The Software that Never Crashes

Posted by Scott on 1. December 2008 18:23

There are many untold stories in the world today.  From saving lives to sacrificing your self for the greater good.  Stories are past down from generation to generation and I want to make sure there is another story that is told to every programmer in the world.  It is the story of those who write perfect code. An interview in Dec. 2007 was done by Charles Fishman about the programmers who code for the space shuttle.  The men and women that put their code to the test.  It either works and people live, or it fails and people die.  There is only a good and a bad scenario.  If you are space shuttle programmer, you are a perfect coder.  I don't want to bore you with the forward, I would just rather get to the meat of the article. So here it is in all of its glory.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html

After reading the article, I hope you realize the amount of inspiration that could be taken from this as a programmer. The quote that sums it all up for me is:

"But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats: the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors."

That quote right there sums up coding in a basket.

• Write better code.
• Write cleaner code.
• Write as if you had to save a life  - Its amazing what someone would do to know that their code could end up costing lives.
  
• Learn something from this article and bring it back to your company.
• In the end, its the process by which they executed that makes their code perfect.  Learn to make great code, plan and think about great code.
• The average programmer today thinks 80% of the time and actually codes only 20% of the time.  This thinking is what makes the programmer better at writing clear and concise code.

This story should be placed in a book for all to see and remember.  Its an inspiring piece about the perfect programmers.

Now the question remains: Have you ever created something flawless?

How to Convince your Customers they need a CMS

Posted by Scott on 20. November 2008 19:21

Currently, I am dealing with one of my current clients.  They control a multi-national non-profit organization.  In the past they have used basic html to do the work for them in the web side of things.  They came to me through a person I knew and asked me to do very minor things for their web site. I agreed and started working with them.  There last request was to accept payment through the website and I told them to look at PayPal.  I thought it was the best bang for their buck.  Banks can charge an arm and a leg to manually enter things in while PayPal does it just fine. Most of the time, PayPal is much cheaper than what banks charge too. So I built them a PayPal system straight from Rick Strahls site. The next thing they started asking was a bunch of questions as in what can I do next, what can they do next and what can be done to improve apon this? Now they aren't very big, with a membership only in the thousands and much of the money is spent through the year.  So I decided to write them an email explaining what could be done with this organizations site. I decided to post it to show others why there is a need to have a Content Management System and hope it helps any other programmer trying to convince their customer to buy into a CMS.

I would like to title it "How to Convince you Customers they need a CMS"

Here is the deal.  I decided to go with the cheapest hosting possible when I purchased the space for $60.00 because of your budget.  It is another server hosted by GoDaddy.  Since its PayPal we are talking about. You are not required to have another server from another Service Provider to use PayPal, but for me to work using my programming languages ASP.NET, C# and SQL I needed another type of server other than what the company you were using had to offer.  Basically, since you wanted my work I needed to use GoDaddy (which is the cheapest hosting so far). PayPal doesn't have  restrictions as to what it uses as a server, but the application I build for you and the programming I do for you does have the restriction.  The $60.00 will be an annual expense once a year on or around the same date of this past week.

The way I look at it is that we are in the very early stages of development on what is formally known as a Content Management System(CMS). The best place to loosely define it would be Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system. If we look at your organization at the base level.  We can see the organization requires most if not all of the following:

Required:

• A membership database.
• An event calendar and scheduling feature for the calendar.
• A money management system.
• A payment system. 

Extra/Additional:

• A place to hold all your images and review them in a photo gallery.
• A place to hold all your official documents.
• A place to publicly display all your public information (Website).
• A place to download any and all forms or documents relating to events and organizations.
• A place to write and read all the news of your organization.
• A place to create newsletters that can be emailed out to all your members once completed.
• A blog for your organization.
• A place to email all your members on a regular basis.
• A place to host a forum which would allow all your members to communicate and chat amongst each other.
  

• Because your organization has several other organizations below it in a tiered approach, you could also host webpages for those different organizations.  It could have something like a main page for each and every member in your organization or team.  This can be seen for example in another online application such as facebook.com or linkedin.com.  This of course is above and beyond, but it is available.

ASP.NET and C# is not regular HTML that you might be used to.  It is an entirely new platform for developing web applications.  When I say new, I must say that’s it has been around for about nine years and is owned by Microsoft, so I do not see it going anywhere soon.

You will get all this with the $60.00 a year hosting through GoDaddy and along with my working costs.  You can achieve this with your other hosting company, but it would not be through me.  I am sorry to say, but I do believe the other languages that are used to develop applications like this could not compare with what could be built with ASP.NET and C#.

P.S. As an organization, I must imagine you do have a membership management system in place along with some sort of news letter system.  Both those systems could/would cease to exist once I built this for you.

Side note: All this information is completely dynamic. Once I build a “component” for your application, it will then pull data dynamically from the database.  This means that you can have an extensively large amount of information on a webpage without very many things to develop or need a programmer for.

