Older blog entries for steveh (starting at number 2)

Rant about the weather

Damn it's cold here. I'm sure there are other places in the US that get colder, but 1) I'm not used to it and 2) the stupid banks here won't lend me money for a car so I have to cycle to work in the snow. Apparently, because I have an H-1B visa they think I'm going to take the money and run back to Ireland. I also haven't managed to get a credit card yet.

Boulder is usually a lovely place to cycle round, they have cycle paths away from the traffic that follow the creeks that run through the town. But when the paths are covered in snow and ice and you are worried about sliding off into the creek, it's not so enjoyable.

Still, lots of fresh air and exercise can't be bad.

Work

Getting back into 3dwm development quite nicely.

My girlfriend was unable to find work in the US (legally) so she had to go back to Ireland. I miss her, especially today with it being Valentines day.

It does mean though that I have a lot of free time which I'm using to hack on 3dwm.

Yesterday I picked up a copy of the book The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the New Economy. I've only got about a 1/4 through it but already I want to work on 3dwm (and DRI and the linux kernel) full time. It raises some very intersting questions about our lives today. We are shaped by the work we do for someone else to elevate our social standing. It wasn't always like this, will the day come again when we are free to do what we are passionate about, in the timeframe we are comfortable with and be rewarded for our efforts? This is a very interesting book, I highly recommend it.

Work on 3dwm is still slow at the moment, but I am determined to find more time to work on it.

FINALLY! I have dsl! 28.8 dialup was getting really tiresome. The hookup took longer than it should have due to either Qwest's incompetence or the fact it was the Christmas holidays. Still, I have it now and I'm impressed, the Cisco 675 modem/router is pretty cool.

So, as this is my first diary entry I'll write a bit about what I've been doing recently. Up until Aug 2000 I was working for 3dfx in Dallas, then I moved back to my home town of Belfast, N. Ireland before leaving the company in Oct. Trajically since then 3dfx had to close it's doors and sell what it could to nVidia. The engineers who worked there are extremely talented people and fortunatley a lot of them have found work either at nVidia or elsewhere. Some are still looking though, so drop me a line if you are recruiting and I'll put you in touch with them. Although I have respect for nVidia and they deserve every success I'm sorry to see 3dfx go.

In Nov I moved to Boulder, CO. Getting settled in has occupied all my spare time meaning I haven't been able to do any 3dwm development since I left Belfast, however this is about to change. Now I have decent internet access I'll be setting up my development machine and get back to hacking. nickelm and I have agreed to move the texture loading/decoding from the server to the client to make the interface cleaner. Now the server will only accept textures in one (TBD) format, and it is the client's responsibility to handle the various image formats with the help of libNobel++. This sounds like a good place to pick up development again after such a long break.

On an unrelated note I was interested to learn from gman that Sun's GNOME development team is in Ireland... cool :)

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