It’s the Saturday before Christmas and no more work for a few days!!! I will be coding as I always do but no corporate misery until 2nd of Jan 2008.
Events of the past week and other things on my mind: I do 2 jobs, one for a Bank and the other for EscSoft.
On Monday I had a big argument with my manager at the Bank as she rated my performance for the last 6 months as poor but then said my performances has been great for the last 3. In the last six months I have lost four members of my family which, anyone with any emotion who has been in the same position would feel the pain of loss. Looks like this manager has no heart and is a ruthless getter of performance stats. I am sorry I can’t be a robot with no emotion, I am human.
In the corporate world of Information Technology it is very rare to get a manager who is both technically competent and a good people person. My current manager was a normal member of our team who took the senior position because no-one else wanted it and it would probably be better than to get an external person who could be a real bastard. Managers have to do meetings and shuffle paper, us geek techies have fun solving problems and also keep being techies. I always say “What goes around, comes around” so I will wait and see what karma befalls this person.
Previous managers in Banks were Harry who came from a senior position at the IBM labs in Hursley, England. Phil who was a really cool geek and loved to race yachts but went crazy if anyone modified his code (he was a purest in coding – talk to any obsessed Perl coder who loves regular expressions). Then before that there wars Phil the bastard who had no technical knowledge and tried to change everything to “His Logic” and screwed everything up. He eventually was booted out. The manager before him was Steve the Jehovah Witness who attended his church every week and used to keep gifts sent to him by companies at Christmas, stating they were social gifts and not Christmas gifts. This is odd for a so called serious Jehovah Witness as they do not believe in Christmas. Then one year, his wife made him buy a bigger house and one day he came home, the door locks were changed and his best friend had moved in. A few months later, he moved in and married the now ex-wife of his ex-best friend who was far more beautiful so in the end it worked out well.
On a happier note, sales of iDumpPro are constant which is nice and we can now pay the hosting company for the website from the registrations. It’s so nice to (1) have people use your product and enjoy it and (2) not make a huge loss.
On the subject of programming in Windows….. When you write a program which has to perform many functions for example, in iDumpPro, it has its own internal media player, CD reading and writing code, audio conversion code and so-on. There will be systems which it will not work on. A lot of programs will hook into Microsoft Media player but I did not want to do this because each version of Windows is different and having your own audio code should mean more consistency across Windows 2000, XP and Vista.
I have been lucky so far because people have reported bugs and I then work with them to resolve the issue. While the same bug may not appear for other users, it would at some time pop up unless fixed. Thanks to you all.
People who do not program have no idea how hard it is to make software bug free as there are so many factors which can affect the software. When working with 50-60,000 lines of code, there will always be something which will (under certain conditions) misbehave. When I first had a beta of iDumpPro ready, I packed the entire application into 1 exe file so that it could become portable and carried on the iPod. I then tested it under Vista and the whole thing broke. I had to resort to using an installer. I have seen some tools which will install on-the-fly to the PC like a silent installer so that the user will see only the app running and nothing in the background but these tools are $1000+ and not currently in my budget. I started writing iDumpPro on 1st Jan 2007 and expected it would take less than 6 months but so far its been almost a year. I think my programming estimating formula should be Expected development time (EDT) *2 + 30%.
I will be starting to lean .net programming this week and will create a windows explorer type app first will allow you to drag/drop music files between folders and iPods/CD’s/iTunes. I’ll be keeping it simple so that anyone could use it. If possible I will aim for this to be portable and carried on the iPod.
I am in the process installing Vista/Visual Studio 2005 on my Intel 4 core extreme machine which has 150gb Raptor boot disk, BFG 8800 GTX graphics card, X-F1 Audio and 22 inch 19200x1200 flat screen. I have been playing a lot of “Call of Duty 4” and “Quake Wars”. As Vista runs half the speed of Windows XP, it will be interesting to see if I can play these games with all special effects turned on.
Andie (who wrote iDump) has now moved to Australia and is staying with friends in Sydney over Christmas before going off to Adelaide at the beginning of Jan. I expect he will not be doing much email during Jan so I will monitor the forums.
After Christmas I will put a couple of my laptops on eBay to raise cash to buy the new HTC Shift which is due out in the UK first week of Jan 2008. It has both Windows Mobile which runs for 7 days and Also Windows Vista and all this for less than 1kg in weight. See this link for more info: http://www.expansys.com/p.aspx?i=151160
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