Just a small update today. My job is going well. I finally am feeling comfortable in the position and feel like I am contributing towards the cause. I just laid out enough tasks to keep me busy till June. We are brining on a GUI programmer who will be writing a Windows front-end for all of the tools and engine work I will be doing. We are going to try using C-sharp in the .NET framework, because I have heard that this is the best way to produce highly sophisticated Windows user interfaces in a very rapid fashion.
So far, I remain extremely unimpressed by .NET. It may be great for Windows GUI developers, but if you are an old school low-level programmer it's nothing but a monsterrous beast that gets in the way. I was using Visual Studio 6 before, but under .NET my entire machine goes down to a crawl. I only have a 2.8ghz P4 with 2 gigabytes of ram; so why should I expect the compiler to run?
I really want to be able to do some work from home, so today I broke down and bought a desktop machine I can do development on. I bought one of those Sony Vio things. I also bought a wireless network card, a monitor, and an all-in-one copier, scanner, printer. All told it was about $1200 *AFTER REBATE*! I literally have to send in 9 separate rebates to get over $500 back. What a huge pain in the ass. The guy at the store said they offer the rebates because lots of people don't actually bother to send them in, or don't send them in correctly; and it allows the manufacturers to dump products for less than it cost to manufacture them.
The machine has an Intel P4 with hyper-threading. Hyper-threading is a new processor that actually contains two processors on one chip. You can really notice the improved performance when trying to switch between multiple applications. All I have to do is put some more RAM in my machine and it will work out very well.
Tonight my son Alex is having his 11th birthday party and has a bunch of friends over. Tomorrow we are going to the neighbors to watch the Super Bowl. There is supposed to be a big snowstorm tomorrow and, if it happens, I will be able to work from home with my new machine.
That's all the news that's fit to print. More when something compelling happens in my life.
So far, I remain extremely unimpressed by .NET. It may be great for Windows GUI developers, but if you are an old school low-level programmer it's nothing but a monsterrous beast that gets in the way. I was using Visual Studio 6 before, but under .NET my entire machine goes down to a crawl. I only have a 2.8ghz P4 with 2 gigabytes of ram; so why should I expect the compiler to run?
I really want to be able to do some work from home, so today I broke down and bought a desktop machine I can do development on. I bought one of those Sony Vio things. I also bought a wireless network card, a monitor, and an all-in-one copier, scanner, printer. All told it was about $1200 *AFTER REBATE*! I literally have to send in 9 separate rebates to get over $500 back. What a huge pain in the ass. The guy at the store said they offer the rebates because lots of people don't actually bother to send them in, or don't send them in correctly; and it allows the manufacturers to dump products for less than it cost to manufacture them.
The machine has an Intel P4 with hyper-threading. Hyper-threading is a new processor that actually contains two processors on one chip. You can really notice the improved performance when trying to switch between multiple applications. All I have to do is put some more RAM in my machine and it will work out very well.
Tonight my son Alex is having his 11th birthday party and has a bunch of friends over. Tomorrow we are going to the neighbors to watch the Super Bowl. There is supposed to be a big snowstorm tomorrow and, if it happens, I will be able to work from home with my new machine.
That's all the news that's fit to print. More when something compelling happens in my life.
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