TAGENIGMA LLC

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]

These are the common steps I use to setup a new machine and my favorite tools.

Create recovery CDs if not available

Remove [Norton] if pre-installed

Enable Remote Desktop access

[Firefox] – Be sure to get these add-ons: [Foxmarks] (bookmark synchronizer), [FireFTP] (ftp client), [ChatZilla] (icq client), and [Firebug] (web debugger)

[Thunderbird] – open source email client, [manually backup] or use [Mozbackup] to backup/restore Mozilla products

[Lightning] – integrated calendar for Mozilla Thunderbird

[TortoiseSvn] – an open source client tool for integrating with subversion source control

[WinMerge] – an open source diff tool excellent for quickly identifying revision changes and merging code quickly

[Cygwin] – UNIX command-line tools on Windows (grep, tar, tail, head, zip, unzip, ssh, scp)

[Textpad] – a text editing utility with built-in regular expression support

[Gimp] – a free image manipulation program

[WinRar] – there’s always some hoodlum in the online community using the rar format that contains a file that you need

[Skype] – online chat/voice communication

[MagicDisc] – allows you to mount ISO files on 32/64 bit Windows

[VMWare Player] – free virtual machine player

[Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008] – Microsoft development tools for doing anything .NET

Visual Studio 2005 Express Service Pack [xp] [vista] – Various bug fixes that fix known problems in Visual Studio

[Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite Service Pack] – fixes numerous bugs in the Team System edition of Visual Studio

[Visual Studio 2008 SP1] – ISO service pack

[Windows Platform SDK] – A development kit of tools, libraries, and source for developing on the Windows platform

[DirectX SDK] – the software development tools, includes and libraries for building DirectX applications [Setup.exe]

[Google C++ Style Guide] – coding standards attempt to keep programmers’ code easy to read and hopefully easy to understand

[Microsoft XNA Game Studio] – all the dependencies that you need to start developing for the XBox

[Quicktime] – for very basic video editing

[ITunes] – to synchronize with my IPod

[Sharepod] – a better way to manage music on your ipod

[Wireshark] – network packet level analysis

[Combined Community Codec Pack] – contains most of the codecs you need to play movies from the net

[Visual Assist] – the best enhancement for Visual Studio Professional or better that you can buy

[BitTorrent] – Popular download and distribution client

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

[Wine 1.0] is an implementation of the Windows API for *unix. Written for X, I’ve followed the progress of this project for years. I first stumbled across Wine, which made it possible to use MS Office and StarCraft on Mandrake Linux.

[Mozilla Firefox 3] has released. Download your copy today. Mozilla is trying to set a world record for downloads in a single day. The release became available 10am PDT, but unfortunately, Mozilla servers have been experiencing intermittent down time.

The free evaluation version of [Spore Creature Creator] is now available for download. Any creature that you make will be able to work in the full version of Spore releasing September 5th.

Intel’s Paul Lindberg talks on about challenges when developing games that utilize multiple cores. Brad Werth talks about the diminishing returns when focusing on performance and implores developers to focus on features to get a better return. Paul describes how decoupling subsystems allow asynchronous designs to be more resilient when more than the allocated frame time is taken.

[Intel Profilers]:

[Thread Checker] – checks whether your application is threaded correctly

[Thread Profiler] – checks whether your application is well balanced between threads

[Threading Building Blocks] – helps design your application for threading

More videos can be found on [Intel (r) Software Network Developer Zone]

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.

I sent my XBOX 360 for repairs on May 27th and got it back June 10th. That was fast! I have yet to take it out of the box to make sure the red lights are gone. They sent a free month gift card for XBOX Live to boot! And the box is back in working order!

The [Apple World Wide Developer Conference 2008 Keynote Address] is now available via streaming Quicktime. You should install Quicktime 7.6, but the video still pauses a lot. With all the delays, it makes the video hard to watch.

[King5] reports Bellevue-based [AFS Trinity Corporation] has developed a Hybrid-SUV that gets 150 miles per gallon. The trick is, they need to find a manufacture interested in mass producing the electric hybrid. An electric car was similarly developed in the 80s, but without a dedicated manufacture, the line died out.

[Gamasutra] has an article on [IncrediBuild] which is a product that advertises the ability to reduce C++ compile time by 20X. This is especially useful if you have 150k of source plus external dependencies and you already find your compile times for a full rebuild are at 30 minutes.

We took a trip out to [Index, WA], a small mountain town North of Highway 2. We drove across an interesting bridge to get into town. The town has a post office/grocery store, a school, a church, a small park, and [Wood’s art gallery].

Later we stopped at a park in Sultan on the way back home.

Today I received a replacement motherboard for my P5N-E that fried last month. I have 30 days to send the defective board back otherwise I’ll be charged $110.

Unfortunately, I get the same result with the new motherboard. So it’s time to send the whole thing back for repairs…