Short Update

I'm not going to say much on this yet. Long story short, I've been laid off. I will go into some more details soon.

Windows 7 RC

Now the Windows 7 Release Candidate is out for public consumption. I decided that I would install this one on my desktop as well, utilizing 80 GB I have laying around doing nothing holding a dead Linux partition.

So far, on my desktop, I've had an issue with it randomly completely locking up the machine. I'm still trying to narrow it down to what the cause is. On my notebook, with the Beta version every other boot or so the keyboard and touchpad didnt work, I have installed the RC on there but haven't used it enough to see if it is fixed yet.

I did send in a few bug reports with Windows 7 Beta, the keyboard and mouse thing one of them. The one that has bothered me the most, however, is a bug with thumbnails and the Photo Viewer. Since I collect a ton of pictures from the internet - japanese art, funny pictures, etc - I have a massive collection of images. A bug that started with Vista exists where for some pictures it will neither load the thumbnail correctly nor show it correctly in Photo Viewer, instead stretching it out to really tall vertically and only a few pixels wide. This ends up making it impossible to tell what the picture is trying to browse through pictures without opening it up in some other software.

I sent in this report with some example pictures, IIRC specifically a picture of Samus Aran and a picture of Old Snake grabbing Link from Zelda Wind Waker. As of 7 RC, they fixed the thumbnail view problem, so it renders thumbnails correctly, but the Photo Viewer aspect of the problem remains. And, unfortunately, since it is RC phase, they took out the bug reporting functions. I sent in another report using Beta's function indicating that it continues in RC, but at this point it probably won't be seen before 7 RTM. I'm hoping they catch it though since it should be a simple enough fix.

Internet Flu

The internet is on fire. It has caught the infection of rumor, over lack of knowledge of the new Swine Flu. One of the biggest infections is Twitter, which, over the weekend, was exploding with hundreds of tweets every minute, full of misinformation about the flu.

Never before have he had such a medium for such misinformation to spread so quickly. We've had chain letters, chain e-mail, chain phone calls, but the simplicity that the Web 2.0 world offers us today means that there's just so much more available to people - and people are so much more inclined to use these tools - to talk about issues. And because of it, wildfires begin. Wildfires spread. And mass panic, much larger than anything before it, begins, spreading, infecting everyone, far faster than any actual disease could.

The End of History

So Yahoo has announced that they are pulling the plug on GeoCities, one of the earliest free web hosting sites on the internet. It's been years, and fallen by the wayside, and modern social sites such as Facebook and Myspace have filled the role it once held: for people to have personal pages.

Like probably a lot of the web developers around my age, the legacy of GeoCities is something that has affected me. Years ago, so far back that the Internet Archive doesn't have any records of it, I had a page on GeoCities. It started out as a hosting of an - I believe - 8th Grade computer class that had HTML development as part of the course. An age past, where I had a StarTrek.com e-mail address as my personal e-mail, before that was shut down, and I was only beginning to learn.

Much like the beginning of anyone at the time, the site was atrocious. Anyone who used the internet in those days can remember rampant proliferation of animated GIF-heavy sites, which were just absolutely horrid to look at. I was no exception, here, in the first days of learning how to code, Animated GIF's and MARQUEE tags in a barely-readable site. If I remember, the site was just talking about some of the pre-release images from Pokemon Gold & Silver, and had a MIDI of the FF2 (the NES one) Overworld theme playing in the background.

We've come a long ways since those days, and the face of the internet has evolved drastically. And now, all we can do is watch, as one of our oldest still-living ancestors passes to the grave, and salute in silence. It gave us the push, brought us to where we are today, and without it the user-based Internet might have been a very different place. A salute to GeoCities, a symbol of our past.

Progressive Generation

So it's been over a week since I last posted on here, longest for a while. I've been mostly busy with steady progress at Spiral Island. I think I'll have all the framework completed by the end of the month, and from there it'll be just adding the data and doing graphic and sound work, with minor tweaking along the way to code. I was going to put up a video on Youtube of the technical work so far, but my notebook's webcam wasn't doing well picking up from our DLP television.

Seeing a project come together like this, after years of planning, is very nice. I've heard it said several times in the video game developer industry that if you're not completely hating the project by the time it's out the door then it's a rarity. So far, I haven't hit that point. Aside from sheer boredom from some of the programming my excitement to have it done and see it live grows with each passing day. Even the programming work is exciting, at times when it's actual probelm solving and not writing the same thing over and over (mainly drawing calls to paint everything on the screen); there's been several times I've been literally bouncing around my apartment while programming and listening to music. Consuming whole 2 Ltr. bottles of Mt. Dew may have contributed to those instances, but that's beside the point, the point is that it's my work I'm seeing come together. And with most sessions I'm learning something new about the language, and finding new (and usually better) ways of doing things to get the goal.

When everything's said and done I'll have a lot of post mortem work to do, so will be adding a lot both here and on the revamped AnacondaSoftware site at that point. I'm also going to start a crash course into re-learning Japanese using the Pimsleur method right after release, so I can get a Japanese version released as well. I'll go more into that as in the future, and talk about that several times as I go along that process.