Personal

An evening with ZMan and Benny

Jason Olson — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 20:12:00 GMT

As Benny mentioned on his blog, last night I had pleasure of going out to dinner with ZMan and Benny. We went to Ruby's Diner out at Redmond Town Center.

For those of you "not in the know", Ruby's Diner is a 50's diner among the many other 50's diner clones and knock-offs that tend to invade the rest of the country like a sweeping parasite spreading with reckless abandon, all the while trying to convey a sense of the Good Ol' 50s with a disdain that shows just how warped and twisted our country seems to be now when compared to "simpler times."

Of course, I find all that ironic considering that the waitresses wear extremely short skirts that are borderline-Hooters that you would have... (Read More)

Stones, Day 4

Jason Olson — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 00:01:00 GMT

Well, day four of Stones. I didn't get too much work done last night because I went out and had an excellent dinner with my wife and my father (who was in town on a business trip). Oh, and I also was working out some plans with some friends on an ultra-secret project :). I can't say anything yet, but hopefully once things settled down and we're a way into the project, we'll reveal it publicly. Until then, mum's the word :).

Soooooo, here is Stones on Day 4: ... (Read More)

Stones, Day 2

Jason Olson — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 02:06:00 GMT

Well, today was my second day in XNA land working on Stones (my Bejeweled clone and my first XNA game (and also a subtle play off of Jason Mauer's Bouncing Balls demo)). Once this game is finished, I'll be using it as a vehicle to do a series of game development screencasts on XNA (most likely it will also be in tutorial form that will be included with the video in the download).

I'm still just psyched how good XNA is. Maybe once I come down from "Cloud 9," I'll be able to come up with some constructive criticism. But until then, I'm going to just enjoy the ride. So, here's what Stones looks like today after Day 2: ... (Read More)

Heroes Kicks Total Buttay

Jason Olson — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 00:06:00 GMT

You know, when I read George's opinion last week, I was still skeptical. But I figured that I would tune in and watch it tonight. Oh... My... Goodness!!!! George was right, this show kicks total buttay. I just can't get enough of it. After an hour, I was pissed that it was over and I have to wait another week (ANOTHER WEEK!) to see the next one.

please, Please, PLEASE let the network not cancel this show. This is one of the best TV shows I've seen in a while (although now I don't know whether I like this or Eureka better). Man, between Eureka and Heroes, I'm in TV heaven right now.

Rory Joining Channel 9

Jason Olson — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 22:03:00 GMT

Yay, I can finally talk about this. For those of you that haven't heard yet, the incomparable Rory Blyth, the smartest man, is joining the C9 team.

Rory is going to make a GREAT addition to the C9 team and I expect to see some great stuff coming from him in the future. Of course, I'm also psyched because it means that he will most likely be working just one or two hallways away from me :).

Congrats Rory!

Virtual Machine Monitors, Exokernels, and Hypervisors, Oh My!

Jason Olson — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 22:11:00 GMT

For those of you that semi-regularly follow this blog, you may or may not have noticed that I've really been getting into OS Development lately. Of course, the first step is brushing up on x86 assembly language. Outside of that, it's a lot of Research, Research, Research, and more Research. Heck, even if it's not research, I just finished the book "Just For Fun", about Linus Torvalds (very enjoyable read, IMO).

One of the specific topics that has really excited me is the Virtual Machine Monitor architecture (type of Exokernel, Hypervisor, etc.). I figured I would take this opportunity to link out to a bunch of resources that I have found interesting as I read up on this topic (you'll find that every single one of these points to Wikipedia; I'm finding that I use Wikipedia MORE and MORE when doing research; I LOVE it!).

Enjoy :).

Now I just have to see what it would take to get a hold of a box with one of the new Intel VT or AMD chips :). Yum!!!

