Ideas are a dime a dozen – ie worthless.
It’s probably already been thought of – and discarded.
Do your research.
Then do it again.
Become an expert in the field. (Yes, more research)
Do it yourself. No-one wants in on wild schemes.
Only amateurs work for free.
Only amateurs work for % of future profits (0% usually!)
When working with amateurs, you get what you pay for.
Unless you have a prototype, with 2 years of beta testing, investors aren’t interested.

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This weeks topics:
* No extract() in ASP
* Joel on Software forums
* Endless streams of email.
* Fires, putting them out.
* Extended Warrantees
* Actually writing code
* Turkey
* ‘drews biz
* International Barclay, 111 48th Street, NY New York
* Some Action CD
* Uninspiredness
* Turkey.

How about this:

* being well-paid to do a job which utilizes 10% of your skills.

* consequently not being happy with such an arrangement

* initiating a sequence of events which: demands greater responsibility, but not necessarily greater compensation, in pursuit of some hypothetical compensation, as yet unknown, but hopefully significant.

Can somebody please tell me what the hell I’m doing? Thanks.

Hacked on a CGI web app circa 1995 written entirely in shell scripts.

Actually was pretty clean for being so old and clunky.

Trying to get my head around Dot Net. Not Sure I like what I’m seeing. Bought a book, but it was crappy. It told you how to do things, not why to to do them.

The question is thus:
Writing a Program to write the Program You Want to Write,
** OR **
Writing the Program you Want to Write ?

Last couple weeks have been Microsoft™ weeks.

Microsoft™ software is very strange stuff. It’s good stuff, though, definitely good. But strange.

My whole mindset shifts when I’m in Microsoft™ mode. You don’t even think about how you’re gonna do it, you just do it, as long as you remember one thing:

* one handful of crap,
* one handful of hardware

And it really works. Everyone in the office seems totally accepting and accustomed to hung applications, and they just sit there and watch, and eventually, as I’m discovering, the shit actually works!

What I will hand over to Microsoft™ is that they are really good at making really complicated things pretty easy to do. Really good.

What they are not so good at is things consistently working well.
The weird Microsoft™ errors are real and Windows™ heads know what I’m talking about. Don’t even try to deny it.

In the end, I have reached the conclusion that Microsoft™ technology is every bit as hokey as anyones elses.

Get Yours.

I’ll probably wait at least 6 months after the stable release. IN the meantime, it’s looking like it’s finally time to learn Servlets and JSP.

Web Designers: STOP DESIGNING FOR FIXED WIDTHS.

It’s over.

I’m still working on my growing suite of Web Site tools (codename mTOOLS), which has served as my foray into object oriented programming.

At work we’re putting together a web-based file repository and a personnel directory- perfect fodder to become new classses for mTOOLS.

We looked a bit on PHP Classes, but everything I found was either overblown or a bit out-of-date. I grabbed the Gallery I had written just a bit earlier.

That piece begat a nice little Directory Lister widget. At work, Ingrid is putting together an administrative class to allow for directory creation and file uploads.

I stripped out some common functionality into a base class, and now both the gallery and directory lister share a common codebase.

Anyway, if anyone should care, here’s the tarballs:

DirectoryTools (Base Class)
Gallery
DirectoryLister

I got around to rewriting my image gallery / directory lister script using object-oriented techniques. So, here you go.

See it in action here, and here: Random Objects

For the nerds among you, read the docs.

If you like, Download it.