A Tour Of My Work~

In a few hours from now I'll have my second appointment with a psychologist, but that's not what I want to talk about right now. Instead I would like to detail some of the more relevant projects and such I'm working on at the moment. While most details will probably only interest about 0.1% of those who read my blog, I'd nevertheless like to blabber on about things which really interest me. Yes, I'm a geek :D

First of all I just started work on the NT4-style USB stack for the ReactOS Open Source project ( www.reactos.org ), a free Windows clone. After completing this I'll move on to creating an NT5-style (Win2k/XP) USB stack, followed by Firewire support as well. Thanks to generous donations to the ReactOS project this work even gets me a bit of money (few Euro/week, but still). If you'd like to donate to me, but see something back for it as well, you could donate to USB support in ReactOS instead ;) At this point the money I'd get from donations would be enough to work a paid 8-16 hours a month on ReactOS (6-12 Euro/hour). A few 10 Euro donations would allow me to work on this project a lot more :)

Related, I'm still working on ReactOS-Synthesis, which is the project to merge Windows with ReactOS files, thus expanding its functionality using Open Source components. Some of the things one could do this way is to add functionality to Windows which otherwise wouldn't be available. It'd also allow one to keep for example Windows XP up-to-date so that one doesn't have to buy Vista or the upcoming Windows 7 to get the latest features (and extra bloat...). Just in my work on the ReactOS USB stack I have already noticed that the Windows XP USB stack omits quite a few things in the USB specification (some were added later in service packs). It'd be nice to add such features oneself instead of having to wait for Microsoft to graciously add those features in an SP (after a year or so).

A side-project I'm researching is putting a VHDL/Verilog simulator together. Current simulators aren't that great, not to mention feature bloody expensive licenses (think tens of thousands of euros per license). An existing Open Source simulator (GHDL) is usable, but very limited. I'm looking into writing a simulator together with Pieter at this point. In his work he uses such tools a lot and thus knows exactly what he'd like to see in one :)

Trevor is at this moment putting the final touches on a level editor for our game engine, which'd finally allow us to easily construct our games. I've got a few game scripts ready already and am currently revising a draft of the first game we'll be working on. I'll soon add an entry for it on the Nyanko.ws site. This latter site will also see a complete refresh by next month, in time for the Beta testing of our first game and its release before the end of the year. Right now we're also working on expanding the company. In particular we're looking for graphical artists (for e.g. concept art) and 3D modeling people (3D Studio & Maya), audio people (music, sound effects) as well as Alpha/Beta testers (somewhat less urgent right now :) ).

I'm setting up an intranet right now to support this expansion featuring an SSH forwarding server and various servers including HTTP, FTP, SVN, SQL and others. I'm basing it on the approach used by Pieter's company, AimCom, as it seemed like a sensible approach when I saw him use it the past months.

In other news, I'm waiting for some money from a web development job to arrive this month and am about to start on a new one, featuring porting a Joomla patch to the latest version. I also was working on a website for a Malaysian company, but with no response to my latest emails I've decided to pause work on this project. For a Norwegian customer I'm working on a site, though, which'll be done this month.

I could still use more paid projects, though. There are some freelancing sites to advertise one's services, but if any of you know of some web- or software development work, don't hesitate to recommend my services ^_^

Alright, that's enough for now... it's noon and I haven't even had breakfast yet unless you count that piece of chocolate I had earlier. Need some real food now :P


Maya