Phew. It's been a long time since the previous entry. Let's see if I can't make up for it.

Got a job. It seems nice enough, although I've been spending my working hours mostly on "the premises of the client", whatever that means. Forgot to check the employer for particular worthiness in the area of patent policy, but it doesn't seem that software patents are in any way central to anything they (we?) are doing. And having money under a rock somewhere is certainly very nice.

The laptop mentioned in the previous entry (an IBM 560Z) is actually pretty good. The only minor complaint is that I'm getting slightly worried over the fact that the fan in the left edge of the "keyboard part" only seems to function during early startup, i.e. after the machine starts to run LILO it stops and doesn't start again, ever. I've only had the keyboard get warm a couple of times, so this probably isn't all that significant. I'm slightly more worried that the early startup process doesn't display the "press F2 to enter setup" or whatever it was in the top edge of the screen like it used to (or am I misremembering things again?).

As for q:laruisku, I wrote a "DisplayKit" abstraction so that the program can select between a SDL framebuffer implementation of certain 2D drawing primitives and an OpenGL wrapper. This seems to be working pretty well this far, although I feel that the SDL framebuffer impl could have better low-level blitting loops... then again, I likely shouldn't pay so much attention to their particular efficiency at this stage of the project. Once I actually get something resembling a rocket game on the screen, I'll make the first source release, after all these years. "Release early", indeed.

Also, I took a look at the XPLC component framework thing. Apart from the somewhat disgusting IInterfaceNamingStyle (also the functionNamingStyle), I think it might be something worth keeping an eye out for. Assuming that the virtual method call ABI in G++ doesn't suddendly change, of course...

On the "life" side, since the last diary entry I tested for the 6. kyu grade at our Aikido dojo, exactly 3 months after I started training there. Looking back, I wasn't by far as nervous about it as I am about my upcoming 5. kyu test... I'm still finding it to be much fun, though, and my ukemis are getting such that I barely feel like I've been doing any when I get back home :-)