User:Sodovan

Long time hobbyist and sometimes professional programmer.

Primordia

Way back when I was knee high to a grasshopper, like 1978 or so, my Dad bought a shiny new Radio Shack TRS-80 (it was called a Tandy Model 1 outside of North America). It had 4K of RAM, and a cassette drive.

I worked my way through David Lein's excellent tutorial on Radio Shack Level I BASIC, and got hooked on this programming thing.

Later on, the machine underwent surgery, and when it came back, it had 16K of RAM, and the Level II BASIC upgrade. After some adjustment to a very different language, I discovered that there was this USR() function. You could directly call machine language routines with this! Oooooo...

So I learned Z80 assembly language, hand-assembled routines, wrote programs that ran incredibly fast. A member of the local users group wrote a book on exactly this, and I helped proofread it.

I got addicted to writing entire programs in assembly using EDTASM...

Later, we got a Model III, with floppy disk drives. A member of the users group, Henry Yau, gifted me a few floppies filled with games, including Robot Attack, Dancing Demon, and many others. He was apparently famous, as I came across a pirated game a few years later, and in looking at the hex dump I found the pirate's comment "Look ma! No Yau's!"

Eukaryotia

In 1988, in my first year at university, I saw a book with a cool cover, known nowadays as "The Dragon Book" and learned the mysteries of compilers and stuff. I also picked up a copy of "Mix C" (OMFG their web page is still up!) to learn the language of the book's examples.

After uni, I did a lot of stuff at low levels, working with a multiprocessor OS vendor, and contracting on multiple firmware projects. One got me a patent (US 7058528) for some simple knowledge of a bit of Fourier and a bit of Maxwell.

Hominidae

I am currently working on:

• a small (125Kloc) Java web app. That's my paid job right now.
• reading the OpenSim-NGC/OpenSim-Tranquility server source code.
  • kinda dumping brain into here on what's in there.

Starbaby

Things that are tickling my brain right now:

• Helping with the NGC project (once I have gathered enough clue to be useful).
• WebRTC support for NGC.
  • Misterblue Waves has done the hard initial work of getting WebRTC working on OpenSim, using the Janus WebRTC server.
  • I forked it to:
    • Port it to NGC as it now stands.
    • Work on positional sound (Janus doesn't do that yet)
• Someone just mentioned LL's work on introducing Luau to SL. Interest piqued!