Coding is fun
… and so is solving problems using software.
Consolidating documentation and writing for the sake of wasting bits is utterly boring.
I have a hard time writing for an audience that I know will not take the time to understand what I write if I make it unambiguous. But most of the time they will make weird assumptions if there is a tiny hint of ambiguity.
I can totally understand that not all people grok software development, but I’ve always thought logical thinking was the killer feature of mankind. Recent encounters makes me wonder though.
This also leads to the importance of a well defined vocabulary. I waste huge amounts of commas and parentheses when writing systems related documentation because I can not allow myself to make any assumptions at all about the readers current knowledge and taste in words.
So I guess it’s my fear of ambiguity that makes my writing unreadable. At least I’m not spreading any misinformation 
…and while I’m writing about my writing: My sentences are way to long and I don’t know if it’s OK to start one with ‘But’ just to skip a comma in the previous one.
FreeMind and the current job
The current job is about defining/refining and documenting a system that is a couple of years old. I was a big part in building it initially but it has grown without much control since then.
As I see it, the main reason it is hard to get a grasp of it now is because there is (or has never been) a central role to consolidate the development. For each little project there has been a new project manager who only wanted to do his part at the lowest cost or him. No one has taken, or gotten, responsibility for all of it. This has led to more than one ugly hack to solve the same issue in different sub projects.
Now they have taken the opportunity to try to figure out what functionality there actually is, and what should be reused or refactored.
This is the first time my deliverables aren’t code. Starting with a blank sheet is always hard, but I remembered FreeMind, a free mind mapping tool. It helps a lot with the blank sheet syndrome since one can start dumping information in it and organize it later. Of course that is possible in any other text editor, but the graphical metaphor of FreeMind helps, at least me, get over the writers block.
I haven’t run FreeMind in Vista before so it was not very pleasant to discover that all file operations on new files failed. I solved it by copying one of the document that came with the install. When I double click it in my favorite file manager it starts FreeMind and I can save changes to ‘old’ documents. It is apparently a known bug so I will keep recommending FreeMind to any one who wants to listen.
I used to build my documentation for logview4net in a commercial competitor called Mind Manager. I think I will start using FreeMind for both logveiw4net and jsiPodFetch in the future.
Kontera removed
As some of you may notice I removed the double underlined links from Kontera today. I found them to be a bit too intrusive. It was hard to read the actual text and see where the ‘real’ links were.
No one was clicking them and I guess lots of readers found them to ugly to return here.
Old PC working again
I’ve got the old PC up and running again. It was no easy quest to find a matching motherboard for an ancient computer. I ended up buying a used board.
The current plan is to run it as a file- and svn-server mainly, but I had to keep running XP so the kids can do their stuff on it. I will probably have the svn repository on the system disk and back it up daily to the other disk. I will also make some kind of offsite backup of critical data, like source code and pictures. My free 2GB account at Diino will definitively be enough for the source code. I might even be able to ftp it to my web host. All pictures are a different story. I think I’ve got over 2GB already. On the other hand; I am thinking of moving my web site to Dreamhost and they offer a lot of space for their hosting plans.
I haven’t finally decided if I should run Subversion my self. If I go to Dreamhost I can use svn there, but then it will be unavailable when my crappy internet connection drops. It will be available when I’m not at home though, and I wont have to keep my box running all the time. That will probably save me a lot of money per year.
If only people could click more on my ads so that my internet activities become self financing. I’ve got a donation button if someone feels like helping me move to Dreamhost.
No SVN, bummer
I’m using OpenSVN to manage the source code to some of my projects, but it has been down for a couple of days now. That is a real pain. IT is (was) a free service so have expected that it would shut down eventually.
I don’t have a computer that I can run SVN on. I do all my programming on the same machine so I could possibly run SVN or (evil thought) SourceSafe on that and use Diino for external backup. But I am a bit to lazy to set up backup routines ad manage the SVN server.
The SVN host I have seen online are a bit to expensive for me. I’d gladly use a cheap one with a low up time guarantee, as long as they make some kind of guarantee.
Hmm, maybe it would be possible to sign up as a reseller for one of the big server farms and sell hosted SVN.
(Just two seconds after I posted this OpenSVN was up again but I really have to get something a little more reliable.)
New release of jsiPodFetch
I encountered a couple of severe errors in jsiPodFetch this week so there was a new release yesterday.
Changes in 7.36
- When adding new feed it didn’t show up in the list.
- Don’t download items marked as done.
- Woops; If a feed was deleted while one of its files were on the player; the app couldn’t display any items.
- Added a content menu to the tray icon.
- Added a play button when an item is selected so that one can listen to the media on the PC
- Extended tooltip on ‘blue light’ when downloading content.
