This week, I’ve a piece of ‘homework’ to do. I’ve got an interview lined up for the 16th at a company based 130 odd miles away. I’ve no problem with that at all. They’ve even given my an assignment to do. This is fine.
What’s not fine is that I powered up my PC, today, to start the project, and it wont start up. I’ve a horrible feeling that it’s either the PSU (Power Supply Unit) of the internal wiring. And that’s a really stinker, because it’s come at the worst possible time.
My PC is the only thing I own that runs Windows (aside from my Dreamcast, that is), everything else runs different shades of Linux. The project needs to be written for Windows.
‘Not bad,’ I hear you cry. ‘You can write the code on Linux, and compile on or for Windows.’
Not the case. Along with the .exe file, these guys want the full code listings and a Visual Studio project file to go with it. I can only guess that it’s so that they can check that the code was written by me, and not stolen offa the web somewhere.
The basic project (without giving too much away) is this: I have to write a program in C++ that will load a selection of images, stored in a custom file format, as fast as I can get the system to load them, then display them onscreen using OpenGL. The files are in the 15/20 meg size range, so loading them will take a few cycles more than a compressed JPEG image. Then there’s the ‘Add extra flourishes. For instance, a filter system like Edge Tracing or Grey Scaling’
That’s all gonna take a while. I’ve only one week to do this. And my PC’s dead.
Crap!
Oh, well. there’s very little I can do. I could dual boot my laptop with Windows. But that’ll require backing everything up and reinstalling everything. For two reasons:
- Ubuntu 10.04 currently takes up the entire 80gig hard drive
- Windows has to be installed first to allow dual booting (without too much messing about with GRUB)
I’m going to see if I can beg, steal or borrow a laptop or PC from any of my friends, I’m sure they’ll understand… Hopefully.
Update:
My brother has let me borrow his brand new PC build. he is an absolute life saver. He said that he doesn’t need it just yet, as he hasn’t a graphics card for it, and he’s still got his laptop. I owe him big. I’ve just dropped my ATI graphics card in there and it works like a treat.
Now to install OpenGL and Visual Studio. Wish me Luck.
I’ll probably end up using this project as a spring board into writing software that will load different file formats. Possibly a media player software or something like that.
