Stephen's Weblog

So, this whole apprentice thing has managed to become bigger than I expected it to; Anyway, after the first round, I am now left with 3 very good candidates on the top of the rest; I’m now in the process of building a second round exam, to get a much more specific idea of what they know and what they’re capable of. I’ll also send everyone who returned one of the first round surveys an email, indicating where they stand compared to everyone else :P
More news on this later… this second round is not going to be an easy exam, it’ll be pretty detailed, and will cover everything from the basics almost as far as the knowledge I will eventually require of an apprentice. It will take a bit of time to write, of course… I’ll post an update to this post when it gets further along.

So, well, as can be expected, I have been working on reverse engineering the Wii, to a limited extent. I don’t have huge amounts of progress, but what I do have can be seen here, at wiire.org – I haven’t been intentionally hiding this from you guys, a lot of people already know about it, but I’ll link it here just in case anyone has missed it.

…to carry on the “sgstair” way.

No, I’m not planning on leaving or anything.
Just expanding my horizons by a few orders of magnitude. I have a lot of really big things planned, the creation of many libraries that will form the base of what will eventually become a full operating system (within a few years, hopefully)
I’m looking for a suitable trainee, someone to whom I can impart a good deal of useful knowledge and wisdom I’ve accumulated through my career to date, and who can help me in the development of these libraries and other projects, which collectively require extraordinary amounts of work.
The reason that I’m stating this here, is that I’m curious if anyone in my readership might want a position like this…
If you think you might, please read the following set of simple requirements I’ve put together:
You should have interests in programming, math and, less necessarily, electronics and science.
You must be interested in learning new things. (And if you think you know it all already, you’re very likely incorrect.)
You should be pretty good at remembering things that interest you.
You should have at least a rudimentary knowledge of how programming works, Knowing C or ASM is a plus.
You should like puzzles, and figuring out things.

That’s it, only one absolute requirement even! Note that I am not a slave driver, and If I do manage to acquire an apprentice, I don’t expect a huge time commitment, or anything like that (if you have more time all the better, but I only have a limited time myself)
So, there you have it. If you’re still interested, I’d expect you can figure out how to get in contact with me.

(Side note: I really don’t expect to get many, if any responses to this, but if I do, woohoo! that’s a lot of time that may have been spent looking on my own that I don’t have to worry about any more :)

(Side note 2: Just for those of you who worry about it, the library code and various projects I have planned will be licenced almost exclusively under the MIT source code licence. It’s likely not all of the libraries that will be created will be released to the public immediately, but some will, and which ones do are very much up for debate. Also, I’ve been working on plans for a private SVN server + public SVN site (web + anonymous svn download) + a bug tracker for this collection of libraries.  So, libs will be quite accessable to the public if they are released to the public. Anyway, just thought some of you might like to know that.)

(Side note 3: For now, if people contact me about this they’ll be put on a list, I’ll get around to talking to anyone who does indicate interest within about a week.)

(Side note 4: Since some of you seem to have misinterpreted what I’m saying about time requirements, I’m not requiring any amount of time; in fact early on it will probably be limited by the amount of time I have available. Granted if you’re interested it will eat up more time than you might expect, but I’m not making any solid requirements.)

(Side note 5: I’ve sent out a survey/test email to all who have expressed interest – thanks guys :) – it’s not too late to be considered, but I will probably make a final decision within a week, or possibly 2 weeks, depending on how things go.)

(Side note 6: I’m tentatively setting a deadline of the end of the day (23:59 GMT) on December 23, for applicants to return the survey/test email. You’re still welcome to apply before this time, but once you’re sent the email, you have the same deadline as everyone else. Exceptions are possible, but I don’t see why there would need to be any.)

Hey all,
I’ve had lots of fun (read: not fun) things to deal with lately, nothing really interesting just a series of small things that have added up to eat up all my available time and then some.
So: DSWifi release 0.3b has been delayed, but I am meaning to get it out soon – I’ve decided to drop the extra features I was planning for it (As they’ll be addressed in the oncoming rewrite) and merely add the bug fixes I’ve been planning, to get it out the door soon
Also, the rewrite I’ve alluded to will wait for a while, specificly until the Wii comes out or thereabouts; as I’d like the 802.11 and new TCP/IP system to work on that system as well (the sgIP rewrite may come sooner, as I am planning to play with the gamecube in the meantime, and I’d like to port sgIP to it. – if this happens I’ll release a version 0.4 with just the sgIP TCP/IP rewrite)
As far as stuff goes, I have my plate quite full of projects at the moment, so everything is moving very slowly – I’m trying to prioritize and only work on the top 2 or 3 projects, but it’s far more difficult than advertised! wish me luck! :)
(oh, and about the downloadable DS demos – I may or may not get around to adding the latest set, not sure if I really want to at this point. There are some other people who have the latest ones though, I’ll add the link on here / the wiki if I can figure out where)

