Coding is all about grammar, software is all about philosophy.
– Unknown

Programming can be fun, so can cryptography; however, they should not be combined.
–Charles Kreitzberg and Ben Shneiderman

The sooner you start to code, the longer the program will take.
–Roy Carls

Our developers never release code. Rather, it tends to escape, pillaging the countryside all around.
–The Enlightenment Project

Perl is the crystal meth of programming: it’s so incredibly useful when you need to do a large amount of work in a small amount of time that you tend to overlook the fact that it’s basically precipitating the implosion of your vital organs.
–Dan Martinez

Programmers are the tools for converting caffeine into code.
–Unknown

If you lie to the compiler, it will get its revenge.
–Henry Spencer

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as users.
–Edward Tufte

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
–Fred Brooks, Jr.

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
–L. Peter Deutsch

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
–Fred Brooks

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third works.
–Alan J. Perlis

When Leo Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina, he could have been thinking about cubicles: “there are no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone around him.”
–Leo Tolstoy

The real value of tests is not that they detect bugs in the code but that they detect inadequacies in the methods, concentration, and skills of those who design and produce the code.
–C.A.R. Hoare

The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build.
–Bjarne Stroustrup

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
–Larry Wall

I did say something along the lines of C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows your whole leg off.
–Bjarne Stroustrup

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
–C.A.R. Hoare

Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
–Ted Nelson

Trying to outsmart a compiler defeats much of the purpose of using one
–Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger

UNIX is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.
–Dennis Ritchie

Putt’s Law: Technology is dominated by two types of people–those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.

An organization that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.
–Bjarne Stroustrup

Theoretically, software is the only component that can be perfect, and this should always be our starting point.
–Jesse Poore

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
–Damian Conway

Documentation is a love letter that you write to your future self.
–Damian Conway

If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture.
–Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder

Theory is when you know something, but it doesn’t work. Practice is when something works, but you don’t know why. Programmers combine theory and practice: nothing works and they don’t know why.
–Unknown

If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.
–Unknown

Those who want really reliable software will discover that they must find means of avoiding the majority of bugs to start with, and as a result, the programming process will become cheaper. If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.
–Edsger Dijkstra

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
–Yogi Berra

For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled.
–Richard Feynman

One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.
–Robert Firth

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.
–Jon Ribbens

If you want a girlfriend, avoid working in the computer games industry like the plague. If you work seven days a week, 15 hours a day for almost two years, with barely enough time for a pint, you have no time whatsoever for relationships. Plus computer-games makers are regarded as being about as hip and cool as abattoir workers.
–Toby Gard

Your problem is another’s solution; your solution will be his problem.
–Unknown

Embedded lines of code are growing 26% annually but developers are increasing by 8%.
–Venture Development Corporation

Productivity can decrease by as much as 25% when workers put in 60+ hour weeks for a prolonged time. And, turnover is nearly three times higher among workers who work extended hours. Absenteeism among companies with extended hours is more than twice the national average.
–Reworded from Circadian Technologies Shiftware Practices 2005 survey

There’s a fine line between being on the leading edge and being in the lunatic fringe.
–Frank Armstrong

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
–Albert Einstein

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think I know, I’ll use regular expressions. Now they have two problems.
–Jamie Zawinski

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.
–Henry Petroski

One test is worth a thousand opinions.
–Unknown

If the lessons of history teach us anything it is that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
–Unknown

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
–Bertrand Russell

Debugging is like alien abduction. Large blocks of time disappear, for which you have no explanation.
–Unknown

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
–Alan Kay

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
–Gerald Weinberg.

Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they’re much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.
–Eric S. Raymond

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
–Donald Knuth

The most unsuccessful three years in the education of cost estimators appears to be fifth-grade arithmetic.
–Norman R. Augustine

No engineer looks at a television remote control without wondering what it would take to turn it into a stun gun. No engineer can take a shower without wondering if some sort of Teflon coating would make showering unnecessary. To the engineer, the world is a toy box full of suboptimized and feature-poor toys.
–Scott Adams

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
–Douglas Adams

In handling resources, strive to avoid disaster rather than to attain an optimum.
–Butler Lampson

There are various reasons that software tends to be unwieldy, but a primary one is what I like to call “brittleness”. Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.
–Jaron Lanier

People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years.
–Joseph Licklider

Code generation, like drinking alcohol, is good in moderation.

