Everything you never wanted to know about Jon Watte

In my career, I've dug through a number of scene graph renderer internals. Almost always, they claim to be "hardware independent" by abstracting the hardware, and then they go ahead and expose functions like "bindSecondTexture()" and "setAlphaBlendFunc()" to objects, and have objects "render" themselves by calling those functions.

I'm taking the XNA 4.0 beta for a spin. I don't have a Windows 7 phone (who does? :-) so I can't get motivated to start porting things like kW Animation / X-port to it, but I thought I'd check out the new and improved render target and effects APIs. Here's a little screen shot:

All Points Bulletin -- a great idea for a MMOFPS. Also, a nice vehicle for in-game customization of clothing and vehicles.

You can draw decals. You can sculpt avatars. You can paint cars. The game even has a built-in step/pattern sequencer!

VMWare workstation is in many ways a great product. It allows you to do all kinds of nifty set-ups that let multiple virtual machines talk to each other and the rest of the world, within the confines of your local PC.

However, there are some problems with it. I have a couple of virtual machines that I use as a sandbox for developing networked applications at work. These are hosted inside a Dell Inspiron XPS 1330 laptop. The laptop travels between networks frequently. At work, it's usually plugged in, but sometimes gets un-plugged and goes on wireless-G. On the train, it goes on a Sprint WAN card. At home, it generally goes on another wireless-G network.

I just had to link to this.

I have a home theater with a reasonably advanced remote control set-up -- the Universal Remote 950 MX. While having a conventional "remote stick" form factor, it is actually an embedded system running some small version of Windows CE.

I've been doing some Android programming, trying to get a feel for what an Android app would look like when structured as a main screen, some set-up screens, and a main gameplay screen (which then wants to go back to the main screen). I've fought a bit with the built-in Android layout views. They seem to be missing some capabilities that would be really useful.

Here's a new perfmon graph of the memory leak progress over half a day that I'm seeing on my computer. It's definitely *something* slowly eating my memory. But it doesn't show up in the process monitor.

For work, I'm using a Dell Inspiron 1340 laptop. It's a wonderful piece of machinery, with Windows 7 professional 64-bit, a Core 2 Duo with 6 MB of cache, 4 GB of 1066 MHz RAM, 128 GB SSD and (this is the key) an NVIDIA 9400M and a G210M working in tandem (SLI) to get me a 13" laptop that scores 5.8 on Windows Experience Index. Yay technology!

Politics. I often try to stay away from it in writing, because it'll come back to haunt you later. However, at this point, what I hear and read about healthcare reform makes me sad. But first, let me set the stage: