Monthly Archives: May 2008

Summer Internship at VMware

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A few months ago, I received an email from a recruiter at VMware. That email was one of those rare moments where my life almost went down a completely different path. I had signed up for so many free trials of VMware Workstation over the years, that I was used to getting emails from them, and when this one popped into my mailbox, I disregarded it. Fortunately for me, however, the sender made a small mistake. He had misread the name of my college, and so a few minutes later, I got a short, one line email that read:

“Sorry I just noticed that you are at the University of Louisville and not Louisiana.”

Having no idea what this was referring to, I looked back in my inbox and noticed the previous email from the same sender. It turned out that he had found out about me from my work on Deluge, and that VMware was looking for programmers with GTK+ experience.

After a series of emails and a few interviews, I wound up with an internship for this summer, and this morning I landed in San Francisco, ready to start work on Monday.  Their San Francisco office is just a mile down the road, well within walking distance.

I spent some time today exploring the city, going a few blocks in either direction on Market St.  I saw a lot of interesting things, and took some pictures that I’ll try to post later (at the moment they’re up on Facebook).  The city has a very Mediterranean feel to me, and reminds me a bit of my trip to Spain several years ago.

Obama Live

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I got to see Barack Obama live today at the Convention Center in downtown Louisville.  Although I’d already cast my vote for him early via absentee ballot for the Kentucky primary, I thought it would neat to see him speak in person.

I have to admit I was impressed.  At one point in the speech, someone in the crowd passed out, and Obama stopped midsentence to make sure they were ok and even giving them one of the bottles of water that were sitting under the podium on stage.

Quadro 570M Tested

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So, I decided to test out my new laptop’s video card a bit more.

I already knew that the card could handle Quake 4 on it’s default settings at 1920×1200.  For this experiment, I decided to crank things up a bit.  Again, the card is an Nvidia Quadro 570M with 256MB of dedicated graphics memory and another 256MB borrowed from the system memory, for a total of 512MB.

I cranked Quake 4 up to it’s highest settings.  The game warned me that at least 500MB of texture memory was recommended for this setting.  When I started the game, it actually seemed to run OK.  Every once in a while there would be a little jump, but it wasn’t that noticable.  I didn’t play too far into the game, only 5 or 10 minutes, but even in some larger firefights involving multiple enemies, the card held up.  Not bad for a supposed “non-gaming” card.

T61p works great with Linux

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Model: Lenovo Thinkpad T61p 6459-CTO

Distro: Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS

  • Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 2.5GHz
    The CPU runs fast and cool.  While idling, it stays somewhere between 40 and 50 Celsius, and goes up to about 60C under load.  For comparison, the CPU in my previous laptop would hit the low 90s under load and idle around 60.
  • Video: Nvidia Quadro 570M 512MB
    The video card is well supported by the latest Nvidia drivers.  The Quadro 570M is essentially a Geforce 8600M-GT in terms of hardware, and can draw upon 512MB of memory: 256MB dedicated, and the other 256MB borrowed from the system.
    I’ve yet to put it though any stress tests, but it didn’t have any trouble playing quake 4 at default settings at 1920×1200, though I only tested it for the first minute or so of gameplay.
  • Wireless: Intel Wifi Link 4965AGN
    Works out of the box with Intel’s open source driver.  Connects without trouble to my Netgear 802.11n router, and maintains full signal stength throughout the house.

The following also worked out of the box:

  • Special buttons, including volume and media controls
  • The integrated SD card reader
  • Bluetooth

In short, every piece of hardware in the T61p works fine in Linux.  Under the latest Ubuntu release, all I had to do after installing was install the nvidia-new driver from the repositories, everything else is supported by default with open source drivers.