On the way to the parade in Snohomish after work, there was a hilarious radio program called ["The Shoe Horns"]. I especially liked the segment that talked about the life of a writer. Or in my case a home programmer. Tune in to the program at 78:30.

I picked up a [500 GB My Book My World] external usb/ethernet harddrive. I can say that I'm not impressed. The transfer speeds are dog slow. And the USB interface just doesn't work. I got the harddrive with the purpose as a redundant backup. But really the thing is too slow to use.

My [Preferred Development Environment] has been working great. The speed of the Gateway FX7029E is good enough to test Crysis mods and various other games that I've been working on (Supreme Commander, Warcraft III, Assassin's Creed, and Crysis). The only problem is that I have a dead pixel on the screen. So I have 90 days from June 13th to get a free replacement. It's just a pain, because I'll have to backup my stuff and then reinstall my development environment.

I've always been a fan of video tutorials like the ones from [Luxology] that show all the features of Modo (my favorite modeling app). I've recorded some of my own videos using [Dr. Divx]. Brad Peebler, author if the weekly "Modocast" suggests [Camtasia Studio] - a full featured video capture, editing, and annotation piece of commercial publishing software. Best of all, Camtasia provides a plethera of [video training tutorials]. The marketing slogan is, "this is so easy a 6th grader can use it!".

Another tool that is capable of capturing single frames for analysis comes with DirectX and is called PIX. [GarageGames] has a blog article about using [PIX] to debug a shader and talks about filtering techniques used to diagnose problems with all aspects of DirectX rendering.

It is possible to take screenshots of the desktop and output an image sequence. The image sequence is converted to an MPEG1 in [this example]. The [WMF SDK] provides a WMF writer object to write single images to a WMF movie. [DirectShow] wraps WPF and provides a convenient wrapper. Many DirectShow source examples are already installed with the Windows SDK and found within ('C:/ Program Files/ Microsoft SDKs/ Windows/ v6.1/ Samples/ Multimedia/ DirectShow'). To compile, make sure the Windows SDK includes ('C:/ Program Files/ Microsoft SDKs/ Windows/ v6.1/ Include') and add the DirectShow common includes ('C:/ Program Files/ Microsoft SDKs/ Windows/ v6.1/ Samples/ Multimedia/ DirectShow/ Common') are in the include search path. The Windows SDK libs ('C:/ Program Files/ Microsoft SDKs/ Windows/ v6.1/ Lib') should be in the lib search path.

Some of the DirectShow samples failed to find stream.h, which can be remedied by replacing:

#include <streams.h>

#include <Control.h>
#include <evcode.h>
#include <strsafe.h>

June 1st, 2008 was a historic day for me. It was the day I finally transitioned from the ranks of SDET (software developer engineer in test) to a full fledged game developer at [Isotx]. I received the formal offer Tuesday and told my boss Wednesday. July 16 will be my final day at [Infospace] after nearly 8 years. At [Isotx] I'll be working on indie and commercial game delivery using a platform called [CrosuS]. I'll be also be adding video editing, upload, and distribution capabilities for CrosuS video. I've already been working with [Crysis] and [Assassin's Creed] with more hot titles in the very near future.

[CryMod] - a website dedicated to providing information about creating mods for Crysis
[CryMod] - a database of Crysis mods available for download
CryMod - Crysis maps [1] and [2] for testing
CryMod - a Crysis mods [1] and [2] for testing
[CryTools] - a useful tool to package Crysis Mods
[Crysis Patch 1.2] - includes a Crysis modloader

Forum: [post]

June 13th, I picked up the last ([obsolete already]) [Gateway FX7029E] from the Bothell [Costco] while I wait for IBUYPOWER to repair my other quad-proc box. As with any new developer machine, it takes about a day to install all the tools needed for the job. These are the common tools that I use on a regular basis.

There are times when you want to save a [MS Office 2007 file in Adobe PDF format].

We had steaks so good that they didn't need BBQ sauce; other steaks can't even compete with. But now we are out and need to order again.

America's Choice Entrees, LLC
dba Praire Gold Foods
Minneapolis, MN 55344