Dav3xor

Woohoo! Now I don't have to tear my web game apart for IE support.

They were hinting at doing SVG a few months ago, it's nice to see they're stating it officially.

(And to get things started -- we got a Skype interview with Harj, who is a super nice guy.)

Mostly working on the Awesomization Process.

Out of curiosity; if you applied early, did you get some preliminary contact from Y-C?

Welcome -- to Zumodrive

Pay no attention to the Cylons behind the mirror.

It's impressively quaint that they think they can protect your data by not telling you how it's encrypted.

The US Patent System has just been owned by Kurt Godel.

and Halliburton -- oh crap.

A friend of mine used to work for a local television station. When a local business wanted to run an ad, they had an internal form that got filled out that had a field that said --

"Customer has expressed an interest in having his (pet, small child)in the spot."

Bad taste is universal.

"I understand this concern on behalf of the taxpayers. People want value for money. That's why we always insist on the principal of Information Retrieval charges. It's absolutely right and fair that those found guilty should pay for their periods of detention and the Information Retrieval procedures used in their interrogations."

Yeah, she she's spent a lot of time on setting it up to work (mostly) without a keyboard -- She says Quickscript is really good (but has some bugs). I want to play with it more myself, but it's one of those "you can have it when you pry it from my cold dead fingers" kinda deals.

My wife has a modbook, and it is made of unmitigated awesome. It's a little heavy, and the display is a bit dim because of the glass screen cover... But it's awesome. And the price is very reasonable. The stylus works really well (and comes with several different types of tips, including a felt tip that feels just right...)

She bought it to do UX design work with it, and started on a webcomic with it because she just liked playing with it so much. ArtRage is awesome on it.

Hehe, Lisp is oatmeal, Perl is Lucky Charms...

That's a 0xFA1AFE1 lot for 4 bytes.

I suppose the theoretical limit is 1 bit -- if you define the program in terms of a virtual machine that takes 1 instruction -- "play a game of chess".

You need some sort of related technology called 0xDEADBEEF.

errr, Battleaxe.. not sword. obviously.

Nothing says "I would never want to work there" more than a giant bronze compass with corpspeak at the cardinal points and a sword wielding maniac riding a spiky cat in the center.

A little bit of all those things -- it worked just fine, on the device, for 2 years, including the occasional eastern hemisphere TFR. It only happened with a TFR that was close to the international date line which made the ascii -> float conversion run off the end of the string. I admit I didn't test that eventuality -- but I was using a C library function that's been in constant use for over 30 years.

There's no real weather data standard, XM Weather is a collection of formats (nexrad radar comes over as a bitmap, weather reports are METAR encoded).

The Temporary Flight Restrictions are in XML, well, not really XML, it's a really nasty format designed by Jeppesen were you basically have to write your own XML parser because they made it impossible to parse with a standard XML parser.

It just goes to show that even when you test the hell out of something, you can still get blind sided by something you never thought of, but once it happens, it seems really obvious.

Remember the problem the F-22 had going across the international date line -- that code was a lot less tested than mine in that regard -- but they just didn't think about it.

http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-down-b...

I work on avionics. It's a great job, except you have no idea when or how things can go drastically wrong. We had a bug in our weather data parser that didn't surface in 2 years of constant testing. The weather receiver is only supposed to give data for the continental United States, but we occasionally would get a Temporary Flight Restriction for Iraq, which worked fine.

One day, we got a report from a customer that his panels rebooted twice, in the clouds. All signs were pointing to the weather receiver. I feverishly looked through the code and eventually found the problem.

We were getting a TFR for an air show.. in Guam. I knew that we handled the eastern hemisphere properly, the Iraqi TFR's worked fine.. The data looked something like "....151.235E10.1235N...".. We eventually determined that the floating point value parser was treating the E as scientific notation and blowing up. It worked fine on my PC (glibc), but not on the device (newlib).

Sad about the Difference engine -- I was there on one of the days when they turned the crank (totally by accident). If you show up on a 3rd Saturday of the month(I think it's the 3rd Saturday), you can see the PDP-1 run and meet one of the guys who programmed Spacewar back in 1962.

It's an incredible museum.

Portland is beer obsessed.. The owner of Hopworks (the brewery in the clip, makes a brief appearance) is my backyard neighbor -- super nice guy. Makes totally Organic beer, and owns a very nice bicycle powered bar.

