The US Ambassador in Libya was killed in an attack yesterday by "Islamist gunmen” blaming America for a film they said insulted the prophet Mohammad. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/12/us-libya-usa-attack-idUSBRE88B0EI20120912

When looking for hobbies, I wanted to do something that got me off the computer.   Not just because all my muscles had atrophied into an E.T. like husk…but mostly. I’ll update this with what the garden looks like now but here’s what I went with: Here we’ve got onions, lettuce, parsley, carrots, cucumbers and tomatoes. We also planted 1 little Morning glory plant…My son Alex and I “take care” of this one. here we’ve got some strawberries, black berries...

Recently there was an article on Wired that interviewed some people about how the death of Steve Jobs affected them.  I was interviewed for the article and how I massively cut down my hours and started handing things off to others as I realized that I was slowly wrecking myself working such crazy hours and being away from my family. One of the smaller changes is that I now bring my dog to work.  Pictured here is Stardock’s Vice President, Derek Paxton with my dog Bailey. ...

So this year I took up gardening as a hobby. And my boys wanted to have pumpkins and a few of them have already come in. The best pumpkin has already “detached” itself from the vine.  I’m wondering if it’ll “stay good” until Halloween time. Anyone out there with experience in this?

http://www.nest.com/living-with-nest/ Anyone out there get a Nest? I was thinking of getting one for our cottage up north. It’s a “smart” thermostat that will hook up to the Internet and let you monitor and change the temperature from remote (along with a zillion other features). But I wanted to find out if anyone has this and whether they liked it or not.

  http://www.systemcomic.com/2011/08/03/so-youre-mad-about-something-on-the-internet/ A great way to diffuse a raging Internet troll.

While the unemployment rate nationally remains over 8%, the unemployment rate in the tech industry is basically zilch. Software developers and game studios can't hire people fast enough and fiercely compete for the talent out there. This is why companies fiercely guard their company cultures. When every person at a given company knows that they can easily find another job if they so choose, the onus is on companies to make sure that the "work experience" is such that they have an incentiv...

(from a forum discussion) It’s not that I don’t take the issue seriously. It’s just that I don’t take you seriously.

For the last few weeks, the poor IT team have been battling spam bots. Let’s give a shout out to all our hard working moderators who have been able to clean it up quickly and the IT team that’s been making it harder for them to do it.

First off, I want to thank all the people who have written their kind words of support these past few days. I wish I could say this is the first time we’ve had to deal with a frivolous lawsuit and I wish I could say it was the last. It happens. It’s business. The only difference here is that one party doesn’t normally leak this sort of thing out to get press coverage. It is amazing how many people will look at a bunch of unsubstantiated allegations and assume they’r...

Smarter developers than myself (Which would be most of them) have told me that there are “Tricks” to making DirectX 9 support multithreaded graphics.  Unfortunately, they’re beyond my capability. DirectX 11, by contrast, natively supports a process spinning off a graphics related job into a thread (as opposed to it being in the same thread as the main message pump thread). When I joined the Fallen Enchantress team as lead developer (the first time I’ve held that position in over a...

What kind of place do you want to work at? Stardock’s a pretty fun place to work.  We have almost no turn over and morale is pretty high.  It is, however, a nerdy place. That means there’s lots of references to Monty Python, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Robot Chicken that sometimes float around.  That is to say, it's not a place for everyone. When we interview people, we make some effort to make sure people know that Stardock is a silly place.  People bri...

It's no secret I'm not a fan of the way Microsoft is handling Windows 8.  So how could they have done it? First, simplify/unify the underlying platform in a way that developers can feel confident that they're not going to get screwed over again (That Silverlight knowledge in my brain is going to be stored right with my OS/2 SOM storage). That means .NET .NET .NET.  You make sure that if you write for .NET 4.5 that it'll work on any Windows 8 target.  I don...

I’ve had JoeUser.com as my home but with two differnet IDs (draginol and frogboy) so thoroughly conflicted at this stage, I thought it would make sense to set up a site that combines them. My articles still get posted on all the Stardock sites (you might be reading this on JoeUser or WinCustomize or Sins of a Solar Empire. Who knows.  But now you can find all my stuff together at www.littletinyfrogs.com .