April 2004 - Posts

Church!
The last time I used the word church was as the nickname for Johannesburg’s notorious, glorious, Sunday rave club ESP. I used to jam away every Sunday from nine am to nine pm, together with enough other dance music enthusiasts to earn the club its quasi-religious nickname.

While others may have, I never used the term in any kind of disrespect with regard to real churches. I consider myself a very respectful atheist, and even have a profound interest in the Bible, but it was during a very interesting biblical conversation last night that I joked that maybe I should start going to church if only to meet women. It would, however, be the last resort but my social life has been a bit cold lately.

The funny thing is, this morning when I stopped to put petrol in, I was approached by a lady in a bright yellow top; I first thought she was a Mr. Delivery person, but she offered me a flyer to join their Volunteer Ministers Cavalcade this afternoon at Gillooly's Farm, less than a minute’s drive from my flat. I told politely informed her of my atheism, and while she was telling me that it didn’t matter, I saw the Church Of Scientology badge on her top.

I have read Dianetics and found it interesting, if not entirely factual or practical, and I have some respect for the man that wrote Battlefield Earth. John Travolta has disgraced L. Ron Hubbard to quite some degree with his screen effort at popularising the novel. Although the Church Of Scientology is not a church, and is highly controversial, I am willing to lend them an ear. After all, I even still listen to Jehovah’s Witnesses sometimes, and anyway, I’ll meet some people, and even if I only know them for a day, it will have made a difference.
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Posted 17 April 2004 01:07 PM by bkelly | 4 comment(s)
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Going Gold
Tomorrow signals the end of a hellish week for me. We finally cut CD's to deploy our new application to about 120 clients. I had no sleep on Wednesday night, and have been under constant pressure to develop a fully automated and robust deployment package. Next week will also be quite trying as I field queries from support regarding instances where the installation does not run quite as smoothly as it does on our test machines. That reminds me, we all know that hard coding paths is very bad practice, but I something I have seen quite often, and even admit to doing once or twice in a pinch, is to hard code the "C"drive and create a temporary path there if it is difficult to determine a special folder. Last night two of us were getting panicky because after a succesful install, there was no application under the Program Files folder. Our company folder wasn't even there. The program had installed to D:\Program Files, the machine default. Notwithstanding, I could have easily hard coded a working folder on the C drive and not had any trouble, but consider the case of my home machine. It only has one hard drive, and its letter is G. I'm sure that although it' s very rare, there are other cases of computers without the ubiquitous C drive.

This week, and other such weeks, have made me realise that deployment should never be considered a latter phase of the project, but rather developed in parallel with the application.

That would allow the time necessary for thorough deployment testing, as there are so many variables and possibilities to cover. Deployment testing is also very time consuming as sometimes one has to rebuild, uninstall, and reinstall to fully test a new deployment feature, or a bug correction. Something like MSDE does not install quickly.Tomorrow signals the end of a hellish week for me. We finally cut CD's to deploy our new application to about 120 clients. I had no sleep on Wednesday night, and have been under constant pressure to develop a fully automated and robust deployment package. Next week will also be quite trying as I field queries from support regarding instances where the installation does not run quite as smoothly as it does on our test machines.

That reminds me, we all know that hard coding paths is very bad practice, but I something I have seen quite often, and even admit to doing once or twice in a pinch, is to hard code the "C" drive and create a temporary path there if it is difficult to determine a special folder. Last night two of us were getting panicky because after a successful install, there was no application under the Program Files folder. Our company folder wasn't even there. The program had installed to D:\Program Files, the machine default. Notwithstanding, I could have easily hard coded a working folder on the C drive and not had any trouble, but consider the case of my home machine. It only has one hard drive, and its letter is G. I'm sure that although it' s very rare, there are other cases of computers without the ubiquitous C drive.

This week, and other such weeks, have made me realise that deployment should never be considered a latter phase of the project, but rather developed in parallel with the application from the design phase. Developers should spend time analysing there own requirements as well as those of their clients, and starting the deployment design at the same time as the application design allows us to leverage the component and feature functionality of Windows Installer. This allows us to have fancy setup programs that offer custom installation configurations, and eases later patches and fixes, as well as upgrades.

Actually completing the deployment package well ahead of the main application would allow the time necessary for thorough deployment testing, as there are so many variables and possibilities to cover. Deployment testing is also sometimes very time consuming, when one has to rebuild, uninstall, and reinstall to fully test a new deployment feature, or a bug correction. Something like MSDE does not install quickly. Dependencies between the main application and the setup package may arise and require changes to one or both applications, something very risky close to the deployment date, and early discovery allows for well though out solutions.
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Posted 16 April 2004 09:29 PM by bkelly | no comments
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Caffeine Code
Rumour has it that, sometimes, software developers are viewed as coffee-to-code converters. If this were true, the amount of Ricoffy I have consumed since yesterday morning would have surely result in a body of code that one million monkeys randomly hacking away at their typewriters for all of eternity could not rival. Next time I spend all night converting coffee to code I will at least ensure that I have better coffee.

Our new application is going live on Monday, and today is the absolute deadline for everything, meaning that several aspects of software development and deployment, by some sacred law, could not be manifest until the small hours of this morning.

Tonight’s will be a very good sleep.
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Posted 15 April 2004 06:14 AM by bkelly | 1 comment(s)
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Navigating My Life
I’ve wanted some unknown thing for a while, but its nature has always eluded me. You know the feeling, there is a missing piece in the puzzle of your life. but you don't know what it is. Then, today as I took the Grayston offramp on the way to Sandton, I knew what I wanted.

A street corner vendor selling wall hanging world maps. I’m sure the market for these maps is good enough that the vendors don’t have to leave their corner to follow a geography teachers’ convention somewhere, and I’m quite dissapointed I didn’t buy one right there an then, before they are all snapped up. Imagine, my own world map on a wall in my flat, making my otherwise incomplete life whole. I thank entrepreneurs everywhere for this windfall.
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Posted 08 April 2004 12:44 PM by bkelly | 1 comment(s)
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My Television and I
My television has not been switched on since last Tuesday, and I have not missed it once. I intend keeping it off over the long weekend and enjoying some other things that I have been neglecting such as reading, music, and programming. Oh yes, I’m supposed to fit some studying in there as well.

Where did I get time for television before? It stole it from me, and I let it. It’s an easy way to pass time, to occupy the mind, and sometimes even to fall asleep. An otherwise long, lonely evening at home becomes only as long as it takes to unlock the flat and switch the TV on. Now, my evenings at home are by far too short, and sometimes even too few. A phone call to join a friend for drinks or a braai can be unwelcome, and Saturday’s shopping includes plans to avoid leaving home at all on Sunday.

I am not becoming a recluse, and I still go out at least once a week, but my TV deprivation has added value to the time I spend by myself. I actively enjoy what I do instead of passively enjoying a TV show, or even passively not enjoying one. The only use I really have for the box now is watching movies, and at 54cm it is too small to do them justice. I think I’ll be doing myself a favour by selling it and maybe later in the year buying a nice big one, just for movies. Until then, many happy evenings to me.
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Posted 07 April 2004 12:11 PM by bkelly | 6 comment(s)
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