News
It's been a long time since last update - but I have important reasons for delay:
I bought HP Pavillion dv7 notebook (suffice to say it scores 4.7 / 5.0 on Vista's benchmark). That's my first notebook, and yeah, unfortunately was stupid enough to install Vista, which never works as you expected - every day creates new problems and challanges. I encountered almost everything - from such trivialities as incompatible programs, to dead/dying internet, sometimes no sound at all apart from Winamp, serious partition errors (which after restart magically disappear!), to rare cases of bootup errors. Overall SLOWNESS of this... "thing", drives me crazy. Right now I'm still struggling with internet randomly dying after an hour or two when browsing in Firefox (Google suggested that's a well known problem - but nobody suggests how to !@b$%#f4 fix it), and programs randomly stopping for few minutes (whole system continues to work, only processess that I'm using currently stop responding). I hate the word "randomly" in such cases, which makes problems even worse and difficult to solve.
Probably I can't fully blame Vista for all of this - are those HW compatibility problems? However, if XP could run at the same hardware without any problems, not eating so much RAM and being that PITA, why Vista won't do the same. I think that with every new generations of OS we should have better, more stable systems - not worser. Anyway, what's better in Vista? The system UI looks better and is more intuitive (after getting used to it and forgetting old patterns from XP). That's all, I can't - from the top of my head - tell you what it does better than XP. In such case, what's the point of switching to Vista? Are there any compelling reason for this? For me, after using XP for years, and Vista for months, there's one big NO for V. I want my XP back. Unfortunately I don't have time for reinstal right now, and I even heard that on some laptops it's impossible to erase Vista since then other OSes won't work (hardware chip checks for its existence or sth), so I'm stuck with it for (at least) a few months...
I installed and dual boot with Ubuntu 8, unfortunately it also has it's glitches - due to incompatible audio hw, so far it's been impossible to hear any sound from speakers. Out of the box you get only 800x600, which makes it hard to do anything, and other things are impossible (ie. too big windows). For bigger resolutions, you have to download proprietary drivers. And for 2 months wifi didn't work because of buggy net drivers, and only recently after kernel upgrade it started working, so I could download updates and drivers. Then, after month of working, after system update, some essential component has been removed and wifi stopped working. Grrrrr. Since there's no use of OS without internet, AGAIN, I'm stuck with Vista... Aaaaaaaaa!!
Ok, sorry for the ranting, now the important stuff:
I moved to Netherlands to work at Playlogic on Unreal3 powered AAA game. Yup, that's neat. Moving and getting organized at place took me some time. Ok, in fact I had 1 month taken out of normal, productive life. Couple of times even I had the luxury of not knowing where I'll sleep next night - at hotel, company(?), or maybe somewhere outdoors... yeah, there are problems finding cozy apartment in Netherlands! they should do sth about it I suppose ;-). Luckily now things are going smooth and steady, and I'm prepering for more serious projects.
Magic Pencil, my current project of choice, is developed using Kaizen principle - every day a little better. Unfortunately I'm already sitting > 8h at work coding, and when coming back home, I have more satisfying, less killing-yourself-doing-stuff things to do. Yet rest assured - (I hope) it will be released this year (if I had a dollar for every time I made such statement...).
Hmmm, that was a little more like a blog post than typical news on my homepage :-) but I really had to rant this stuff out of me. I feel better now. Anyway, it's my vanity/home-page and I can do here anything what I want!! see: oufdrjksdfeijkl fderuhkjsdefojklsdefikljg desk;oasfwkljgsdikljsdflksdfzkjldsf ;-)