Well, something like that.
Anyway, for those of you who are madly addicted to the game, there’s something you really should try:
At the moment, a friend of mine (StoneCypher) is recruiting beta-testers for a commercial PC sudoku game he’s nearly done with. If you can’t get enough of the puzzles, it looks to be a very sweet deal, and he has enough puzzles (and types of puzzles) to make you dizzy :)
So, if you’re interested, please read his blog post about it, and sign up if you like

This has been a public service announcement, We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming…

Well, it seems to be the case that a plugin that had been recommended to me (Bad Behavior) seems to have been blocking some legitimate traffic to the site. I only had it installed to cut down on spam, and now I have a new system that does a much better job of that; so… I’ve disabled it.
If any of you were having trouble with rss feeds or the like, this should be fixed now :\
Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused (not sorry to the spammers though :P)


.:11·13·35:. «+JaJa_» if you can cram 4Tbyte of RAM into stick form i'll be amazed
.:11·13·44:. «+parrot_» That'd be amazing!
.:11·13·50:. «@sgstair» JaJa_; shall I clip that, so we can laugh at it in 5 years? :)
.:11·13·59:. «+JaJa_» sure

… I guess we’ll see :)

I finally broke down and bought an Xbox 360 – I’ve been wanting one for a very long time now and I finally had a good opportunity and excuse to get one :)

No, this doesn’t mean my projects are going to go slower – I probably won’t play it a whole lot – right now things are moving slow because my work is taking a lot of my time and I haven’t worked out a nice balance to keep all my projects moving smoothly yet.

Anyway, if you’d like to add me as a friend on xbox live, please feel free, my username/gamertag is ‘sgstair’.
If you do add me, I’ll look forward to seeing you online.

Okay, finally I’m getting around to posting some pictures and stuff here.
Coming back from E3 was just tiring, and since then I’ve been busy, but here’s what I’ve got.

On wednesday (as reported earlier) I stood in the line to see the Wii – that was the highlight of the show; the line itself was pretty interesting (they had talking posters, namely large tvs with a videoconferencing system so it looks like it’s a talking poster or something) – the line was very long, about 2.5 hours or so before I managed to get in, but it was a lot worse on other days (up to 5+ hour wait on friday, according to nintendo’s E3 media.
I of course watched almost all of the games, and most of them look really interesting – the games I played were the warioware game, excitetruck (which is a heck of a lot of fun), and a stupid dragonballz game (just to see how they did the only apparent fighting game there – unfortunately it was not very good.)
I have a number of videos taken from my camera (640×480, 15fps with no sound) that I will try to convert and upload in the near future, just for the heck of it :)

Besides the Wii, there were a few other things that caught my attention…. Here they are listed in no particular order:

Gametap was doing a live space-ghost interview, which was pretty neat (additionally, I’ve also seen a particularly funny interview with peter more – but you have to ignore the crazy laughing in the background :P)

nVidia had seating, which we used frequently and watched some of their presentations (such as microsoft flight simulator X, and many others) – the two things I saw there that really stuck out at me though were the Robo-blitz demonstration (looks like a ton of fun) and Timeshift (which looks interesting due to somewhat unique gameplay)

I also saw geometry wars for x360 for the first time (heh heh) – color me uninformed ;)
Well, I still very much want to get an xbox 360, this just strengthens that desire.

Besides all that I visited most/all of the other booths and wasn’t incredibly impressed… I even played lumines 2 and didn’t like it very much :P

I’ll post some pictures now, and will work on converting my videos sometime…. maybe this weekend? dunno.

Bored…….
bored bored bored.
I’ve managed to see all the stuff I want to, and my feet hurt too much to just wander around aimlessly ;)
Still haven’t met many people, and didn’t take many pictures today; maybe tomorrow will be better in both of those regards.

anyway. still looking into why my images aren’t working how I think they should, I hope to get them working soon, or at least once I get home (saturday evening) – ya I know I’m late, I want to post the pictures anyway. Yesterday with the Wii was thrilling though, and I still can’t think of anything else.

Ok… there were a *few* interesting things I saw today ;)
The gametap booth had a *live* space ghost coast to coast interview, hehe – that was really entertaining, I’d imagine it’s somewhat downloadable somewhere if you want to see it.
Well, stay tuned, tomorrow I’ll update my blog with more info tomorrow.