Autoconf 2.62 has now been released.

I have been anticipating this release for more than a year now due to its support for openmp and a number of C99 compiler check enhancements.

This will be the last autoconf release under the GPL version 2; going forward we’ll be seeing GPL version 3.

Spiffy.

So I found myself an absolutely amazing engineering job!

A couple weeks ago I had an interview with a company by the name of Rising Edge Engineering. For those of you without an electrical background of sorts, a rising edge is the part of a digital electronic signal where the voltage rises from low to high, off to on, or 0 to 1.

The interview was absolutely amazing. The way that the conversation went was something like “I don’t know how to do anything that you guys do! And, I am absolutely committed to learning what it takes to do this”.

Their response was something along the lines of “Ooooo! I want that!”

So here I am, employed as an Engineer in Training in the discipline of Electrical Engineering for Rising Edge Engineering.

Fun Hey!

So I am bringing my post-graduation sabbatical to an end and am now fully into the creation of my engineering career.

I spent the past six months since graduation working in the construction industry with an awesome residential framing company known as LPT Construction. The owner and manager has been really great to work for while I was working through school, and was totally willing to work around whatever crazy school schedule I had.

I really have learned an enormous amount about construction, management, safety and productivity from the years of part and full time work in this industry.

Nevertheless, I am now really interested in starting my software engineering career; after all, I attained my degree for a reason right!

Anyways, so I am available for hire! If you want to take a look at my resume, please have at it!

-Ted

About 2 years ago I purchased two monitors for a dual monitor setup on my home workstation. Unfortunately, I was thoroughly disgusted with the image quality of my mythtv system when I was using my traditional CRT as a monitor. So I sacrificed my second monitor and have been using it as my television for the past long while.

That all changed this week when I purchased a new 26” LCD television to use and the monitor for my mythtv media server.

Now that I finally got my second monitor out of so called bondage, I took the time to configure a dual monitor setup on my main workstation.

I was surprised at how straightforward this was with OpenSUSE 10.3. Originally I had expected that I would need to do at least a little bit of manual configuration inside my xorg.conf. Well, it turns out that dual monitors was far easier than I had expected and I am now working on httperf across the dual monitor set-up.

As a side note, I am using an nvidia 7800GS with the proprietary driver.

Well, I have been using the development versions of OpenSUSE 10.3 since alpha 5. The operating system has certain stabilized quite a bit now at Beta 3.

In one week (Sept 20) the first release candidate will be pushed out the door. I am expecting only a few changes between now and then.

One of the real big *Behind the Scenes* changes, has been with the package management system. If you have been following the development of the OS since 10.1, you will surely have heard that there have been numerous complaints with the system.

Primarily the complaints have been associated with the the integration of the red carpet technologies into the software management stack.

Essentially in 10.1 and 10.2, there were two package managers. The traditional yast stuff, and the newer red carpet stuff (zmd/rug). I personally blame a lot of the problems on the necessity to synchronize (and failure thereof) between the two technologies.

Anyways, with 10.3 looming in just under a month, the *new* package management stuff seems to have more or less hit its stride.

ZMD has been removed from the OpenSUSE distribution and the old yast and red carpet packaging stacks can finally be said to have a full grown healthy child. zypper. So far, I have no major complaints here at all, although some of the error messages are somewhat oblique.

Also in the news is that the people at AMD have released a good chunk of the specifications for the ATI R500 graphics chips. Currently the documentation (894 pages so far) mostly reflects the necessary information for implementing proper two dimensional support for applicable cards. Supposedly, the three dimensional register information will be available some point next week.

I am by no means an expert at graphics driver implementations, but from what I have read, this seems to be fairly promising. One could certainly hope that it will be possible to make the applicable cards *less evil* as time moves along.

Anyways, I won’t be making any purchase in the graphics card domain for the foreseeable future.

Keep on swimming :)