New Job, Current Projects

I am not entirely sure why I haven’t posted here sooner.  I guess I felt it was best to get some time at the job under my belt before talking about it too much or I’d jinx it.  Either that or it’s my short attention span.  Either way, while a build grinds out, it’s time for an update.

I am alive and well and living on Ganymede.  Not really.  I’ve moved to San Jose.  Pretty much the week I arrived here, I’d gotten the matter of my unemployment handled.  I now work for Hewlett-Packard in their emerging technologies group.  I’m not really at liberty to talk about my project (even though it was leaked), but I can say I’m working on some new products for the company and I get to spend a lot of time working with a lot of open source material.  I think Dr. Boykin might be pleased.

Of course, I’m still living in a small space and don’t have my electronics equipment with me, so there hasn’t been much fun hardware hacking on that front.  On the software side, I’ll mention a follow-up to my EeePC.  I blew away the Asus-supplied Linux distro (known as Xandros) and replaced it with Easy Peasy.  I have to say that, while I haven’t used Easy Peasy heavily yet, it strikes me as not only as superior to Xandros on a netbook but possibly as one of the most attractive Linux distros I’ve ever seen.  Better still, of course, is that installing it involves removing the copy-on-write filesystem scheme used on Xandros, so I now suddenly have an attractive desktop environment, a full suite of development tools, and plenty of free space on the SSD to spare.  Developing from an SD card isn’t horrible, but it can get really slow.

One of the fun things I get to do at work is to muck around with extensions to an emulator.  If I can find a way to write about that on here without accidentally getting myself in trouble, I’ll make a future article of it.