Extracurriculars

I figured another great place to start with this blogging thing is to introduce people to the other projects I'm working on/helping with as well as a couple places I'm frequently found online.

Excluding my research I am currently helping with the engineering and development of the following projects:

Project Link (website currently down) - This project was inspired a good friend of mine that goes by the name of Xemberad (some Furcadia nuts out there might recognize the name :p). The goal is to create a game engine/platform that we will use to re-create the fun and feel of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past as an immersive MMOG. The project has been through some ups and downs but we're working on redesigning the architecture of the engine (we first started this project when we weren't quite as capable as we are now) and we're really excited about the ideas being mapped out.

XFighter (website coming soon) - If anybody has ever played M.U.G.E.N. you know how awesome and fun it is to be able to set up dream matches in a customizable 2d fighting engine. Well my beastly Athlon 64x2 with 2GB Dual Channel DDR and dual GeForce 7600GT cards was struggling to run it recently; based on the animation frame timing patterns (since sometimes it runs slow enough to see them) as well as how input processing seems to work and a minor hint from the process manager it seems M.U.G.E.N. is not only no longer (if ever) open source, but it seems to be a single threaded application with nested loops. Our goal is to make a much more modern 2d fighting engine that will be completely extensible (note the use of extensible instead of customizable, this application will be designed using provider style design patterns and dynamic extension loading in mind). We've got a lot of ideas but the project is still in it's early stages, keep your eye out for updates :p

with my ever apparent shortage of time these days that's all I can really invest my time in right now, but I have a tendency to troll around several IRC channels (some I visit most weekdays, others I drop in from time to time); if you're ever interested in discussing any ideas about the above projects or anything else for that matter drop by for a bit :). These are the channels I frequent:

Server: Americhat (irc.americhat.net)
Channel: #genscripts Link
#genscripts is my home on the internet, it's full of great thinkers and skilled coders of all shapes and sizes and they're just generally fun people too. There's a lot of mIRC development that occurs in there, but really there's everything from PHP developers to realtime concurrent systems developers and everybody brings something worthwhile to the table.

Server: DALNet (irc.dal.net)
Channel: #partyhouse Link
#partyhouse is the very first IRC channel I ever entered back in the mid-'90s and, while I've taken a few hiatuses from it I always go back when I get the chance. To enjoy chilling in #partyhouse I recommend you remain open minded and bring your sense of humor, it's not all developers but there's some intellect present if you need it :).

Server GIMPNet (irc.gimp.net)
Channel: #mono-winforms Link
#mono-winforms is home of the Mono Windows Forms team. These guys are working hard to make it so that rich UI applications written against the Microsoft-designed .NET Framework can be run on Linux and Mac operating systems without the stress of using third party toolkits. They're not done but they get my respect; if I had enough time to choose another project to contribute to, this would be it. Just trolling in the channel I have become a part of many intellectual and thought provoking conversations and I enjoy all of the people who spend time there.

That's all for today folks :p - if you have any interest in any of the projects I'm on let me know, either by commenting or by finding me in one of the IRC channels mentioned above. Help is always appreciated :)

-TheXenocide

Quick Thought

Being brief tonight because I still have work to do, but if anybody reads this and knows of a solution or is inspired (and has the time :p) to make a solution, please please please let me know. Basically I wish there was better support for XMI export and/or source generation for Visio 2003 UML Models because it's a cheaper program I can use at home (I'm not exactly rolling in cash) for projects. Searching around it seams Microsoft has written an Add-In for Visio, but it appears as though the features are a bit lackluster for real usage :'(.

Anyway, I must be off :*

<edit>

I've also been using SVN a lot lately (free and whatnot :p) and I was really impressed with #develop's TortoiseSVN integration but I wanted to see if I could do the same with Visual Studio (cheaper than relying on VSS or TFS). In the process I've stumbled on AnkhSVN which I haven't been able to test yet, but it seems like a perfect candidate and it is now a stable release. I'll try to post back with my experiences. I'd also like to take a look at GForge's project management capabilities; it seems really useful but I've had some difficulties getting it set up myself (more about GForge another time).

