Todd Seiler

I’m always afraid of websites randomly disappearing, especially when they have useful information on them. I happened to stumble across a website that explains how to set up multiple dropbox instances on a windows 7 or vista machine. I’m going to briefly just copy that info here for my own reference ( and yours )

1. Setup dropbox like normal with an account.
2. Create a second user on your windows machine with a password.
3. Login as that second user.
4. Install dropbox again for that user and set it to synchronize a folder that both windows accounts can access.
5. Log back into the original windows account.
6. Find the dropbox.exe in the other user’s folder that you just created: c:\users\<username>appdata\roaming\dropbox\bin\dropbox.exe
7. Make a shortcut to that .exe file somewhere.
8. In the shortcut’s properties, change the “Target” field to something like this: runas /user:<username> /savecred C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\D ropbox\bin\Dropbox.exe
9. Double click the shortcut, type in the password, and it should be working.

I have been on multiple in-person interviews and, although I still don’t do very well at interviewing, I have picked up quite a few interview tips along the way. The main idea is: Interviewers are looking for any reason to reject you. Don’t give them that reason. This list will help you avoid common reasons for rejection. Some of these items might be completely wrong and may screw up your chances. If you think so, let me know and we can discuss it. After all, I said I wasn’t very good at interviewing. I will add more to this list when I think of them though too.

I have labeled each item as E – “Easy”, M – “Medium”, D – “Difficult”. Most of the difficult/medium entries are labeled as such because you have to remember to do them during the interview and you may be required to train yourself to stop doing bad things, which will require days, weeks, or months to get right. These difficult items are indeed difficult because there is already a lot going on during the interview.

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I manually installed notepad++ into my dropbox folder so I could use it anywhere. Unfortunately, it didn’t add the “Edit with Notepad++” entry for the context sensitive right-click menu. This trick works for almost any application that accepts a file name on the command line as the first argument.

To see if your application has this ability, open up a command prompt (start->run->cmd). For example, lets see if notepad has this ability. In the command prompt, type “notepad.exe file.txt” without the quotes and where file.txt is some text file in the directory the command prompt is currently in. Notepad will launch with file.txt loaded and showing. If you can do this with other apps (such as Notepad++), then you are good to go.

So to add the “edit with” menu option manually, you have to create a text file and add this to it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Edit with Notepad++]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Edit with Notepad++\command]
@="\"E:\\DropBox\\toddseiler\\My Dropbox\\Apps\\Notepad++\\notepad++.exe\" \"%1\""

Replace the path with wherever you installed the application you want to launch (in this case, it was notepad++.exe).

Two things of note: Make sure the path has double back slashes between each directory “\\” and make sure that after the “file.exe” file name, there is a trailing “\”. In this example it says “…\notepad++.exe\” This must be there.

You can make it say whatever you want in the menu by editing the words “Edit with Notepad++” to whatever you want.

Save the file with a .reg extension. After you do this, the file should have have an icon with little blue building blocks on it. Double click it, windows will ask if you really want to enter this into the registry, click ok/yes.

You now should be able to right click on any file and have the menu option come up. Clicking it will result it the application launching with the “clicked on” file loaded (if the application developer implemented this.)

If you use visual studio, you can use a #pragma to tell the linker to link in a library. This way, you don’t have to screw with project settings if you just want to quickly test something.  For example, if you wanted to link in the winmm.lib import library, it is done like so:

#pragma comment (lib, "winmm")

A lot of people don’t know this, but #pragma once is actually an optimization. It is faster than using the #ifndef blocks.

But you’re in luck because you can safely write portable code with it, in case the compiler doesn’t recognize #pragma once by doing this:

#pragma once
#ifndef HEADERFILE_H
#define HEADERFILE_H
class Classname
{
    int member;
};
#endif /* HEADERFILE_H */

3/5 – Introduction to Game Development
This books has a little to say about a lot of the different areas of game development. If you don’t know anything about the game industry or how things work, it would probably be a very good read. The sections that helped me personally were the physics and the programming sections. The rest were not interesting to me. I’m sure they would be interesting to the people that took interest in those sections, obviously.

5/5 – Get in the Game! – Careers in the Game Industry
Goes over in depth of how a game dev studio works internally and what each position entails. If you’re trying to break into the industry, I would definitely recommend this book.

5/5 – Unix for Dummies
If you’ve never used linux or unix before, this is a good book. It’s easy to follow and is actually a decent reference. Although it doesn’t have advanced things, which I wouldn’t expect it to. For getting acquainted with linux/unix, it’s very good.

