Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Hi,

My eye is better. Thanks for asking.

At work: at work we are still developing SMS. Now the graphic design is being made, along with 3-fold flyers. The funny part was the graphic artist asking us developers "what else" did the application do besides sending SMS. We looked at each other and said... "nothing"!

My project: First alpha build being put online in a test domain.
Last night already made great advances in the content controls. Already have controls for login, logout, login info ("welcome back, John Doe"), recover password (already sends emails), up to 10-level permission levels, simple search, search results responding to simple search, and paging. Not bad.
I've been active too in marketing tests, and it's been going pretty well (or you wouldn't be seeing this blog right now).

Other news: Not much to tell. Preparing for an evening out in Valentines Day, getting to wear engagement ring with my girlfriend. Nothing much.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Another day

Hello

I am at home today, because I have an eye infection and look like a monster. Or at least, that I was punched in the eye. The area below the eye is inflamed and a dark pinkish colour.
Yes I've gone to the doctor, and I'm being medicated.

My project is now entering the phase of designing parts or controls for it. Each part will be placeable anywhere on the site and its unique identifier means each page can contain dozens of the same parts and all have their own characteristics. Nice.

At work we keep designing the dreaded SMS message service. Now we have decided to include a basic and a premium service, to circumvent the fact that the premium is too expensive and that the basic doesn't do a very nice job sending messages. Sometimes they arrive, sometimes don't - and always report error, even when delivered. Go figure.

To me, this is bad project design.
I mean my boss cames in Monday and says "We'll do it to immediate send SMS" and we start coding. By Wednesday when he leaves the project has to "Send scheduled SMS and have clients and agents who have clients associated" and we start reformulating all of it. Friday, yes Friday he comes and says "Ok, so we need two pricing schemes, and accept online payments on the double" and we stare at each others in silence.
This. Is. Bad. Project. Design.
I know I shouldn't bash my day job, it's what keeps my food and clothes, but - sincerely! We are a software firm and we have a software we sold once. ONCE!
Another software is sold one in every three months. Other we are happy to sell it once a month. And our flagship, being the flagship, sells once a month too. The flagship is expensive, but the other ones don't! They're in the $100 price-tag.
And we instead of designing new applications, divide the team to develop parallellelly (lol) two softwares, are stuck going round and round with a thing that WILL NOT give much revenue, everybody is doing it, and we're doing it the WRONG WAY.

And then I am sort of joked there because my own software didn't sell much copies too and went bankrupt. That's exactly the point - I got it from experience and would not be happy to see it happen to me again on other place.
And that's the reason to be developing this new software project on my off-hours: to get some more income while I am there employed, and to see if I could lash out some thing to become my next try at independency.

Cheers.

Thursday, February 7, 2008

4 hours sleep

Hello.

I am with 4 hours of sleep. Damn insomnia.
Tuesday was national holiday and as my girl worked all day long, I rewrote my project from scratch. Now it has triple the flexibility and one-third complexity.
It's quite ingenious actually: just like Visual Studio has primitive controls (labels, textboxes, etc) we can build upon, my project has primitive parts that can be combined to form complex websites.
My friend has already expressed interest in one functionality my project doesn't have, but that will be a matter of two new parts added to the parts collection and all means just a day's work.
Integrating in future projects: seamless as all controls will be versioned and distinct from actual site logic. They have their own code and conditions and can be subclassed, which means I can do some specific stuff for a specific website and won't break the primitive controls.
It's got so flexible, I'm also doing the project's backoffice (composed of it's own controls and parts) inside the project's new engine!

Yesterday I went diner and going out because it was my 2nd anniversary with my girlfriend. We are on route to rent a house and start living the good life away from our daddys and mommys.

Today I also learnt that the vocalist of my preferred band just got out because he felt he could'nt contribute more energy to the band. It's Karkhov from Blasted Mechanism. Here's a video of them acting live:

Sunday, February 3, 2008

My Birthday

Well, my birthday sucks. My 29th year on planet started with a fight, ended with a fight, my mom and my girl crying, and me wanting to trash the cake. Sad, sad day. Even rained outside.

I spent the day trying to work on my project, I'm considering alternatives like Joomla and .NETNuke, have set up a virtual machine to try both.
The Vista Server 2008 is damn stupid and slow and well, it's Vista. Joomla is like 2mb zip file and it took 20 minutes to unzip the darn thing. XP virtual machine? 1 minute!

My MediaCenter remote control isn't working and i think its dead.

Today I surprised my girl by visiting her in her job when she thought I was somewhere else with my friends, she liked. Many hot girls there shopping on a Sunday too. Even saw a goth one lol.

Today is all, Joomla is finally unzipped so I will play with it a little now. See ya.

Friday, February 1, 2008

Still alive

Hello.

Tomorrow is my birthday. As my girl works, I will be programming on the pc all day until she arrives. Then we will lie down and see a movie in our MediaCenter.
Not planning much of a celebration, but we'll see.

Bye