Projects

I am rather unhappy about the progress of my personal projects, or rather lack thereof, for 2006. Although there has been a number of achievements, like figuring out the format of Riven’s special effect files, determining the padding on Riven’s audio files and reverse engineering Blizzard’s extended MPQ archive format as well as a working implementation of MPQ digital signature verification with extracted Blizzard public keys, Riven X is still a far way from being done and I still don’t have released 1.0 versions of my 2 basic MPQ tools (DropMPQ and MPQ Extractor).

Nonetheless, work continues 2007 should see progress across the table. Presently, I am investigating a new file flag in Burning Crusade’s MPQ archives (0×04000000), weird Riven X crashes in current seeds of Mac OS X 10.5 (may be related to the inter-thread communication code) and a simple World of Warcraft repair utility (which I may or may not finish). Looking further, I will continue MPQKit’s refactoring and rewriting for support of extended archives and work on making Riven X playable, which immediately implies implementing hotspots and state variables.

I am also declaring MPQDraft End-Of-Life. Too many hoops to jump through on Intel Macs. Besides, currently (very) popular Blizzard games have awesome user modification capabilities. However I may revisit this decision, if only with the goal of providing some manner of legacy support for modifications using MPQDraft (most of them are StarCraft campaigns).

This shall be the year of the 1.0s!

Blog

I obviously need to write more often on this blog. I suppose it’s a matter of self discipline. In any case, here are some topics I want to write about:

• Multithreaded programming. Mac OS programmers may very well have a head start on this one considering Apple’s hardware history – they’ve been selling MP machines for a while now. Justin Olbrantz has posted a number of them already, and I intend to follow suit and cover algorithms, data structures and best practices for taming MT software engineering.
• Somewhat related to the above is asynchronous IO on Mac OS X. Specifically, I want to finish and publish a comparison of certain operations in MPQKit done with and without AIO. I originally had planned to post this in December 2006, however the code ended up needing a lot more work.
• OpenGL and shader programming on Mac OS X. Another topic I particularly like. And who knows, maybe I’ll get crazy and start a project to have a good shader editor on the platform – no offense Apple, but GLSL Editor is still terrible compared to say RenderMonkey.

This concludes this state of the blog for 2006.

Kind of feeling bad for not posting much, I’ll have to work on that.

Let’s have Kirby dance. <(’.'<) (>’.')>

Awesome.

Incidentally, my internship was extended late last week and will end Friday April 28th. I’ll use this extension primarily to write my research report, which is nice because I’m still being paid

Everything should be back up by the evening, and of course /dev/klog will remain available.

It has been many months since I last wrote on this journal of mine, quite possibly because college has been taking so much of my time as of late. It’s funny, you’d think moving forward things would get easier, or at the very least stay pretty much the same. But it has been one hell of a Fall semester so far, in part due to the large number of term assignments (4 of them) and the more esoteric courses I’m attending (organic chemistry, Japanese). Still, things are soon coming to an end and the prospects of doing an internship this coming winter are higher than ever.

Which somewhat brings us to /dev/klog. On every copy of my resume, one can read this blog’s address. As such, the thought of someone responsible for hiring interns visiting a pretty much dead blog has been running circles in my mind as of late. I suppose I’m pretty much lazy, in the sense that whatever can be done later will get done later. Unfortunately, lazy execution is a pretty good software engineering strategy, but hardly a successful one in real-life.

Consequently, I’ll be dedicating more time to this blog than I have in the past. Not solely for the sake of my winter internship, but also because I truly believe one should stop and synthesize one’s mind on a regular basis. Structured thinking and discipline is key to success in many fields, and that’s certainly the case of engineering.

I realize this entry is rather short, but it’s a preface of sort to upcoming content. There are many things that need to be talked about, including Apple, Mac OS X, Cocoa, my projects, some of the things I’ve learned this semester, politics, and so on. In addition, my projects will also get some sorely needed attention. Updated news, better descriptions, frequently asked questions, a bug report infrastructure and a few completely new project pages.

Stay tuned!

In any case, having a place to talk about my software projects and other things I find interesting is quite exciting, and I’ll make it a priority to write on a regular basis. The teaser that was online prior to this launch reflects that commitment, as anyone who has read the MYST novels will understand.

For now, I would cordially invite you, dear reader, to read this page about blogging and what /dev/klog will be about, in the hope that you may gain a better understanding of what this will be about and decide whether or not you should subscribe to my feeds.

/dev/klog - You better pipe that through your mind.

[pool release];
return 0;
}