The new Samuel Beckett Bridge was assembled in the Netherlands and taken to Dublin by sea. However, there is another bridge in the way.
Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, signed the Lisbon Treaty today, against his better instincts. Since Ireland was told to keep holding referenda on the treaty until it gave the right answer (as with the earlier Nice Treaty), the Treaty will now come into effect in January 2010.
I am not, and will never be, an EU citizen.
In the past when this country was annexed and people were assigned new duties as citizens of the annexing state, revolution was the result. I don't fancy that, so I think I'll be moving to Canada instead.
The finally-more-than-fantasy VASIMR ion thruster + a pebble bed reactor = feasible manned interplanetary flights within our lifetimes.
Given that the VASIMR represents an order of magnitude improvement in specific impulse (rocketry's equivalent of fuel efficiency) over chemical rockets, I wonder if sustained acceleration at a constant 1g, and thus perfect artificial gravity, could be achieved in the next 50 years?
Ireland is in a dire economic situation. The way out of this is realise that the days of large multinationals employing hundreds of thousands of unskilled Irish people to manufacture physical objects are over and that the future of this country is in the hands of small service businesses. With that in mind, please consider some of the following to make it easier to start and run such a company here.
The new Samuel Beckett Bridge was assembled in the Netherlands and taken to Dublin by sea. However, there is another bridge in the way.
A bootstrapped start-up is a great place to work. However, not everyone can start their own – you need to have enough money in the bank to live on for about a year or you'll need to do consultancy work at the same time, and deal with the overhead of context-switching your brain between consultancy and your company.
The next best thing is to work for a start-up that you don't own. So why should you give up your job in a bank or IBM and work for a start-up you've never heard of?
If you sell software without using sales reps, you need to make sure that the short time between downloading a trial and making a decision to proceed or not is as rewarding as possible. Even if you have a sales force, it's very difficult to change someone's mind if they have decided your software is broken or hard to use.
Finally, something not so easy - test your designs on real people. If you can, create mock-ups using pen and paper or specialised software and fake the interaction by moving parts around. When you have anything that works left people loose on it without giving them any hints and watch what they do.
... when there is so much available for free?
Probably the most important reason is that companies that charge for software pay someone to ensure that it installs properly and has a manual that actually describes the version you're using.
I upgraded the version of troubled open-source project OpenOffice on my main machine to 3.0 recently. After a lengthy process, the installer spends about ten minutes checking itself. The user is then presented with this:
While it's inexcusable that an upgrade should require the user to shut down Explorer and the quick start utility of its own previous version, this is made worse by being impenetrable to the majority of users. Note the use of the term "process id" and the lack of any description of how to use one to shut down either of these close-button-less processes. I was unwilling to try the "Ignore" button, which is probably related to memories of what horrors invariably happened when you chose that option in pre-historic versions of MS-DOS.
The next step was worse. After I did its bidding, the installer started its ten-minute checking procedure again. This time the message was even more obtuse:
What?
As one of the 1% or so of users who wouldn't give up at that point, I shut down all those "applications". They included several of the VMware services and a few other things that really shouldn't impede a word processor from installing. This time, the ten-minute check worked, but my patience was gone – converting any important documents I have in OpenOffice's format to Microsoft's .docx is now on my task list.
The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it.
The Second Rule of Program Optimization - For experts only: Don't do it yet.
Michael A. Jackson
...premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Donald Knuth
I'm writing software that, in its barest essence, manipulates lists of files. Some of those lists are long, and sometimes they need to be sorted. Most of the properties they need to be sorted on are stored in a database. Thus, the records referring to the documents in question need to be loaded from the database.
I don't like databases. To paraphrase an unknown person - when faced with a data storage problem, the server applications programmer instinctively reaches for a database; now he has two problems. Therefore, I like to wrap them up, often in multiple layers - in this case the loading of document details is done through a document database interface. For some reason, when I wrote this and its SQL implementation (which itself does very little direct database access), I didn't offer a way to load multiple documents at once.
So, when it came to making the control that sorts a list of files work, loading details took far too long - four seconds or so for the results of a search with 14,000 hits. I needed to write that function to load multiple documents at once, so I added one that built a long SQL IN clause, assuming that it would be fast enough and I could do the standard trick of using a few prepared statements with various length lists of parameters in their IN clause later.
It took 14 seconds to load the same set of documents. One query was taking close to four times as long as 14,000 queries to get the same information. Worse, there was no particular reason why I hadn’t simply skipped the step of running 14,000 separate queries - it's blatantly stupid. For once, I hadn't prematurely optimised.
Luckily, databases offer an awkward Swiss army knife in their ability to create temporary tables and use them in joins. Joe Celko dislikes these because they turn a set processing system into a batch processing one, and I agree. They also tend to come with a long list of caveats attached. In this case, creating a table, dumping 14,000 identifiers into it using a batched insert and using it in an INNER JOIN to filter a query takes less than a second, so it's what gets done.
Twitter left me cold when it was launched. I didn't get the point of a blog that isn't a blog, and agreed with The Register that it was more "Web2.0rhea".
Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley talked at length about Twitter in the most recent episode of their podcast and suggested using the feed-able Twitter search tool to look for people with the problem your software solves, in much the same way as one would use Technorati to look for blog posts about it.
However, unless my understanding of how replying to a tweet works is wrong (i.e., only my own followers will see the reply unless the original tweeter subscribes to a search for @ his own user name), I'm still not sure how to exploit it. Any suggestions?
Some local examples: