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.
The Long Tail and The Diamond Age
I’m almost done reading The Long Tail
It is the kind of book where I feel I’ve thought of the basic ideas presented before. Not that I could have written it myself though. Far from. Chris describes the long tail as all the small niches that doesn’t get any shelf space at Best Buy, but are very lucrative when exposed on the web. This is because web sites like Goggle and iTunes helps bringing niche consumers and niche producers together. It also looks like more and more people are turning away from being hit consumers when it becomes easier to find just the right niche products.
Anyway; this infinite range of products got me thinking about The Diamond Age
Moving to SharpDevelop from Visual Studio Express
In light of the recent controversy of using plugins in Visual Studio Express and getting some inspiration after listening to the DotNetRocks episode with Christopher Wille on SharpDevelop I thought I should give SharpDevlop a chance again. I am working on two utilities that I plan to release as shareware and as I do not want to rely on tools supplied by my employer I have been using Visual Studio Express until now. I haven’t done any real work in #Develop yet, but I’ve got both projects up and running.
The first thing that bit me was the lack of a typed dataset designer. I was on the way to move that structure into a List<T> anyway so it doesn’t bother me that much right now. I’ll write about the progress of each project this week.
AllOfMp3 is dead, long live Mp3Sparks
Seems like RIAA finally won the fight; AllOfMp3 has shut down.
… but there is a new site called Mp3Sparks up and running. Mp3Sparks looks like a clone of AllOfMp3 and is owned by the same company. They claim to accept credit cards so it is possible to actually buy from them. That was a problem AllOfMp3 had at the end since none of the credit card ompanies wanted to do business with them.