Feedback Wanted - Favorite Development Features in Vista/Longhorn Server

Jason Olson — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 14:18:00 GMT

Howdy all y'all. I'm hoping to get some feedback from all of you. Basically, I'm hoping to get a "reader's braindump" on what development features you are looking forward to most in Vista/Longhorn Server. So, what development features are you looking forward to most in Vista/Longhorn Server? Feel free to just leave a comment (nice and easy-like) :).

Writing Your Own OS With Visual Studio 2005

Jason Olson — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 01:29:00 GMT

Before I joined the ranks at Microsoft, a hobby I started to take up was Operating System development. Technically, I didn't get very far yet (I had just started). My "kernel" (if you can even call it that) basically just printed "Hello World" to the screen. But heck, it was booting up from a floppy, loading the kernel into memory, and executing to do that (in a VM of course, I wouldn't even dare run my hobby OS on an actual machine :P). ... (Read More)

Installing Ubuntu Under Virtual PC 2004

Jason Olson — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 14:55:00 GMT

After my post the other day linking out to a post about authoring file systems on Linux with Mono, I decided that I wanted to try it out myself. So, I went and grabbed the latest Ubuntu, and sojourned out to install it under Virtual PC 2004.

I remember trying to do this 6-12 months ago and having it fail _miserably_ for me (or most of the Linux distros for that matter) when trying to install under Virtual PC 2004. Eventually, I just gave up. Now that I have a little more knowledge on Linux and virtual machines using Virtual PC/Virtual Server, I decided to try again. Luckily, I'm now up and running with Ubuntu in a virtual machine. It wasn't without its hardships though.

Since I don't really use my virtual machines for multimedia purposes, I haven't bothered looking into whether the sound is working properly or not. Besides, my largest problem was with the graphics display. And if I can't even see what the hell I'm doing, how am I suppose to figure out if the sound is working :). Basically, when booting up Ubuntu, the graphics would freak out, go into a total whacko resolution, and there was no usage-o going on-o. This was easily fixable though. First, on the boot menu, I chose a display of 1024x768. Second of all, I forced it to boot with the vesa driver. You can either use the "boot with safe graphics" option or simply add "xforcevesa" as a boot option to the regular boot (which I ended up doing even though that might be the only difference between the two options. After doing that, my graphics were fine and I was living happily in Ubuntu land (as an aside: now I see why people are so excited about Ubuntu; it comes a _long way_ in bridging the "usability gap" between Windows/MacOS and Linux for the "typical" computer end-user (not the geek, mind you)).

Of course, after all this, I found this article on the Ubuntu site describing how to install it under Virtual PC 2004. How in the world could I have missed that article six months ago? I'm hoping it's just because the article is new and not because I'm a total tool.

So, to make a long story short, if you're wanting to try out Ubuntu under Virtual PC 2004 (and why wouldn't you considering everything you need is free :D), make sure to check out the guide from Ubuntu. It will save you time and heartache if you're not a Linux guy.

Authoring File Systems with Mono on Linux

Jason Olson — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 13:52:00 GMT

I know, this post isn't exactly Windows-related, but I thought it was cool nonetheless...

Miguel de Icaza recently posted on his blog on the topic of authoring file systems with Mono on Linux. Since I've been digging into File System "stuff" at work lately dealing with TxF and the like, I find this very intriguing.

With FUSE, you can essentially write user-level file systems that can be mounted in Linux. Not only that, Jon Pryor released a bridge for Mono that can be used to write file systems in Mono. Granted, I'd imagine there are some performance impacts and such that you may not want to do this in a production system (although I admit that my knowledge on the topic is NIL). It still seems like fun though. I know I have a couple of ideas that I've been batting around regarding developing my own file system driver for Windows. Perhaps I'll proof them out first on Linux and Mono in C# :).

Of course, all this makes me wonder what it would take to do this kind of thing on Windows. For those of you that may know better, is there a FUSE equivalent in the Windows arena? If there is, I wonder what it would take to create a bridge for that to enable writing mountable user-mode file systems on Windows. Hmmmmm. Maybe a post for a later date?