Friday, September 28, 2007

How Software Companies Die

I came across a great short essay that hit home with me regarding programmers, software companies, and their interaction, and it happens to be written by Orson Scott Card, who just happens to be the greatest author of all time! Of particular interest is the Ender's Game series by Card, which is one of the greatest stories I've ever read and probably had a great deal to do with who I am today. Anyways, check it out at the following address:
http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/kjc/cool/Card.on.Software.html

Yet Another Facet of Murphy's Law 2

YAFOML™ 2:

Any time you have something scheduled that you intend to do (college class, appointment, job, vacation, etc.) something will invariably arise that demands your attention at exactly the time you were supposed to be doing said schedule item. The item that just came up will always be inescapable and the scheduled item will always have been already paid for with no chance of a refund.

This one happens to me all the time. Most recent case: I am a computer instructor for a job training and staffing agency where I teach MS Windows (blech) and Office to potential job-seekers as well as other individuals funded by any of various organizations, their employer, or possibly themselves. Unfortunately, this is only a part time position in the morning. This leaves the afternoon for other stuff, like finishing my college degree.. So I've been planning on getting back into it for awhile now because working part time doesn't cut it for getting the bills paid. However, we recently applied for a grant which would necessitate my working full-time and a pay raise if approved. This was in June or July we submitted our proposal the first time. A couple months went by and turned out there was one item left out of the proposal (which was also missed by most other applicants) making it non-functional. The RFP was re-released with the full requirements and a checklist so items would not be missed. So by the time all of that was done we made our second submission in September. Now just today we found out it made it past the initial review and now are waiting on further information. In the meantime I had applied for college admission months ago, and was waiting to sign up for classes until I knew my schedule, but by now classes have long since started and I'm not in 'em. Damn you Murphy... damn you......

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Holograph for real

Check out this awesome video of the real technology being developed to give us holographic display capability.

Yet Another Facet of Murphy's Law 1

I have been doing this thing for years now, where I come across with another facet of Murphy's Law every day, and I think it's about time I shared it with the world. I will try to post on a daily basis the new facet I discover, so you can all share in my agony. This is something that happens to me all the time, I don't even have to try to come up with these, so in the spirit, here's the first one.

YAFOML™ 1:

The moment, or in the moments shortly after, setting up, customizing, and populating a web site with content on your personal internet link and receiving traffic, your connection will stop working.

This one is really horrible. This is exactly what happened to me with my previous site. I set up my box at home with a full LAMP server on Ubuntu Linux 7.04, got it all up and running, had a few people look at it and got my first comment, and then the next day my link stopped working. In that particular case I was running a wireless link to my ISP from the roof of my building, and it had been working great all winter. However, summer started and the leaves grew out on the trees, and behold, no more net! This tortured me to no end, as I'm a complete and utter internet junkie and require a connection to survive, but since I get my internet free as a founding member of my ISP, I'm on the very bottom of the priority list to get it fixed. So 3 months later, I finally got a 2.4GHz link put up, which was working great, until I turned my server back on.... (yeah I know, don't I ever learn?) Shortly after which, the unit powering the link decided to stop working. It didn't die. It didn't give any indication it wasn't working. It just stopped being able to contact any other computer on the net. That was last month :P We'll see how long it takes for them to get around to doing something about it this time...