Real Life

Zohar (my Subversion and Trac server) will be unavailable tomorrow (well technically, today, April 6th) morning due to a scheduled power outage back home. My family couldn’t tell me the reason for it, but that’s that.

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

I know Core Media is late (according to my own deadline), but family visited last weekend so I couldn’t land as many hours as I wanted into the audio code (the last part missing).

I committed a mostly functional RX::CardAudioSource tonight. I didn’t test very small looping sources yet, but I don’t expect I’ll even encounter those so it can wait. Otherwise, I’m pretty happy with the performance of the audio engine and will begin work on RXSoundGroup tomorrow. That class basically manages one or more RX::CardAudioSource instances so that you can stop, start and fade in or out a set of sources at once. This is the direct representation in the Riven X engine of SLST records.

After that, I’ll need to add SLST record loading to RXCard and implement the relevant opcodes. Hopefully I’ll get this thing out the door by the weekend

Sacha Nandlall is this insanely smart friend I’ve known for several years now. Recently, he’s been tutoring an advanced calculus course. Since math is everything and godly, I encourage you to check his page.

http://www.ece.mcgill.ca/~snandl/math264/

I am now installed in the basement of a young couple and their 10 years old daughter somewhere in a suburb of Ottawa. They’re nice people and everything would have been fine had it not been for the lack of a high speed Internet connection. I don’t know what they have, but it’s not high speed even though it comes out of a coaxial cable. However, it’s been agreed that this should be resolved as soon as possible, so I’m not overly concerned of being cutoff from resources I depend upon. There isn’t a Wi-Fi network either, but that’s easily resolved.

One may wonder why I would sacrifice the conforms of my home, the power of my desktop computer (which I could not bring with me) and the freedom of my unlimited high speed Internet connection for this internship. First of all, why do an internship during the winter semester (that isn’t a typical behavior), and second of all why so far? The answer is 4 letters long: WWDC.

The biggest one ever

It’s pretty easy to see that WWDC 2006 will be hugely important for Mac developers. It will be the first WWDC with retail Intel-based Macs in existence. Mac OS X 10.5 will be discussed in details. The very future of Mac OS X will be debated in bars and pubs after long days of learning and exchanging with fellow developers. It will be like a huge. And I certainly don’t want to miss out.

It takes dollars, among other things

Of course, going to WWDC isn’t free. Let’s make a small list of expected fees:

• Plane ticket, Quebec City to San Francisco and San Francisco to Quebec City: ~ $760 CD
• WWDC early registration badge: ~ $1300 USD -> $1534 CD
• ADC Student membership: $99 USD -> $116.82 CD
• One week lodging, shared: ~ $400 USD -> $472 CD

And the total comes at ~ $2882.82 CD. That’s a lot of money, and I was very conservative in my estimates for lodging, not to mention I completely excluded “operational fees” like food. Without being irrational, the total cost of going to WWDC is close to $3000 CD. That’s even more a lot of money.

Start early

Consequently, I decided to do a paid internship during the winter semester to insure my participation in the most important event of the year on my calendar. However, I took that decision relatively late into the fall semester, which limited my choices. Short of doing Windows MFC programming and condemning my soul to eternal damnation in a special hell, I hit the road to Ottawa.

Let go of reality

With my current situation explained, it’s time to leave the globe of Real Life behind for some time and concentrate on entries more relevant to the nature of this blog. Unafraid to repeat myself, I therefore sign off with the prospects of some much-awaited entries on Riven X and other ongoing programming efforts.

I have update my vCard to contain my internship housing address and my mobile number. You can download it from the About Jean-Francois Roy page.

In other news, I’m currently planning my move to WordPress 2.0 in addition to a brand new theme, which hopefully will be more unique and distinguishing than what I presently have.

Things are obviously going to be pretty hectic in the coming days as I settle in my new residence, so regular posting will probably have to wait until mid-next week.

I’d like to wish anyone reading this blog a happy new year. Cheers to a great 2006!

Yesterday, my fall semester ended when I handed in the final assignment for my agents software engineering course. This marks the end of long sequence of regular university semesters, because this coming winter I’ll be in Ottawa for an internship in a research center. The direct corollary of that reality is more updates more often for /dev/klog and more time to work on my personal projects, namely Riven X.

Speaking of which, I should have some great entries related to it ready in the coming days, starting with the answers to my previous entry on card rendering.

For the time being however, I will be spending some quality time with my folks and enjoying a long overdue break.

Happy holidays!