Well, It's the beginning of another month. Things are still a little tight, but the light at the end of the tunnel ISN'T an oncoming train.
Ballistics:
One bug left. Not a show-stopper by any means, but we'd like to get that one cleaned before going gold- that insistence on quality sort of thing (Especially since it took as long as it has to get out the door...). It's nothing that is going to have us NOT ship at this point, but we're being picky at this point about it. Michael's got another nice game that is about to go out the door (Many will want this one- honestly... It's dead cool.) so there's a couple of weeks delay before we get serious about taking it to the duplicators for release- so I'm taking the time to zoom the last known issue and to evaluate the possibilities for PowerPC and AMD64 ports. They probably won't be included in the main CD and would be a follow-on installer of some sort- don't know how Michael will want to do it, but if we get a port going, I'll announce it here and probably in a few of the other venues.
It's nearly there, gang, honest. The upshot of all this is that Bandits WON'T take anywhere near as long, and we ended up with some tools that will be properly Open Sourced once we get them much closer to something usable by someone other than LGP.
NetEffect:
Not much to say (Covered by NDA, afterall... :-) other than it's working at paying the bills incurred over the period resulting from Nexa leaving me high and dry. They're tickled with me as best as I can tell- I'm getting access to hardware to test the stuff I've been working on tomorrow sometime. Three weeks, and I'm already where they expected me to be in about two months' time- that's not an assessment of what they thought of my abilities, that was an honest assessment of the amount of work. Doing 10-12 hour days (Overtime on contract pay is a good motivator, no?) will do that for you. I've got about another 2-3 weeks or so of the code crush before it lightens up a little for me and I get it code complete for the current hardware. Besides, they're making things I'll need if Coollogic gets it's funding and I'm getting paid to write code that I'd have had to contract out for if they weren't doing it right now- not too bad. (Did I say "if" there? I really meant "WHEN".)
Coollogic:
Major international contract that is expected to be closing all the way tomorrow. Can't say more on that one, but the work really begins closer to the ending point of the NetEffect work. We'll need interconnect hardware for the aggregation clusters, etc. NetEffect, if their silicon's decently stable (and it looks to be so far...) it's the front-runner for that right now. Funding is purportedly about to start the final stages at any moment- and I've seen enough to believe that this is very likely to be the case.
I'll get excited when I see that first draw-down in the operating account and I've drawn part of my back pay, but it's beginning to actually look good- and not in the wishful thinking sort of way. I just wish I'd not paid 5+ years of pain to get there.