• JamesHelferty

James Helferty

How were you involved with TPU?

I mostly just lurked in the IRC channel and chatted with folks. I wasn't one of those that actually went out of his way to get projects and stuff started. If someone asked a programming question in the channel, I'd try to help, but that was about the extent of my programming involvement with the community.

How about a capsule summary of the programming you did in your TPU years?

At the time, I was mostly interested in Turbo Pascal mixed with inline assembly. I had a couple of graphics libraries I was throwing together for the purposes of making a sprite-based game of some sort. I seem to recall hacking my own PCX decoding routines, a bunch of VESA mode programming, optimized blitting code, etc. Nothing really interesting ever came of it.

After a while, I moved on to Linux and programming in C. I didn't have much time for TPU anymore by then, though.

What are you up to now professionally and/or academically?

I'm currently working at TransGaming Technologies on the Cedega development team. Perhaps you've heard of us?

Before that, I had a short stint at Strategy First, working on a couple of projects that never got released. It was a co-op job, but I got to really dig in deep on a bunch of stuff. The project I spent the most time on was called Zero-G Marines; I wrote the input system, in-game console, config file loading routines and a couple of equally uninteresting subsystems, although I spent most of my time adding new features and functionality to the animation and rendering subsystems. (Ah, nostalgia.. the early days of pixel shaders and vertex shaders.. good times..)

What are your favorite programming languages and tools today?

I spend most of my time coding in C, since that's what work requires. As for what tools I use, I'm kind of partial to using Kate for my editing work; Anjuta has a tendancy to crash with a codebase our size, and Kproject always locks up while trying to do its Intellisense-style stuff. Sometimes simpler is better.

Then again, Kate is no bed of roses either; in recent iterations, they've gotten rid of the project view, which I had really ocme to rely on, and the version they shipped with openSuse 10.1 crashes every time another application modifies one of the files it has open. Which makes working with source control a real pain in the butt. I've looked around time and again, but nothing else really comes close to what Kate offers. Which is unfortunate.

As an aside, since I spend most of my time working on graphics-related stuff, I tend to spend a lot of time digging around in the OpenGL programmable pixel and vertex processing extensions. So I suppose you could say that those are kind of like my favorite programming languages..

What sorts of software are you most often developing lately?

Look at the Cedega feature list, and you'll see a couple of the things I've worked on in there. Other than that, I don't really have much on the go. I've got a couple of personal programming projects that I toy around with now and then, but nothing really worth mentioning.

I'll let y'all know if that changes.

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