It's been a long time since I've written - looking at my old posts they're from my brief time in the Blue Frog project! That was a while ago. I've gotten married in the mean time AND divorced! How's them apples?? Yeah, the Blue frog thing... It was brilliant and fun but ultimately futile - we had a good idea, no means to accomplish it, and all the crime lords and multi million dollar AntiSpam companies against us.... But as a mental excercise quite stimulating. Learned a ton about peer to peer architecture and pre-shared key style security technology.
Back to today however and why I'm writing:
The last few months, I've been struggling at work and at home with nasty technical problems and bugs and wishing "Man, more people should write something when they figure out solutions!" Sadly, most forums are quite hard to sift though as you must always study the entire dialog thread to make sure you understand if a solution is present for your needs.
Some recent headaches I may recap in the future:
- Autocad: So many quirky and extremely frustrating glitches one hardly knows where to start. I love Autodesk, but man - it's A: Complex software with countless ways to shoot yourself in the foot. B: Just kind of crappy and buggy. And it's the best product on the market I still maintain - so that says something about the competition!
- Torrents, UseNext and the Film / Music industries. Technical challenges are mild to easy - so I might not write much about that. But my opinions and sense of what is right and wrong is strong....
- Media streaming, HTPC's (Home theater PC's), DLNA, UPNP and a countless hoard of video codecs and transcoders. All this added together with international movies (subtitles and mutliple language tracks) means: HEADACHE. I've learned a ton and solved a lot of challenges - I'll share some day.
- Vista, Linux (specifically Ubuntu and Suse) and the state of the computing world. Endless source of problems and facinating opportunities - all moving ahead at light speed.
- Microsoft - I've been a fairly loyal user since I was rudely evicted from the Amiga / Unix world. But they are REALLY making me pissed off lately on every front. And in the last days I've come to believe that it is now finally possible for mid level non-Mac users to make the migration to a Linux style system comfortably. I'll be writing a LOT about this as I plan to migrate to Suse over the next few months. (Why Suse? Becuase it's bundled with Thinkpad laptops and I'm about to buy a new one! :)
- Adapting broadcast and consumer entertainment system technology to new IP delivery systems. This is my day job now - finding ways to bring conventional and new entertainment technology together into elegant GUI's for the really really rich people in the world. :) We must all pay the bills right - and this is a fun way for me.
- I've also been thinking hard about: Alternative energy and how to save the world, what I'll do when my hybrid car wears out and I need a new one, film history and the Criterion Collection, love, hate and god and digital photography. Might even get a random post along those lines one day.
But who knows? Maybe something I figure out and write here can save one of you some sweat and tears. That would make my day. (smile)
