www.enchantedage.com

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!

Once in a while, I'll hear a question like "I'm tired of flipping burgers/school/my job as a sewer cleaner; how do I get into games programming?" Some people will say "don't do that -- game developers are treated like the scum of the earth, and careers are brutal and under-paid." I think that doesn't quite capture reality, though.

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 see this headline in the latest ACM TechNews:
Educators Seek New Ways to Steer Kids Toward Technical Fields

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:

Last week-end, I lost the boot disk for my Linux server. Mostly, that server just serves as a file server for MP3 files, photos and ripped DVDs these days, but not being able to listen to music or watch movies does cramp your style a little bit.

If you combine software outsourcing (seldom a good idea) with bulk form email (also not a good idea), what do you get? Can two wrongs make an unny-fay?

Really gives you a good feeling for the quality of work these people do, right?