I feel a sense of pride when I think that I was involved in the development and maintenance of what was probably the first piece of software accepted into Debian which then had and still has direct up-stream support from Microsoft. The world is a better place for having Microsoft in it. The first operating system I ever ran on an 08086-based CPU was MS-DOS 2.x. I remember how thrilled I was when we got to see how my friend’s 80286 system ran BBS software that would cause a modem to dial a local system and display the application as if it were running on a local machine. Totally sweet.

When we were living at 6162 NE Middle in the nine-eight 292, we got an 80386 which ran Doom. Yeah, the original one, not the fancy new one with the double barrel shotgun, but it would probably run that one, too. It was also …

Recently, a bug that caused excessive memory usage and slowness (specially in large models) in Workbench has been fixed in its canvas. From the testing I’ve done, the speed for displaying diagrams seems to scale much better and dragging around tables in large models is doable in an acceptable speed. This fix is in the upcoming releases of the 5.0 and 5.1 alpha versions of Workbench.

Apart from that, we’ve been doing some work on reintroducing OpenGL support to the Workbench canvas. Unlike the initial implementation, this time OpenGL is used directly instead of going through Cairo’s experimental (and not quite reliable) support through the Glitz layer. This means that in machines with a recent graphics card, hardware acceleration will be used and working with large diagrams will be a lot smoother and faster. Of course, software rendering backends (GDI+, Quartz and Xlib) will still be supported and used in case OpenGL is not the best …

The following is what i wrote on “43people.com” about the boss. I thought it was worth keeping in my own archives, since it’s actually a story about my life as it pertains to Mr. Bezos.

Back a few years ago, I was taking some classes down in Edmonds. The one I’m thinking of in particular was on the care and feeding of unix. We were using red hat linux 6.0 or some crufty version that wasn’t so crufty at the time.

Anyway, the prof didn’t require that we buy any books, but he made some suggestions. And he also suggested that we buy them on this new fangled “Internet” thing through a few of his friends down south in Seattle at this place called Amazon.com.

And thus was my introduction to O’Reilly and Associates. I soon thereafter bought a book called “ …

What do y'all think of the idea of a 3d printer? Aaron uses one at work. They call them "C&C machines." I don't recall what C&C stands for, but it basically takes a 3d model from a computer and cuts it into a piece of metal. I've been thinking about building such a beast.

Since there are a lot of data related to such a task, I figured I could get mysql and maxdb involved. Feedback?

What do y'all think of the idea of a 3d printer? Aaron uses one at work. They call them "C&C machines." I don't recall what C&C stands for, but it basically takes a 3d model from a computer and cuts it into a piece of metal. I've been thinking about building such a beast.

Since there are a lot of data related to such a task, I figured I could get mysql and maxdb involved. Feedback?