Sunday, October 22, 2006

Tech spec sheets...

Need to be made out of HTML.

I'll SED.EXE the text out of the generated scores and replace place-holder text in the tech spec HTML page... That should make generating spec sheets extremely easy...

Back to Voodoo...

Well... Guess I'm going back to Voodoo. To be in the R&D portion of it all along with maintaining the Voodoo softwaring and testing system.

To give you an idea about the inner workings of our softwaring process works:

1) Technician enters the customers WO number.
2) The computer pulls the system configuration from the database
3) The machine then reads the system configuration and installs the correct OS.
4) Upon reboot the machine parses the configuration and installs the cusomers chosen software and hardware drivers. For the hardware we follow the "failing gracefully" guideline. We actually enable SLI in all Nvidia configurations. The Nvidia drivers will detect that it should have SLI but in a single card configuration it will throw up a dialog box stating that SLI will be auto-disabled. And upon reboot the machine is correctly configured without adding any more detection/complexity. Ahhh, failing gracefully :)
5) Second QC is a script that checks all the "optical" portions of the computer. This includes things like paint color, tattoo's, liquid color, etc. Everything physical. This test, when I return, will start to include things like counting video cards, ensuring SLI and crossfire is enabled, etc.
6) Lastly is Haiti. Originally designed by Casey Inlow and myself, it is a comprehensive test suite of games, real-world and artificial applications. Artificial applications include CPU Burn, Prime 95, etc.

With HP, it will be nice and interesting to see what they think of all this work and effort. I'm sure they have some very smart guys who might just laugh at all of this effort, or they might be blown away...?

I guess time will tell... Very shortly.