Layer DVD’s and some TDK Dual Layer DVD’s. I’ve been testing the Sony DVD’s and I got through a pack of 15 with only one failure, I’m on the last disk now, not sure if it will fail or not.

I will test the TDK’s next. We’ll see what happens….But don’t hold your breath.

On the note of Nero, I still have problems with it, since every time the DVD does fail to burn, Nero will promptly go back and attempt to start the burning process over again, in the process freezing out every other application running in windows. This attempt to reburn the DVD is of course doomed to failure while it sits there like a dumb-shit wondering…”I think I can, I think I can…”. I’ve seen it waste an extra 45 minutes trying to reburn the DVD that just failed. Seems someone was smart the day they programmed that little feature.

Current mood: angry
Category: Jobs, Work, Careers

I’m not sure what it is, but something must be wrong with me this week! Seems everything just falls appart all at once. I just hate it when that happens esspecially after dumping so much money into everything nice and new!

I go to get one of those new halogen light bulbs that are supposed to last for ever! I start to screw it into the light socket and bang, it’s dead before I can even get it tested.

That by itself didn’t make me mad, I’m just like, ok next…

So I’ve been working on this computer for around 14 months getting my personal stuff organized and converted to digital formats like mp3 audio, mpeg4 video with VBR audio, and scanning all of the artwork that I’ve made since I was a little kid. Including converting all my Audio tapes to wave files, editing them into individual tracks, remastering them by removing the background hiss so they will again be close to CD quality, then compressing it to mp3 audio.

With all this junk on my hard drive now and fully organized it’s time to back it all up to make sure that all my hard work is not pointless, that I will always have access to these materials from the earlier part of my life in a tight compact electronic format. It means burning all this data onto Dual Layer DVD’s since that’s the best format to use these days for long term storage and large volume backups of digital data.

I’ve burned about 12 of these DVD’s with just mp3’s at 8 gigs each. Actually it was only 4 DVD’s but I burn 3 copies of each after learning the hard way that 1 backup or even 2 backups isn’t always enough to make certain that the data is fully recoverable after several years have gone by. Well today I started to burn the last DVD and it failed to verify. Keep in mind that it takes about an hour and 10 minutes to burn each DVD and then verify all the data on that DVD to make sure it’s not corrupted. So that’s one hour of time in the toilet. So I figure it must just be the physical disk wasn’t any good so I start another one the same thing, another coaster, and another coaster and another coaster. After about 9 of these I’m really starting to get irritated because only one of them actually worked. Keep in mind that these disks also cost money, about $100 for 50 of them.

So finally I really got mad and I decided to stop trying this with Nero and use the built in Windows burner, trouble with that is that the built in Windows disk writer doesn’t support very large format disk burning like DVD’s. Someone at Microsoft…as usual only had enough foresight to program Windows such that it would only burn CD’s of a comparable storage capacity of around 700mb, not 8 gigs! So when I went to actually write the DVD, windows gives a pop-up that says please insert a valid CD for the burning to proceed. The disk you have entered is not a valid format. Even though it has a capacity of 8 gigs, not 700mb.

Yet another example of just how stupid Microsoft is!

So I grabbed another software package, I think it’s called ImgBurn, I built the ISO with Nero, and I’m trying to burn the image file with this other software my friend suggested that I use. It’s working so far, but then again Nero got this far too. It’s the verification that it fails on.

After further examination with the built in windows burner software it was consistantly failing when I would try to drag and drop some of the individual folders over to the drive for burning for no apparent reason at all. The error messages are never very imformative, even for a software engineer. If some of these guys who actually write software would write informative error messages the world would be so much more productive! Now the guys who write GNU tend to do it correctly, why can’t the guys who write GNU software work for Microsoft and teach them how it’s done?!

So this is what I have to say about Nero….

Nero-Shmero

and I would like to add MicroSUCK!….you don’t suck….you blow!

Cheers

Seth

Current mood: complacent

Wow!!! I don’t know what to say, but just WOW!!!!

The last 5 months have been totally crazy! After 6 months of no job and building my new computer and organizing all my CD’s and DVD’s onto the new Dual Layer DVD

Current mood: accomplished
Category: Jobs, Work, Careers

If you’ve been reading any of my blogs you know how rough of a time I’ve been having the last 2 years. All this time I’ve been dreaming of what I would do for a professional online portfolio if I ever had the chance to make one. Well here it is, I’ve finally *started* to work on it. I’m really proud of it so far and its just starting to come together. The site itself is up to about 200mb and I’ve got about 3gigs planned for it, maybe more. So there will be scads of example work and projects that I’ve been involved with, plus gords of personal photos stories, adventures, and other pieces of history from my life.

You can watch it take shape over the months here:

http://SethEden.com

I’m working to switch servers and hopefully soon I’ll have the site at a stronger level. There is LOTS of stuff to post! And plenty of new graphics to develop for the site. So it may look simple now but please just be patient, it all takes time.

On a more pressing note, I did finally get the major initial portions of my FabLab project done at FabCon today! I’ve been making so much progress lately that I’m having a hard time getting my boss to keep up with my requests for meetings, and development support. I finally had to just ask for a digital camera so I could go out and take photos of some of the panels for texture mapping on the virtual wall panel objects. We have a sample wall out by the parking lot. So I’ll probably go take photos of that tomarrow, and work to build a larger library of materials in my application.

My program also needs a great deal of testing, I’ve done all the testing I can do within a normal development life cycle. At this point it needs to be tested

The last of my hair
Current mood: sad

Right then,

So I was working on my latest program at my new job. I called it Fab-Lab, a Lab for doing graphics for a company called Fab-Con. It’s actually just a play on words, because they have another custom application called Fab-CAD that works with AutoCAD.

Anyways, I’ve been having this problem the last few days, and it’s my own fault, partly because of how I decided to design the software. The program outlines these pre-fabricated wall panels in a building drawing, and builds a roof segment. Well I decided to break the process into classes and class objects to make use of powerful Object Oriented Programming Techniques, like Class Inheritance, and encapsulation, and cool things like that, that you generally only truely learn about if you take a proper college course on the subject.