I'm a very bad blogger. Update on my life: I have an Intel internship and will start on 5/24/2010 at Ronler Acres 1 in Hillsboro, Oregon!

And I went back to RIT for graduate studies. Hopefully I have a clue what I'm doing. :) 

Hi! Sorry I haven't written. I've been so busy with my last quarter here at RIT. Last quarter was a good quarter, I made Dean's List with a quarterly GPA of 3.75. I totally did NOT expect an A in Modern Japan, that was a nice surprise to get such a high grade on the final to make this possible. This quarter is pretty good too, as I'm delving into Government and Politics of East Asia. The teacher is a tough guy, but he's reasonable. I did well on the midterm while the others did horribly. Intro to C.S. Theory is tough, but I'm managing it. The professor I had before was really bad, I like the new professor I have for C.S. Theory. Getting a 95% on the midterm, I can't complain!

Anyway, if you hadn't noticed, I updated my main website. It looks fabulous in Safari 4 and less so in Firefox 3 and of course it's substandard in Internet Explorer, but at least IE8 renders it correctly. I haven't tested on IE7 or IE6 but I'm not holding my breath on those browsers because they fail to comply with the standards.

I can't believe I'm graduating in 3 weeks! Holy cow! It was only 5 years ago that I was bitching about my first year at RIT with a billion feet of snow—but now I can go back home and enjoy 50 degrees with t-shirts while my mom yells at me that it’s cold. Not after Rochester!

Anyway, I’m going to Jay’s with a friend. Let’s hope their service is a bit better this time!

One at a time. I think I'll start on my IM/IRC framework. Pidgin sucks on Windows, right? :) I'm hoping to provide the same functionality but with .NET and WPF. So, Banter is born. I'll be focusing on AIM and IRC at first, since they're of the most use to me. Banter will be composed of two things, the actual visible IM application and the class library that powers it. I plan to wrap OscarLib until I get around to providing protocol plugins. Yes I know the authors of OscarLib has a WPF client for it, but I think I have a different philosophy. This project isn't related to the GNOME project's Banter.

However, I'm hitting a bug in WPF. I was prototyping a UI and came across this weird bug I cannot reproduce in software rendering. Maybe it's my graphics driver? See the image attached to this post. This isn't limited to menus, I see black areas around other WPF elements like when using Yahoo! Messenger for Vista. Another thing that bothered me was the performance and the drawing. Again, maybe it's my drivers. Windows Vista introduced a new Window Manager, the Desktop Window Manager. Moving around windows doesn't cause tearing, but if I resize a window, WPF is slow to re-render things. I tested this on native Windows applications like Explorer. Again, I see the same problem, but not as pronounced as in WPF. Mac OS X doesn't have this problem with its composting window manager, resizes are smooth and instantaneous.

This is disappointing. Any ideas?

Hey there. I'm just testing Windows Live Writer.

Ok, seriously. I think this time the website is going to be serious now that I have more time. Sure when I go back to school in December, I won't have as much time, but at least the infrastructure is there!