My Blog

(found via a Channel9 – in this post)

By installing this software you agree to:

– all your base arnt belong to us

A cool link from Rory, about a really stupid HR complaint.

Some Wired news articles I’d really like to comment on:

1. How Info-Overload Experts Unwind (this is something I don’t do that well, but I’m learning (I hope))
2. Designer Virus Stalks HIV (cool, but scary… The guys who made it talk about how scary it could be that anyone could start creating “designer virii” – at least this virus is a “good one”)
3. iPod All the Rage in High Fashion (I *WANT* an iPod, preferably an iPod mini – coz they look cooler.  Although the full iPod seems to have a lot more add-ons/gadgets to make it even cooler)
4. Browser Hijackers Ruining Lives (This happened to my cousin a long while ago when he first joined IS – he went to a site and installed some software (he was kinda new to the internet back then) and promptly found his PC randomly opening up his browser and directing it to various porn sites – NOT good)

There are more, but I’ll leave that for now.

Other arb thoughts – I *REALLY* want a tablet PC, especially after these blogs. (Scoble keeps mentioning them both there and on the Geek Aggregator, too often to link to each post)

Oh yeah since shout outs are “cool” in the blogging world, here’s one to Charlie (the coolest guy in my homecell to be blogging – ok, I admit, he’s the only guy in my homecell who’s blogging, but that doesn’t make him any less cool :)), Quixilver (who’s blog’s hosted on my site, has some really interesting blog entries, and has a cool style of writing)… All the guys at dotnet.org.za (generally they’re some of the more active members of SADeveloper.net, who have some cool blog entries about .Net and about life)

I’ve handwritten a few BLOG entries that I really must post some time – we’re house sitting (and child minding a 16 yr old (well, she’s actually a bit younger than that, but she’d be really happy to know that I called her a 16 yr old and didn’t reveal her actual age – which is marginally below 16)) for a few weeks so I’m without a PC at the moment (yet another reason why a Tablet PC would be awesome) So I’ll try get around to posting them some time soon…

This weekend, my church ran a course called “Marriage Enrichment”.  While Christie and I were waiting for it to start Ashley (our lead elder) chatted to us and made a comment along the lines of “You guys are luck to have a course like this so soon in your marriage.  When we got married we didn’t have this”.  Its one of those statements that almost requires a response from you like “Yeah, we are.” or something similar.  But really I hadn’t thought much about it and, not knowing the course material, I couldn’t honestly agree that we were lucky to have the course.  But his comment did get me thinking.

You see, the course was excellent and while I hope to apply what we learned, I’m sure I’ll actually only apply 1/2 of it (if I’m lucky).  At this stage in my life, I probably won’t see the fruits of what we learned and later on in life I wonder if I’ll be able to remember the course and see what good fruit it produced.  I’m at the age where I don’t really know too many married couples well (who have been married for 5 or more years).  So I don’t have any practical comparrisons to make… for example, I could see the benefit if I could say “WOW, now I can see why James and Sandra have been struggling”, or even if I could say “Gee, THAT explains why Christie and I don’t communicate well” or something like that.  You see, I’ve only been married for a month and a half.  So its giving me good pointers for the future, but I don’t know what I’ll need to apply and when in the future I’ll need to apply it.  And I’m certainly not going to learn the entire course so that I can at any stage recall the “correct way to do things” and act on it.  That would be both highly time consuming (of which I don’t have much left to consume) and verging on a “robotic” existence – “Keep all the rules constantly at the ready so you never make any mistakes”.

At the same time I started to think about how if we got our marriage right, had kids who grew up in the church and married someone else’s kids who had similarly “good parents”.  They will have practically seen “good” husbands and wives interacting, so will they even realise the benefit of such courses, or the importance of passing on these values and lessons?  If they do manage to pass the values on, will they really have a practical understanding as to just how bad it can be if these things are not in place?  If we turn the tide of divorces in the country, will our future generations keep it?  Or will they not learn from the mistakes of the past and be doomed to repeat them?  Its all fine and well to talk about history that way – great leaders, wars, plagues, etc.   But do people keep account of social trends in the same way?  I guess that’s what the disciplines of sociology and anthropology are about, but does the “population in general” learn about these things?

Even in this morning’s sermon there were two examples of this.  The one was Ashley talking about the relationship between David and Jonothan… He said something similar to “When David said he loved Jonothan, it wasn’t in an erotic/homosexual way… but it was merely as one would have a deep bond with someone who saved your life in many battles.”  He then referred to the guys and basically said “like when you were in the army, fighting – your buddy who watched your back and protected you.” But anyone born after 1975 would not really understand that analogy – we weren’t forced into the army.  We don’t practically understand that as he does, or as people from the generation before us would.

My lingering question is this: How do we pass on our values and lesson’s we’ve learned to the next generation effectively, and how do we ensure that they’re learned to the same degree and will be passed on effectively to the generation after that?