4/5 – Advanced Lighting and Materials with Shaders
Discusses a ton of different BRDF’s that I never knew existed. This book is really book and meant for advanced graphics programmers. There are a couple of things I dislike about the book: 1) Math formulas are glazed over and never really discussed, so you have to figure them out for yourself, which isn’t necessarily the end of the world. 2) Spherical Harmonic Lighting section was confusing. I’m not sure it was the books fault though because the concepts are really advanced. I just wish they were discussed in more detail. I had to read the section like 3 or 4 times and I’m still not 100% clear on some aspects. Overall, if you are into graphics, I highly recommend this book.

3/5 – Focus on 3D Models
This book is a little bit dated unfortunately. I’m not sure why it bothered discussing the obj model format, I feel it’s pretty worthless. You can be the judge though as the model formats it discusses are as follows: md2( quake 2), obj, milkshape 3d, 3ds, mdl (half-life), md3 (quake 3). I was looking for a good model format and so far I’ve settled on a possible few: milkshape 3d, x format, or possibly md5?  Milkshape 3d seems to be a good general one that can easily be converted to and from others.

5/5 – Programming Interviews Exposed
I learned quite a bit from this book, like solutions to problems that I’ve never really come across before but that could perhaps be useful in the future. Unfortunately, a lot of the questions are simple of you know the “trick.” Otherwise, it’s a good exercise and refresher if you’re rusty. I felt that this book helped expand my mind and helped me start thinking outside the box.

I am always on the lookout for the latest and greatest tools and evaluating and testing some of the best to make my life easier and my work go faster. The following tools are the ones that I find most valuable and useful for me. Almost all of this software is free except for a select few tools.

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CG Tutorial
GPU Gems
GPU Gems 2
GPU Gems 3
ShaderX Series
GameDev.net D3D Book
The 3D Graphics Pipeline
Linkers and Loaders

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4/5 – How to make people like you in 90 seconds or less

This book is a pretty good book because it talks about things I probably wouldn’t have ever thought of. It can be used to network, get a date, or enhance your current social life. The book isn’t very long and at first the book didn’t seem to be that great. By the time I got to the end I was pleased with what I had read overall. I gave it 4/5 because I didn’t think the book was super awesome in any way, but I thought it was worth the read if you want to improve your social skills when meeting new people. I honestly don’t know what would make this book a 5/5 though since I’m not into reading these types of books very often.

5/5 – Game Development Essentials: Game Industry Career Guide
A very good book about preparing to enter the gaming industry. I wish I would have read this while I was actually in school.

5/5 – Pragmatic Programmer : Journeyman to Masters
Lots of really good general coding practices that I should have been taught but was not. All coders should read this to avoid sucking at their job.

4/5 – Effective C++
Although I knew quite a bit already, this book clarified the why’s. A good book overall. I still learned quite a few things.

3/5 – More Effective C++
Taught me why C++ sucks. Has solutions for things that I felt were hackish or incomplete (reference counting solution for example). At least take note of the table of contents. Worth the read if you plan on coding in C++ for your job though.

4/5 – Effective STL
Taught me all the problems the STL has. Basically, if you do advanced things with the STL, either know the STL inside and out, or avoid doing advanced things because it may cause you headaches. It discusses lots of STL special cases. My opinion after reading this book: the STL sucks because it requires a book to explain it and to discuss it’s pitfalls and problems. If an api/library is well written, it shouldn’t need a book to discuss all of its pitfalls and workarounds. Although, the STL is still better than whatever solution you could possibly come up with by yourself. For general coding it’s good, for advanced stuff, well…. you were warned. A lot of special cases are discussed by this book though, so if you plan to do lots of STL stuff, this book is definitely worth the read.

5/5 – Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9.0c A Shader Approach
If you’ve never used D3D before, get this book. Although lots have changed since DX9, it still has lots of concepts (and more advanced things like skinning) that are still very much applicable. I wish I would have read this book a long time ago instead of fumbling through the API’s documentation (which is a good reference though.)

There are a couple of things I recently stumbled across that gives Windows 7 users access to a ton of useful settings.

1) Make a folder on your desktop and name it: Everything.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

2) Click run and type in: gpedit.msc

If I come across any others, I’ll post it here.

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These are miscellaneous useful links that don’t really fit into any of the other categories I have.

Essential Mathematics Book Website
Gallery of Processor Cache Effects
Easy Git
IEEE-754 Floating Point References
Programmer Fonts
Design Patterns

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