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Comments

Cross-posted from my old Adobe blog.

I just approved and then changed my mind and un-approved a comment. The comment was a fair, if somewhat harsh, criticism of the Pixel Bender Toolkit. I originally decided to approve it because it was one person’s opinion and a response to something I wrote, and I don’t mind answering criticisms (even when they are worded less-than-delicately). However, I changed my mind because the writer decided not to include a valid name or e-mail to respond to.

So, that will be a rule I’m going to hold on to moving forward. If you want to post your honest opinion to something I write, I will always try to honor you and will post it; and respond. As long as your comments are:

  • honest
  • not advertising
  • not overt flame-bait
  • do not swear
  • are signed with your real name (or handle) AND e-mail address (which is not published, but lets me know that you are willing to put your name to something)

Hopefully, this should not strike anyone as draconian.

JJ, if you want to re-post with your real name and e-mail address, I will gladly approve your comment.

Speaking at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit – June

If you are planning on attending the AMD Fusion Developer Summit in Bellevue, WA in June, come see me talk about Pixel Bender (probably for the last time!) with Bob Archer. Here is the description of the session:

Pixel Bender is a domain-specific image processing language created by the Adobe Image Foundation, and includes a runtime designed to work well across heterogeneous hardware, scaling efficiently for multiple cores. This runtime currently ships in a number of Adobe’s flagship products. Bob Archer, Technical Lead, and Kevin Goldsmith, Engineering Manager, will talk about the design of the language, compilers, and runtime. They will also discuss how the Adobe system can incorporate complimentary technologies like OpenCL and can scale to accommodate new hardware paradigms like the AMD Fusion processors.

Hope to see you there!

Upcoming talks and events

(all times/dates are PST)

I have a few conference talks and such in the next couple weeks, so I thought I’d send out some pointers.

If you are attending the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, I’ll be speaking on a panel discussing how to educate the next generation of computer scientists for the new paradigms of parallel processing. The Panel is called “Parallelism and Education: Navigating Through a Sea of Cores”, the session is on Monday 9/13 at 11am, right after the keynote. I’ve written about this session last month.

On Tuesday, September 14th, around noon, I’ll be appearing live on Intel Software Network TV, you can watch here.

Later that evening, I’ll be hosting a Pixel Bender Meetup at 6pm at the Mars Bar in San Francisco. All Pixel Bender developers are welcome to join me and talk Pixel Bender. More info and directions here.

The next week, I’ll be speaking at the NVidia Graphics Technology Conference in San Jose. My session is on Thursday, September 23rd at 11am and it is called “GPGPU in Commercial Software: Lessons From Three Cycles of the Adobe Creative Suite.” More information here.

If you attending IDF or GTC or you’ll be in San Francisco on the 14th, come by and say “hi!” Otherwise, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to post video or slides from my sessions soon after.

Of course, I’ll be at MAX as well and may have some surprising things there, but I can’t talk about that yet 🙂

A tale of two customer support experiences

I’ve been putting together a mac mini-based home theater PC. I was going to post on it when I got it finished, but instead I have a different story.

Putting it together, I bought a few components and two different ones failed within two weeks (two weeks of each other and two weeks of opening their boxes). One was the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid. A USB-based TV tuner to record over-the-air digital TV. The other failed component was a Logitech DiNovo Edge (Mac Edition) bluetooth keyboard. Both of these are fairly pricey components, and are each somewhat critical for an HTPC.

The EyeTV just stopped being recognized by the computer. It worked fine for a few days and then poof. Dead. It happened right around the same time I did my first over-the-wire software update from them. I can’t say that it definitely was the software update, but very little else changed between when it was working and when it wasn’t. Rolling back to the previous software helped not-at-all. The computer doesn’t even see the EyeTv when it is plugged into the computer. For a device that is basically a few days old, this is a pretty crappy user experience. I contacted Elgato and they responded pretty quickly. After asking me the “dumb user” questions, they promised to send me a replacement quickly with a return label for me to return the dead unit. That was almost a week ago and I still haven’t received the new unit. Tomorrow it will be a week. That is unacceptable, I think, but I do like that they basically send you the replacement first and ask that you return the dead one.

Continue reading “A tale of two customer support experiences”

How I know that I’m still an engineer and entrepreneur at heart

We were looking at a demo of an agile-project tool yesterday. The tool itself was pretty good, but I just kept thinking about how I could write it myself and how much fun that would be. Then, once I looked at the cost of the license, I had to restrain myself from taking a week off and writing a competing tool that I could release as open source or sell at half the price.

Oh build-vs-buy, you always throw a bucket of ice water in the face of my reveries!

The best spam comment I’ve received thus far

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An idle thought on date naming in the new millenium

Let us pretend that you have a yearly festival, Awesome Fest. You’ve been doing it forever. Awesome Fest ’87 was insane, this year’s Awesome Fest ’09 will be crazy.

What do you call next year’s Awesome Fest? Awesome Fest ’10 sounds weird to me. Don’t you need to start using he whole year for a while (eg. Awesome Fest 2010)?

Maybe we’ll come up with something new?

Just a random thought…

My Favorite Posts of 2008

As is my tradition, I’m including my favorite posts of 2008 here. These are the posts that I like the best, they are not necessarily the most popular. Thanks for continuing to read my nonsense and ramblings, and here is to more in 2009!