Eric Cosky

Today is my first day at home after leaving my job at Rockstar San Diego. Deciding to leave was a decision I didn't make lightly and I can only hope my future projects will be as satisfying as Red Dead Redemption.

It is a strange feeling to be on my own again after working so long for and with other people. It is an exciting time for me and I plan to take a some time to absorb the change and reorient to the new situation.

I've been using the Visual Studio 2008 beta for a while now, and recently I discovered the built in support for unit testing. It's pretty slick, well integrated, and soon I found myself using it to answer some performance questions that had been lingering for some time related to how to best pass large value types around in C#. In my case, I'm interested in Matrix3D, a struct with a 4x4 matrix for a total of 16 doubles in it weighing in at 128 bytes. That's quite a chunk of data to pass in as a parameter to a function or to copy from the stack as a return value. Because I have so much code that depends on passing matrices and other large value types around, I decided to use the new unit testing features to try to measure which approach would produce the best performance. This is what I found out.

As I was doing some experiments with my Virtual PC setup, I realized my base disk image was just too small. I was trying to install the Windows Driver Development Kit, and the installation failed because the disk simply had no room for it. When I first created my disk image, which is a basic Windows XP installation on a single NTFS partition that filled the VHD with a variety of utilities added to it to make my work easier, I created the VHD using the disk wizard with the disk size to 4 GB. I thought that because I had set it to be a dynamically expanding disk that it would allow the disk to grow to any size I needed later. Unfortunately, I was wrong; the disk is limited to 4GB but it will only be as large as is needed to store the used sectors. This makes sense now that I know more about it, but I was left with a decision to either reinstall XP from scratch or find some way to extend the partition.

It's been just over a year now since I switched this website over to Drupal. It was a bit rough at first, not because it was bad but because it comes with a very lean set of modules and to make your site even moderately nice it can take more effort than other websites seem to require. At least, at first.

If you are still using FTP to access your website, it's time to close that gaping security hole. Every time you log in, your passwords are being sent in plain text which is exposing yourself and your host to risk of attack by anyone with access to the hardware between you and your host. That's a lot of people. Fortunately, there is a replacement for FTP that solves this security problem: SFTP, or "SSH File Transfer Protocol". In plain terms, it's a secure replacement for FTP.

A while back I took it upon myself to learn C# and also to update my understanding of the best way to do UI programming with Windows. In the process of my research I found several books that I found very helpful. The books listed below cover a range of topics that helped me get closer to my goals. None of these are to be considered beginner books, however an experienced C++ programmer might find themselves breezing through an occasional chapter due to the similarity that some of the concepts have to C++. This was bound to happen given that C# draws so much from C++.

I've completed the database upgrade for the website. Everything seems to be in order but if you see any bugs, please let me know. Thanks -

I recently upgraded my main PC to Vista Ultimate and decided to take advantage of the family upgrade special, where you can buy two Vista Home Premium licenses for other PCs in the house. One of them is my laptop, a Toshiba Tecra M4. I have enjoyed Vista enough on my desktop that I thought it would be worth updating the laptop for the $50 it costs as part of the family upgrade special. The file sync features alone made it worth considering for me, but there are a lot of neat things about Vista that I was looking forward to also.

CNET has an interesting article that touches apon new legal issues surrounding avatars and who is in control of them.

Something I had noticed a while ago but had never found the time to investigate the cause was why running .NET applications form a shared drive would cause the program to crash. If the same program were copied to a local drive, the program would run just fine.