SEO and BlogEngine.Net

Posted by Scott on 19. November 2008 21:12

In the world of blogs, people can find many types of Blog Engines out there.  The list is vast and non-exclusive which includes but is not limited to:

• Google Blogger
• WordPress
• BlogEngine.Net
• SixApart
• Movable Type
• InstantSpot
• And More...

I am not here to discuss which blog is the best.  I am here to discuss the transformation of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that BlogEngine.NET has succeeded in. SEO is a big game in the world of having an online presence.  You need people to be able to find what they are looking for and get out.  People don't want to spend forever looking for something that they want to solve.  That is what made Google so popular is the fact that they have search well established and it works.

After BlogEngine.NET released version 1.2 (currently at 1.45), they sent out a call for new ideas and thoughts.  That call was answered with many comments, but one in particular I think helped shape the strategic world of BlogEngine which gives it the ability to compete with the other blogs listed above. The user called for many upgrades in BlogEngine for SEO and I think they listened.

Big SEO request (and, honestly, slight aggravation),

The main blog index page is not very conducive to SEO. You have two fields in setup. First field is title, second is description. The description should NOT be appended to the title. If I want it appended to the title, then I'll add it myself in the title field. Further, I do not want my "Pages" in the keywords. I want to add my own custom keywords for the main page. The only other option would be for me to re-create the home page as a separate page and add custom keywords and description, but that's pain. (Please note, that the posts pages are fine. I'm only talking about the front page.) Now, when you look up my site in google, the description is messed up. And, unfortunately, there's no way to change it until the next release. I can't disable your description and keyword mechanism either. It would be great to at least be able to put my own description and keywords in the custom header, but google treats that as "overlooading" and throws both references of the META out.

From an SEM, I must say while the project as a whole it a great piece of work, the SEO, however, hasn't been thought through enough.

Please fix.

I can't tell truly where the changes were made, but they were as in what I can now show you. If you search for any of these topics, you will find my blog in the top 15 or 20 results or even higher.

• Self Programmer
  
• Class of Programmer
• Art of Programming

The facts show for them selves.  BlogEngine.Net has a large amount of SEO maintained in it.  It does a great job with it.  The code is beautiful and works well unlike a platform like WordPress where the code is just a mess.  In choosing a Blogging platform/engine, I would hope that everyone gives BlogEngine a very close look as for it is one of the best I have seen.  The engine has come a long way and hopefully will continue into the far reaching future.

The basic idea of this post was to show you that if BlogEngine.NET does one thing GREAT, then it most likely does other things GREAT as well and should be extensively looked at before starting a new blog.

The Art of Programming

Posted by Scott on 24. October 2008 15:00

Do you think of programming as an art or as a necessity?  Do you think of programming as a passion or just something to make money off of?  Do you find that when you write a program you are brought to a place that can no longer be called a job, but a life changing experience?

"A man can be an artist... in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasey's art is death. He's about to paint his masterpiece." - Man on Fire

I currently hold a 9-5 job as a software engineer.  I consider my self good at the job as does everyone else in my little cubicle.  I think the thing that separates the man from the boy or the woman from the girl is the passion one shows has.  Do they enjoy the work or do they just come to work for the money?  Have you found your dream programming job yet?  I personally have not found a job that currently excites me when I code in 1s and 0s.  My job has its perks like my ability to do a lot of research into new technologies, but at the end of the day I don't truly enjoy my job.  I do it for the money while at work. When I am at home, I do it for the passion.  For the fun of seeing things be created from nothing.

At home I spend my time with my family, but my spare time is devoted to hacking (coding).  The problem with this is that families and friends can't seem to figure it out.  They say "that you do it all day at work, can't you just put down the keyboard and spend some time with us?"  I tend to think that some times they might be jealous or ignorant of my computer, but that isn't the case. While I do sit at work all day in front of a computer working on problems, they are problems of need.  Hacking at work isn't particularly enjoyable nor does it spark the creative muscle. So, in my spare time I choose programming at home to open that creative muscle.  It needs to be freed and fed.

Too often programming is found as a boring task by many of the people I am around.  They don't understand its like building a bridge with your mind.  You build the bridge up piece by piece and when its finally done, you have a ribbon cutting ceremony and people start traveling on it.  They use it and stress test the beautiful code you just wrote.  You are completing a part of their lives with your creative imagination.  Not by the muscle on your back, but by the thoughts in your head.

This is what excites me about coding. I don't wear gloves that build a bridge, but I write beautiful code that gets used over and over again and solves a real problem in a person's life. It's like a piece of art in a national museum.  I don't look at it because its there.  I look at it because it is elegant and just plain imaginative.  When I code at work its out of necessity for the money. When I go home its to use my creative imagination. At work I am a boy, but at home I am a man.

I hope everyone is able to express their creative imagination sometime of each day even if its not at work.

Programming is an ART for me. I paint my masterpiece each day when I get home.