Yep, that's the entirety of the circuit. This will work with any drum brain I know about (but it's been a few years since I did it, so YMMV...) This worked with an old Alesis D4 that I bought at a pawn shop. And I know it'll work with a DM5, etc etc.

You can play with materials a little for the surface -- I used plywood and mousepads. Mousepads are a little soft (the traditional 3/8" thick foam rubber with a cloth backing type...), Different thicknesses of plywood affect sensitivity, etc. If there isn't enough mass, false/double triggering happens.

It's a fun thing to try, and the materials are really cheap (and there are DIY drum trigger boards you can find on the internet now...)

I looked at the map, and it struck me, when did we bomb Mississippi?

The answer? [1964](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Uniform)...

Cool!

BTW, if you're interested in doing this sort of thing -- 2-wire piezo buzzers from radio shack make good velocity sensitive sensors. I built an electronic drumset out of PVC pipe and plywood and taught myself how to play drums with it.

I haven't looked, but it should be fairly easy to convert.

Unless the data is in one of the proprietary GIS formats, then you're in for a late night hellride. GDAL/OGR may be your friend, or may not.

It looks like a nice dataset, but only has center lines for rivers -- no polygon data.

I once calculated the amount of power that could be generated by solar cells on the wings of a small light plane. 3hp, at 100% efficiency.

I'm totally unsurprised that they had to make something with the wingspan of an Airbus to get this to work.

I interviewed 2 recent college grads about a year ago, and they both had the same problem. Both had a demo they had made (this was for someone to help with OpenGL work), and seemed to be reasonably competent and intelligent.

What I worry about most is whether someone will be easy to work with. I assume most people have made it through the resume sorting process by the time they get to me (I'm just an engineer were I work, we're a small company, the boss did the initial vetting).

They were both so worried about making a good impression, I couldn't get them to open up and talk to me. I couldn't tell if they had a sense of humor, or if they were flexible enough to learn something new quickly, or anything else really.

So, my advice.. BE YOURSELF. Write a resume that reflects who you are, This will make you attractive to people who would want to hire you. When you interview, just BE YOURSELF. If you are goofy, let it show. Talk about your enthusiasms, show that you aren't a cookie cutter job applicant. Stick out...

You don't want to work for someone that doesn't want to hire you, it'll make you miserable. I've had several really cool jobs (911 dispatching software, glass panel cockpit displays, digital music encoding/distribution, designing paper airplanes...), and I got all of them because I went in to the interview knowing that the guy doing the hiring interviewed me because he could think of me as someone he could work with from my resume, and we 'clicked' when we met in person.

Everyone is going to give you a list of things you should/shouldn't do in resumes and interviews, but except for the obviously universal ones (spelling/grammar/personal hygiene...) these lists are full of exceptions and personal taste. Do what YOU think is the right thing, this will innately sell you to the kind of people that you want to work for.

One of my previous bosses is a regular on here, he's probably going to laugh himself silly if he reads this (I wasn't always the best employee once I got hired -- but that's another story...)

Good Luck!

My mom had a business were she took a sketch from a (couture) designer, and made patterns for production. There's all sorts of value added there you can exploit (designing a pattern that someone can actually wear is a learned skill that not many people have...)

Not a bad idea at all, but already exists.

This can also help performance -- you get much better cache coherency by putting the components in arrays (an array of bounding boxes, an array of geometry...), and then you can do all sorts of cool data transformation tricks on these arrays (build a tree across it, or a sorted list of pointers, convert to a different coordinate space...) without all the OO overhead (which you still get when you need/want it...) But underneath all that, you still have a tightly packed array of data.

I built an aviation mapping engine that used fixed point math for lat/lon representation. It basically used an entire 32bit signed int and gave a guaranteed minimal resolution of 3 feet. It would quite often go to the ragged edge of what you can fit in a 32 bit quantity.

The fun bit was that you had to use 2 combined registers (ARM) to represent a 64bit quantity so you could do multiplication and keep all your precision.

Oh, for the luxury of a FPU...

Those are all very fair criticisms, but by simply running gnome-panel with Xmonad, you get 80% of what you want.

Apologies for the evangelism. :)

You've probably had 20 other people tell you about this; but switching to a tiled window manager will remove that whole 'careful placement of windows' thing from your life in a very positive way.