Two slightly different rules… I think they both show a lot of truth about the industry as a whole… Check out this (found via Ryan Farley), and this and this (by Rory) 

Today I got a “be my friend” type request from one of the guys on SADeveloper.net on Orkut… so I added him as a friend, and found that there are a good few South African’s there… Very soon I found a group for my old university, and I soon found some of the matric (grade 12) pupils that I’d taught for a year while I was studying.  I found out that one of them is doing her MASTERS in computer science and education, and has become a bit of a (self proclaimed) “linux geek”, who’s currently tutoring Computer Science 3 students.

Its so cool to see someone you “helped out” in learning something going so far with it… 🙂

Hrm… I don’t think I’ve found any really useful SMS applications for windows. (or any other OS for that matter)  Usually the 1/2 good ones charge an arm and a few legs to run.

What my ideal sms app would do:

• Import and Export contacts and contact groups (at very least to CSV)
• Provide an API (preferably SOAP based – and give us a WSDL for crying out loud) <rant>One of the better looking providers in South Africa has this nifty “XML over HTTP” API.  BUT they provide a bloody DTD, no WSDL file – VS.Net doesn’t do DTD’s.  As far as I know WSDL’s are the standard for SOAP services, and SOAP is THE standard for “XML over HTTP”.  What the heck were the developers at that company smoking when they released that product? (or maybe the managers were being all “pointy haired” (that’s a Dilbert reference, for those who don’t get it))
• Let me recieve replies to the messages I send (both in the app, and via the api)
• Have a decent UI (I don’t want to spend 5 minutes trying to get the thing to add people to a group, I just want to “drag and drop” them or something similar)
• Give me feedback as to the delivery status of the message (both in the app, and via the api)

That’s probably the basics – I’d really like to get hold of the source to the UI too, so that I could change it as required… but then I guess they’d want to sell the UI to me.  Its kinda odd that – its free, so what harm would it be to hand out the source.  But the corporate mentality is to charge for it because its an extra service… How about helping out the developers you give the API to, by giving them a sample app (with source) so that they don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time… To me, that would be a major selling point for using one providers SMS API over another.

Oh well, I guess I’ll have to build my own and post the source – then anyone can modify it to work with any SMS provider they like.  Code re-use… I’d build it for myself, and not be able to sell it, I can save someone else time by giving them a base to work on.  I guess I might have a problem if someone made millions off my base of code… but then I guess that’s what the GPL and such are out to protect you from.

I just thought I’d add a quick image to the blog, to see if BlogJet will upload and display it correctly.  For those who don’t know, BlogJet is a really cool app that lets you create and edit your blog entries on your PC and upload them when you’re ready.  It works on most blogging engines, and is really easy to use.

My blog is:

I’ve now had two bad experiences with Photolab’s putting stuff on CD for me and totally messing up the quality of the pics…  I don’t know what the big deal is…

The first time was a simple request to copy images off my Digital Camera’s memory stick onto a CD.  Nothing more.  But they “colour corrected”, and compressed the images.  Now if you call totally wrecking the colour balance “colour correction”, then they did a good job on that one. (for those who don’t know – I’m being sarcastic, they basically ruined the colours)  Then comes their “compression”… but I’ll leave that for later…

The second time was a request to scan images from negatives onto a CD… The photolab had done well in getting the images printed, and came highly recommended for its quality of work.

Both photolabs, clearly don’t look at the photo’s after they’ve “compressed them”.  Because in both cases I ended up with images with large dimensions, but shocking quality (to keep the file sizes down).  But when I say “shocking quality”, I mean that I wouldn’t even put these photo’s on the web they were so broken!   And they charged us for producing this CD of images!

So today I go to a photolab that I know will do a good job, and they want to charge me R50.00 a spool for “medium” quality photos (about the same quality as a 3.2megapixel camera), and R90 a spool for “high” quality photos (not sure of the quality, but they’re about 9mb per image).  One of the reasons that they’re charging so much is because the negatives have been cut already… (if they’d developed the photo’s themselves, they’d have fed them all through in one go – but now they have to feed each little strip of 4 photos into the machine by hand)  I fully understand why this would be a more time consuming process, so I’m ok with it. 

And I’m guessing that the “high quality” images might require more “scanning” time to get the quality.  They aparently put it through their normal photo printing machine and get it to save the images to disk as opposed to printing them.  With that in mind, I have a slight doubt that it would actually take more time to do a “high quality” scan.  Why? Well, I’m guessing that the machine would normally scan them to do the colour correction, and then it would make sense to scan at the highest quality so they could be sure to do it right.  So in normal operation, it would be scanning the images at “high quality”.  To develop, and print the photos would probably only cost me about R60 or R70.  So if the major factor in the high price of digital copies is the “time”, and the machines on a normal “develop and print” run are scanning at high quality, then a “digital only” run should cost less than a “develop and print”.  Anyway… I know there are other factors involved, and that I’m by no means an expert on the process of photograph development.

