[openbeos] Me, Myself, and I

From: "Jonathan Tarbox" <jtarbox@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2002 20:55:55 -0600
    Well, been on the list for a few days and thought I'd post a little about 
myself and what I plan on doing (or more correctly, finishing..) for BeOS/OBOS.

A little background

    Some of you might remember me from BeOS Technical Support, circa R3 through 
to the end.  At any given time, there were only 1-2 tech's on the Be contract.  
During my time there I learned how to write applications within BeOS, and by 
the time the focus shift came (and thus the end of the Be support contract) I 
was getting fairly good at writting BeOS apps.  

    Not long after the shift, I took a long shot and sent a resume to Be, Inc 
directly.. low and behold, they were already familiar with my work and 
abilities so I moved to Cali.  Nothing real flashy, just a QA engineer, but it 
was a foot in the door.  

    Met alot of great people (pretty much everyone who worked there) and had 
one of the best times of my life.  *grin*  JBQ's Playstation 2 hooked up to a 
projector system with the streering wheel and pedals mounted to a desk..  
Andreas showing off a different DVD every other day...  Fabrice cursing with a 
french accent while playing volleyball..  Dan's whitty Bug database entries.. 
and Su Hong!  

Coding Experience

    3c509 driver - While I didn't write the first wrapper, Be engineer's 
started it to be exact, I did write the add-on for it and I did the update from 
R3.x to R4.  Shortly after I got chewed out from RHS and was asked by Be to 
remove the driver from my web site.  I no longer have this code, but had tulip 
and cabletron network driver ports in the works at the time of the end of the 
linux driver wrapper.  Speaking of licensing issues, what license is OBOS going 
to be under?  I'd hope something like the BSD license..  as I'd like to port 
some more drivers if at all possible.

    OpenDivX en/decoder - This was funny.. I completed my version of this for 
the beta media_player and found that Andreas had just released his version to 
the beta mailing list.  Mine supported multiple instances in the same namespace 
(MediaPlayer decodes all streams in one namespace and the opendivx libraries 
use alot of globals that clashed if multiple decodes happened in the same 
namespace) and Andreas had a nicely rolled out RGB conversion function.. So we 
talked and I merged them into one project and added overlay support.  Several 
weeks later, little did I know, Andreas was hired by Be, least he made it to 
Palm..  Unfortunately, the opendivx library itself was buggy and had problems 
encoding certain resolution streams.  When I get a chance, I'm gonna check out 
the latest library and see if it's any better.  Can someone from the OBOS 
media_kit team hook me up with some API's for encoding and decoding under the 
new media_server?

    Triggerfinger - Well, it all can be sumed up to: A GameSpy clone for BeOS.  
It is near completion and I haven't released it to the public yet.  Quake and 
QuakeII support was finished, but the Shogo, Unreal Tournament, and QuakeIII 
support was halted since they were never finished/released for the BeOS...  I'd 
like to hear from the net_kit folks as to whether or not OBOS will have a full 
BSD style socket interface (like BONE was to be)?  Will it support raw sockets? 
 Will sockets be file descriptors, unlike they are in R5?  I wanted to use them 
to determine the number of hops to a server.  Also, if anyone has any games 
they wrote/ported and there is a master list of game servers out there, let me 
know.. I'd gladly add support for them.

Ok, I'm tired and I've talked enough for now...

Later,
Jonathan Tarbox
[openbeos] Me, Myself, and I

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