After about 9 months of work with ST Ericsson, it is time for me to change missions. I haven't posted anything recently because I've had a lot of work to do, and very little time to do it. My free time has been spent sleeping on a train (to the point of almost missing my stop), and a little bit of games here and there to stop me from snapping. Oh, and a few photos here and there too, more on that later.

So, this is it. I've just paid croissants for everyone here in the 2 Linux teams, about 50 people, and since it is more or less the holiday season, I've already started to say goodbye to some colleagues, and some friends. In 9 months I've become quite attached to a lot of people here, and to a lot of things too. I'll miss a lot of colleagues, I'll miss the technology here, I'll miss some of the equipment used for developing and testing. Agilent 8960s, especially. The joys of being a technology consultant.

 My next mission will be closer to home, more news on that later on. What I can say is that I won't be taking the train every single day, and yes, it is in the same city! Only a tram trip away, more or less. Even if I will miss my old colleagues, I'm looking forward to my next mission.

It took a long time to find him, but we found him. And here he is! His name is Flanby, and he is our new kitten.

When Plume died, we felt an immediate loss. We knew that it would happen, the vet was very clear about this, but still. We miss her, and believe it or not, we miss her bad temper, her claws, we miss having to shove her in a carry cage to go to Lolo's parents and have our arms torn off. We also miss her sleeping on the bed with us, the little hello we got in the morning when we woke up and when we came back from work (even if it was only to get some food). We miss her. We also miss the company.

Flanby is not Plume's replacement, and never will be. He is a different cat, with different habits and different character (I hope!!). But once again, we find a purring ball of fur when we get back from work, but as he is only a kitten, he doesn't sleep on the bed with us, he runs around the bedroom, jumps on anything that moves under the blankets (or doesn't move, you never know, it might move if I pounce on it). Our nights are very, very short. We can't sleep for more than 2 hours straight, because he can't sleep for 2 hours straight.

But the best part! He's a geek! He loves cables (especially cat 5 Ethernet and USB cables), he knows how to turn off my NAS and he helps me play games. Whilst working, I was very surprised to see an icon flash up telling me that my network drive was now disconnected. Apparently he likes the blue flashing light on the network drive. So he pressed it. Repeatedly. And how can you possible scream at something that cute? When I'm playing Titan Quest, he comes and helps me by beating up the undead hordes by repeatedly bashing them on the monitor. He hasn't yet scratched it. He sleeps on the keyboard, he has found  out how to turn off the laptop, he has IM'ed a friend and he has already made his first search on Firefox. "jjjjkjkkllllhhhhj" didn't return any answers. Oh, and he also deletes icons from my desktop. Ctrl-Alt-L is your friend.

There is some strange French tradition where an animal's name begins with a specific letter, depending on the year. This year, it is 'F'. Friends and, umm... "friends" have been helping us find names, some of which I really do not want to post online, and sign with my name. Let your imagination run, there are some awful "F" words (get the hint?). Flanby is a dessert here in France (probably elsewhere too), and apparently he has colours that ressemble it. Apparently. Don't ask!

So this is my little joy right now, even if it means I get even less sleep!

In this cruel world of "Metro, Boulot, Dodo" (French expression, literally, travel, work, sleep), you need a way to relax and to refresh your mind a little. There are several ways; some people like playing sports, some like to read, some like to watch a bit of TV, and the geeky population tend to do things on a PC, mainly gaming. Naturally, I'm part of the last category.

When you do crazy hours, you really, really need something that relaxes you. My gaming demands have varied wildly over the last few years, from the extreme "never" to the extreme "all day and all night". I've been there, I've done that.  In the very beginning, I was playing games on a ZX80 machine, but that doesn't count. However you want to see it, it was always about pixels vs pixels. I ran a ZX80 emulator a while ago to get back into it, but I couldn't. My real gaming began when I was in the Amiga era.