</edit>

-TheXenocide

I Am Xeno

Welcome creatures of the internet; this is the newfound home of TheXenocide. I had some spare time whilst waiting for someone to get back to me in the office and I decided that I would start a blog :).

Who? Online I go by TheXenocide; if my real name is ever of any pertinence simply bring it to my attention and we can work things out ;). I am a Software Engineer in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States currently working full time and finishing my undergraduate course load part time. I've been tinkering with code since about 1992 when my stepfather introduced me to Basic, since that day my interest in computer science has never waned. Beyond all the professional crap though, I'm a generally fun loving, relaxed, easy to get along with guy who likes to hang out with friends, play video games, eat/cook good food, travel and most importantly learn. I've always said I never met a boring subject, just a boring teacher.

Why? To be honest, I'm not really sure; I've tried it before and wound up not liking the situation it put me in. Maybe I want people to see all the cool ideas I have, maybe I want to help software engineers and developers in the same ways other blogs have helped me, maybe I just need a place to vent. In reality it's probably some twisted cocktail of all of these and some whiskey sour from someplace in my subconscious.

What? This blog is my brain dump; you're liable to find anything from random events in my life to cool websites i stumble upon to generally useful software engineering concepts and the status of my personal projects.

When? Whenever; If you're that interested in keeping up with my posts I'd recomend some sort of RSS reader because I have absolutely no idea how often I will be posting.

... so... let's get started ;)

As of late, I've been working for a wonderful company that takes pretty good care of me. I'm really happy that I finally found a job that would take my experience seriously; Previously I've had several internships where the employers decided to treat me like some kid who didn't know anything; when I finally demonstrated my worth to them these companies saw nothing more than better slave labor and started asking more and more of me while treating me the same. Finally I'm free.

Outside of work I have also been working on a research project for some time. By some time, I wouldn't say my work is very close to complete, much of my time has been spent trying to plot and calculate the best ways to design my system and playing with features of various programming languages and platforms here and there to ensure my ideas are headed down the right path. The topic of my research is deeply connected with some of my theories on the recursive nature of existence and many repetitive occurrences in mankind's history. I'm sure there'll be more details later, but to give the topic as short and sweet as possible I'll be using a lot of big words :p--I am working on a "Multi-Language Pervasive Distributed Extensibility Platform" that I hope to use (and to see others use) to tackle many common compatibility problems engineers, developers and even users face today.

When I'm not attached to a computer (or rather, when I'm attached to less computers, seeing as how my PDA Phone is pretty much always by my side) I love watching Anime, Adult Swim cartoons, Comedy and most recently Heroes (AKA the greatest show on the planet!). I also enjoy reading, though I can rarely find time for it anymore, and I absolutely love (for some reason) driving around... Book-wise I enjoy Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Non-Fiction (computer books sound a lot more boring then they really are :p), more specifically I absolutely love Orson Scott Card's work (did anybody notice "The Xenocide"/TheXenocide :p) and I'm not at all ashamed to say I also really enjoy the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling. I also spend a fair bit of time watching Discovery Channel's awesome science, math and physics shows and studying up on beginner String Theory, Quantum Mechanics and general Physics.

That's pretty much all of me (at least all of me that I could think of or rationalize placing in a single post) so, in closing, I'll leave you with some of my favorite quotes:

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Love is Like War - Easy to Start, but Hard to Stop" - Some Fortune Cookie a long time ago.

and some of my more recent media favorites:

Waking Life - great movie, a really fun approach to philosophy.

A Scanner Darkly - also a great movie, directed and co-written by the director/writer of Waking Life; it's a little jumpy and, in my opinion, not quite as good as Waking Life, but still worth watching.

What the BLEEP!?: Down the Rabbit Hole - Absolutely awesome introduction to quantum mechanics but truly just an interesting work. Take it with a grain of salt and anything that sparks your interest should be something you take the time to research a little yourself, don't just take the things said as fact, but rather immerse yourself in a creative thinking environment, otherwise you may miss the point.

With that I think I'll call it a day (especially since it's time to get back to work :p),

-TheXenocide