What actually pisses me off no end is that the first two photolabs, charged me money for basically useless images.  I wonder how they can get away with offering such a stupid service… I mean, how can customers be so stupid to accept it? And how can they, with a clear conscience, sell a product that really is useless.  Maybe its just because “digital photography” is not “mainstream” here yet?  And I guess photolabs want to protect their business, so by making crappy digital images they might be able to convince their clueless customers that non-digital images are much better for the average customer. (if I was vaguely artistic and had a cool tablet PC, I’d do a “Rory” and post a short cartoon about these interactions between the photolab staff and a “clueless customer”… but I’m not, so you’ll have to imagine it on your own)

But I just had a thought(no sarcastic comments from the peanut gallery, ok?)… Isn’t this what “Internet Companies” did to the whole world in the whole “Dot Com bubble”?  In both cases, people are sold products that claimed to be amazing, but which fail live up to them… (there are exceptions in both situations)  And those that are selling the “bad” products are only selling them because they either want a quick buck, or they don’t know any better… and the customers choose the “cheapest” solution because they don’t yet know how to measure the quality of solutions offered.

I wonder if that is the same with any new idea/market/technology?  And what do you do if you’re one of those who actually cares about the solutions you offer?  How would you convince clients that your solutions are qualitatively better than the rest?  How do companies survive with making bad technology decisions?  So often once you’ve bought a bad solution the only way to fix it is to throw it out entirely and start over – and NO financial manager will be happy with that. (unless they can see the “bigger picture”, and understand why they’re currently in the situation they’re in)  I wonder how many companies do that?  And how do companies who are offering the solutions ensure that they’re offering quality solutions when the playing fields are changing so greatly?

Why do I ask these things? Well, when I worked for Internet Solutions (eCommerce division (which changed its name twice, merged with a bunch of other DD companies, changed its name a few more times, and basically kinda closed down/was absorbed after many retrenchments)) in 2000, they were busy dealing with major changes in web development.  They were starting to use Dynamo Application Server (a Java based App Server), the whole idea of OO was new to most of the teams, and their old ways of managing projects was not the most efficient. They knew this, and were busy re-developing their methodologies – but not fast enough (sometimes).  Systems were built “fast”, and ran with many bugs or “quick fixes” to keep them stable.  Clients could be lead to believe whatever was needed. (not that this happened on purpose :)) In general, the clients really didn’t know enough to be able to evaluate what was being provided for them. (and sometimes neither did we)

At the next company I worked for (2001 & 2002), we had similar problems – except that now the people implementing the solutions often knew “best practices” but the people “managing” them didn’t care so much about quality as they did about “speed of implementation”.  Now that the “dot com bubble” had burst, clients were far more “cost conscious”, but still they didn’t seem to focus on quality.  I still remember some projects where we’d developed “phase 1” of a site, and some other developers took over for “phase 2” (we provided the hosting for both phases).  In the one case, the second developers knew a TINY bit of ASP, virtually no Javascript, and the VB based COM objects they built were terrible – which all together caused their servers and site to crash regularly.  The client chose them over us because they cost less.  I’m not saying we were perfect, our systems were often terribly buggy. 

We had novice developers, and the managers had gone through a phase where projects were built in whatever language the developer liked the best. So we had systems in C++, Delphi, VB, ASP only, some with all hte logic in stored procs and triggers, others with no intelligence on the DB. So as developers left, we’d find ourselves with sites written in languages that our developers couldn’t understand.  I guess they’d fallen into the trap of not guiding the development – leaving it up to the developers to pick the technologies, and having nobody to evaluate what was being done. (Well, there were people who were supposed to evaluate it, but they were NOT (in any way) developers, nor did they understand anything technical (they were people with a sales/design background).

So what are the similarities between my time at Internet Solutions and my time at Company 2 (I can’t mention the name, because its not yet 2 years since I left them, and my contract with them prohibits me from mentioning things about them that could be used against them by competitiors withing 2 years of leaving them. And showing their weak points, could definately be used against them)

I guess there are three common threads:

1. Managers who don’t know technology/current technology
2. Developers who don’t know much about technologies outside(and inside) of their current technology of choice
3. Clients who don’t have enough experience to evaluate the solutions they’re offered

How would I fix them? Well, if it was my company, I’d ensure that the managers and developers were getting training (there are so many companies who offer free courses, just so that they can get their products name out there (especially good are Microsoft’s MSDN Essentials), so even if the company can’t afford “paid-for” training right now, their staff can keep abreast of what’s happening in technologies to some extent).  I’d also make sure that standards were in place and followed, something like the MSF.  (Even the free documents from Microsoft about the MSF could have helped both companies a lot)  And finally, I’d make sure that we focussed on the impact of quality in our presentations to clients (like guaranteeing transaction times, uptime, security, maintainability/extendability)

I’ll keep mulling over this for a while – some day I’d like to start my own company (either alone, or with a small group of friends) so I always find these thoughts interesting… and I’m hoping that “someday” is not too far off in the future, so these thoughts currently get applied more seriously than they would if it was “somewhere in the distant future”…