The Amiga was exceptional for its time. It had blazingly fast graphics for the time, stereo sound (stop smircking in the back there), 512k of RAM to have fun with (you, in the back, get out!) and it had enough general interest from the public for game publishers to earn a living from developing games. Almost everything was out there, what do you want? Adventure? Got that covered. Action? More than anyone could want! Puzzle? Over here! Shoot 'em ups? Come on, this is the platform they were created on! The Amiga had about everything. A developer needed few things, most were standard. You have an 880k diskette, you have a 68k processor (68000, for compatibility reasons), a standard SDK and it is running on standard machines. Some (few!) had CPU upgrades, some (a bit more) had RAM extensions, and I even got my 512k RAM extension specifically for Dungeon Master. Now comes the tricky bit. Something interesting. You need to make a game that does not require Internet, therefore you cannot easily add mods or extensions, not in todays sense, anyway. This needs to be playable, but the geek generation was only just getting started, we didn't play all day. Some of us even went outside from time to time. So developers made "simple" games; cute sprites and animations, simple rules, simple gameplay, infinite possibilites. A game I spent literally years playing was Populous. The rules were simple, the objective even more so, but how you get that done is up to you. How do you want to play? Defensive, agressive, all-out suicidal? With a few clicks of a mouse, you created your empire of minions. Good or evil, your choice. Peter Molyneux  was the genious behind that, and he has been an inspiration to me. The fact that I am a developer today is greatly thanks to him. I cannot explain how much his games and his vision on programming at the time inspired me.

So here we have it, the "fun games" generation. MIPS and space constraints made everyone careful about what they made. Eventually, like everyone else, I "upgraded" to the wonderful world of PCs. I no longer had by 4096 colours, my 16-channel stereo sound, my cute GUI for doing everything I used to do. Welcome to DOS. Welcome to CGA/EGA graphics, and welcome to a horrible, really REALLY annoying beep. One of the first games I bought was The Blues Brothers, which was a fun platform game, but the sound wasn't sound, it was just beeps. Still, fun enough. Time went by, and a ridiculous amount of processors came out. My 386SX25 became a DX, then a 486SX, DX and DX2. I never got a DX4. Then came the era of the Pentium processor. Games got faster and faster, and we could do so much more. The really old games no longer worked, because they were still designed for 4MHz processors, and even switching off turbo mode made no difference. For the young ones out there, there was a switch on the front of the PCs that actually made it go slower. No, I am not joking.

It came to a point where the CPU was no longer the bottleneck, and all the other components started to suffer. Video cards being number one on the list. A few cards came out, accelerating Windows and/or DOS. Time to make a change. My change was the Matrox Mystique. The Mystique was a 3D accelerator card, almost. Technically it was a 2D accelerator with 3D support. It came with a bundle of games, and I must have played Mechwarrior 2 to death. Destruction Derby was fun, too, but not quite my style. Here I was running around in a huge "Mechwarrior", blasting ennemies to bits, and enjoying real 3D graphics, not the software rendered 3D/2D. I walked on textured ground that went by smoothly in full screen, a glorious 1024x768. Lifelike ennemies were blown to bits, or, to be more precise, lifelike ennemies blew me into component parts, and I could see the explosions close up in all their glory. I wanted more.

I'll spare you the rest; better video cards, more hard drive space, faster processors... The list goes on. Doom, Descent, MechWarrior, Magic Carpet, Quake... More recent titles like Freelancer, Neverwinter, Starcraft, Quake 3, Settlers 2... And very recently, high-end games like World of Warcraft, Eve Online, Neverwinter Nights 2, etc... And then things stopped. Things are going way too fast for me, I feel old. I don't have the energy to buy the latest high-end video card, I don't want to change my processor all the time, and I've changed. I'm not even looking for the same games anymore. I don't have the time, I prefer to do other things. I don't have the money, I prefer to spend my money on "more interesting things". A few years ago, I wouldn't have believed it.

This all sprang up from an article at GamePro.  Their argument is that todays games are too big and too complex. I don't know f that is true, I like big, I like complex, but I like my time more. I quit Eve Online because I have no way of controlling time. I could start without even knowing when I could leave. I gave up Warcraft because I wasn't free enough to do exactly what I wanted. Today I have a Windows machine for gaming (no rotten tomatoes, please!) and I've installed Impulse. The gaming list is rather simple; my current game is Titan Quest. I have no freedom about what I do, it is the same complaint as World of Warcraft, but this time, I control my time. I bought Spellforce, too. Cheap, fun, and again, what I am looking for. More or less. I miss the Bullfrog era, with Populous and Powermonger. I've taken a step back. I'm actually back on the "old" games, I've recently finished Freelancer and Neverwinter, and today I either play Titan Quest or Spellforce. While linear, they still remain playable, because I can sit down for 20 minutes, then get back up and return to the rest of my life. I still miss the old games, though. I really want a sandbox game, one where you can do just about anything, for as long (or as short) as you want.