Archive for February, 2009

I have been working on getting my LinkedIn profile up to date so I can feel comfortable inviting more people to link to me. I have included new functionality to have relevant blog posts included on my LinkedIn profile. I was struggling with how to enter my freelance web design and Linux consulting while I was a student, treat but I think I came up with a solution, so the gaps in my employment history are gone. Excellent!

I have an arcade cabinet that runs AdvanceMAME 0.106. My arcade cabinet has an arcade monitor in it and AdvanceMAME is the only software I have found that can recreate the arcade games with pixel-perfect accuracy on my monitor. Unfortunately, AdvanceMAME is no longer in active development, although there was a recent bugfix release.

I am trying to use the source from Misfit MAME 0.127e which supports Donkey Kong II: Jumpan Returns (or d2k for short) but the changes in MAME are somewhat drastic and I’m having trouble coming up with the appropriate code to make the new dkong.c work in the old MAME environment. I will keep trying, though, because it would be amazing to get it running on my arcade cab until I can afford a real Donkey Kong machine to run D2K on.

Who knows, maybe once I understand the code a little bit better, I might be able to make some real contributions to MAME or possibly fix some buggy drivers in AdvanceMAME 0.106.

I am looking for a good way to be able to map multiple IT governance and compliance frameworks (like COBIT, SOX, TOGAF, ISO 20000, etc.) to one another and be able to interactively browse through them. A week ago I came across Moritz Stefaner and his Relation Browser indirectly through an article called A Cosmological Approach to IT Governance about how the UN put together called some software called 6 Degrees to do something similar. Mr. Stefaner responded to my email within a few hours while the author of the article working at the UN hasn’t responded yet.

The only real problem is that the software is written using Flash and Actionscript. I know nothing about either so I’m working from the ground floor trying to get a grasp on what’s going on. Both Relation Browser and 6 Degrees are reportedly open source, but I can’t find 6 Degrees anywhere and the source for Relation Browser is not directly linked to anywhere that I could find (I had to ask Mr. Stefaner for the link).

Moritz Stefaner is a master of visual representation of data using newer technologies. I hold him in high regard and consult his work for inspiration much as I do Edward Tufte and his work.

A group of not so like-minded individuals at work have decided to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and then go out to lunch to discuss it. I really wish I were a faster reader because one month is just not enough time for me to make it through a tome of that magnitude. Next on the list looks to be Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. I guess we wanted to get polar opposites and see how much they overlap.