Looking for a Venture Capitalist or Angel Advisor

Posted by Scott on 23. October 2008 08:51

I have come to the point in my life where I want to start my own business.  I am in a job that is decent, but I don't see my self going anywhere with the position I am in.  I am in need of some advice from a venture capitalist or angel investor out there.  I would like to share my ideas with this person and see if they think money could actually be made from the ideas I have.  I am truly interested in moving up and outside my set "working for the man" career path.  I can't move to Silicon Valley because of my current personal situation, so it would have to be a long distance thing.

I have about fourteen ideas that I would love to propose to someone.  I am not looking for financing, just an insight on whether my ideas would work and be able to sustain my current low level, low income software engineer lifestyle.

If you know someone that could help or are someone that could help, let me know at spoiledtechie [at] gmail.com.

I just want to get out of the every day grind and work on my own projects.  I can take constructive criticism, let don't worry about hurting my feelings if all my ideas stink.

Scott

A Revolutionary way to take notes!

Posted by Scott on 14. October 2008 22:55

For the past few weeks I have been testing out a piece of software for note taking.  I found the software by luck trolling through www.stackoverflow.com.  The software is called Evernote.  It can do almost everything that is need to do when you need to take a quick note.  All the notes live in an online repository.  Without the repository being Google, I worried that the information might not be there forever.  I decided to take a test drive and let me tell you that this thing just kicks ass.  I have it installed both on my phone and several computers where I can access the notes from anywhere.  I fully enjoy this because my last note taking software was the TASKS section from outlook.  Microsoft was doing a better job with them, but Evernotes ability to take notes anywhere is amazing.  To briefly go through what kind of notes it can take:

Desktop

• It can take anything typed or from a web browser.  The browser part is quite extraordinary because all you have to do is click a button and it adds a note.  You can either highlight text or make the entire web page a note without highlighting and wa-la, you have a web page that you don't have to bookmark for later.  You can just go back to your notes which then unclogs the bookmarks for the real purpose of what bookmarks were made for.

Phone/PDA

• Voice notes
• Text note - Typed text
• Ink Note - If you have a touch screen you can write on the note.
• Snapshot - You can take a picture of some document or anything.  If you take a picture of the document, EverNote has the ability to capture the text off the document so it can be edited for later.
• Upload a file - Currently this isn't on the desktop version, but you can upload a file which will be saved both on your dektops and the database.

Coding

• I specifically use Evernote a lot when have some interesting piece of code that I want to make sure I have at home too.  Instead of emailing it to my self, I now place it in Evernote, tag it as code and then I am off!

For both os's, you can save, delete, tag, print, categorize each and every note.

I wanted to mention one more thing.  This program is FREE!  The service has limits unless you upgrade, but after using it for several weeks, I have yet to reach my limit.

I hope you will give EverNote a try.  It does also have a IPhone version out as well.

Windows Mobile CE 6.1 (and Compact Framework) Released!

Posted by Scott on 13. October 2008 10:44

If you haven't seen it yet.  Mobile 6.1 was just release two months ago.  I just found out and will be upgrading tonight.

New changes include but are not limited to:

• Copy / Paste (finally!) - Only touch screens used to do this.
  
• Domain Enroll in Settings (Enrolling in a domain will connect your device with company resources.)
• New home screen (pan left and right to check out missed calls, notifications like email, sms, etc.)
• Change Master Security Cod
• Added text input settings
• Recent Programs when pressing Start menu - Allows you to see recent programs launched.
  
• Threaded SMS! - This makes it so MUCH EASIER to carry on conversations.
  
• When you compose an email, or SMS, and start typing the name of the contact in the "To:" field, the contact names finally pop up like Windows Mobile Professional!
• Internet Explorer now lets you define a homepage, and also zoom in and out using a nice and clean interface - ZOOMING feature is AMAZING!!!
  
• Task Manager now shows CPU usage as a whole, and also lists it by process
• Internet Explorer offers 6 zoom modes and copy / paste functionality
• IE also uses a new font, which looks worlds better
• ActiveSync will now try to automatically configure your Exchange settings once you enter an email address
• Wi-Fi indicator in the status bar, just as in Windows Mobile Professional
• New "Vista" home screen and theme
• Video Share Calling
• Remote Desktop Monitor
• ONE Note Mobile!!!
• PTT Button can now be reassigned under Start / Settings / Buttons.

 This new CE looks and feels so much better.

 I am two months short on this launch, but if your reading this then so are you!!!

The next 8 years with Technology.

Posted by scott on 12. October 2008 10:39

Today I watched a Google Talk today about Technology.  The president nominee spoke about ideas on free Internet, Public opinion, technology within bills that get passed in the house and senate, Public knowledge of bills, and more.

I for one am a Republican with many views against democrats and especially left wing democrats, but I do think that Technology can SAVE THE WORLD.  I have not seen my parties stance on technology, but today I saw the democrats stance on technology.  I ask you to also look at this stance.  Republicans have not shown me what they plan on doing with technology, but democrats have.

So for me and the stance on technology, I lean towards the democratic view even though I am a republican.

I hope all of you also review this video and sit down for an hour and take the time out of your day to do so.  This has greatly increased my chances for voting democrat. 

Please understand, that I am not being political, but to show you what I think should be done in the technology market.