Cygwin!

My first day of work was yesterday (since I'm technically posting this at 1:00 AM on Wed.), and as expected no one showed up. I need to savor these nights, before business picks up and students realize they have free CS tutoring five nights a week.

I spent most of my time researching open GL, or rather, how to get it running on my own machine so I can work on my Computer Graphics coursework on my own machine. I found out that all the tools were availible for free download, which was great news. That is, until I returned to the apartment and realized I was missing the most imporant tool - a Windows C compiler.

So what's a guy to do? Reinstall linux on his machine? Hells no! That takes too long. Instead I spent the rest of the evening playing with Cygwin. Cygwin is, essentially, a Linux emulator of sorts for Windows. On a fresh install it will load up with a Bash shell and let you do some pretty basic Linux stuff. In order to use all sorts of goodies, the setup file allows you to pick and choose tons of different packages to download and install (kind of like Debian, only it works :p). Right now I've got it running with gcc, X-window, ssh, a whole bunch of other compilers, and what I think are the necessary tools for running open GL (Hell, I can get KDE running with it if I really wanted). And it all works just fine. Getting Cygwin to do what you want is a bit tricky at first, and there is some definite slowdown while running it, but I must say that it is still very impressive. I'll try my best tomorrow (um, today I guess) to test out those some open GL files.
Its criminal how much fun I have tinkering with this kind of stuff :)

This evening I also tried a very interesting brew. Dogfish Head Ale makes a beer called the "90 minute IPA", an Indian Pale Ale that is hopped for 90 full minutes. It is incredibly strong and very hoppy, but surpisingly not as bitter as I expected. Definitely a different kind of taste, though really enjoyed it (and recommend it!). Too bad it is far too expensive to buy normally; I suppose that college kids aren't supposed to become beer snobs.