--Alex Lowe

Nothing makes the software work like the hardware.

– Unknown

To error is human, but announcing your brand new Twitter, YouTube, Blog, and Forum Page in the same worldwide e-mail
as an application update is just asking for Trouble.
– Unknown

Overall pedigree unknown; attributed to a post on embedded.com; read at your own risk.

I always keep a few sticky notes on my desktop to remind me about the realities of the (seemingly endless) tasks at hand:

Happy Tuesday

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine called me and asked me how he could find out if somebody had been reading the e-mail at his computer.  I asked him why he thought somebody was reading his e-mail.  He works as mortgage broker and one of his co-workers started calling up his clients.

I asked him if he had any anti-virus software (he does, pretty good stuff), if the computer was his or the company’s (it’s not his), and what his password was (one of his children’s names).  After the third question, I told him (a) his co-worker had almost certainly broken into his files and (b) he needs to change his password to something less obvious than a marquee screaming “come steal this”.

I also told him if he was worried about somebody being on his computer again in his absence, he could pick up one of those programs that suspicious significants use to check-up/catch their significants.  You can find them just by searching Google with keywords like “software catch cheating spouse”.

Now it also got me thinking about a product we could produce.  Just about every laptop shipped these days has a camera.  What my friend really needed wasn’t just something to take a shot of the screen that his co-worker was looking at, he needed a picture of his co-worker as well shot at the same time.  Let’s lay out some basic marketing requirements of what this “thing” should look like:

1. The program/project name will be “You Are So Busted”.
2. The software should automatically start when the user starts the computer, logs on,  etc., unless it has been configured otherwise.
3. The software should be stealthy.  Maybe a tray icon (at the most), but nothing in the task bar unless the owner is actually configuring it.
4. The software should take a picture of the desktop (or focus window) periodically.  Maybe every 10 seconds.  Same thing with a web-cam if it is present.  We don’t need high motion video here…people searching through your mail, surfing for porn, or hanging out in chat rooms aren’t exactly switching screens that fast.
5. The software should NOT need a key logger or any of the other (hacker-like) and complicated features I’ve seen in some of the other “catcher” programs out there.

The interface and use model must be very simple.  Most of the other ones I’ve seen look pretty complicated.  People are using them (obviously), but I think our competitive advantage comes in simplifying the system, not adding a million options to it (Time Tracker aside).  It should be one main screen with the following options:

1. Start Automatically (default to “yes”).
2. Use Web Cam (default to “yes” if a web cam is found).
3. Set Storage Location (default to “somewhere”…doesn’t need to be changed).
4. Set Password (default to no password; if set, must be used for configuration as well).
5. Use Password (default to yes if the password is set).
6. Watch Captures – Look at capture sequences by date.  Show both the camera and the screen shots in sequence.  Let the user increase/decrease the view rate.

On the drawing board for now.

This is going to get a little nerdy…and long…and possibly be slighltly less boring than clipping your toenails…feel free to nod off or bail out at any time.

Time Tracker has a “multi-user” option already.  This feature is somewhat crude (but effective), in that it requires the users to send their record files (with a “tag” for each user) to the “manager” who collects all the record files in one instance of Time Tracker.  This has been in place for some time (and since complaints about it have been ZERO, we’re assuming everybody is reasonably satisfied).

However, this is not what people really think of when they think “multi-user”.  What people really think of as multi-user is “connected”, either through the browser (i.e. web page interface) or an application (i.e. a program you run), but connected in a way that changes made by other users are immediately visible to you.

Let’s start with the basic goals that this program would need to satisfy:

1. The program would need to maintain a list of Projects.
2. The program would “general” list of Tasks, any of which could be used in the Projects.
3. Records are generated by Workers.  Each Record is associated with a Project and Task.
4. A Worker could work at any computer to create Records, as long as they can access the system (e.g. Log In).
5. A Worker could create Records while not connected to the system, but could upload their Records (and download any changes) when they are connected later.  Workers could be put into Groups.
6. A Manager (who is also a Worker) can create Records, but also see any Records created for any Project/Workers that have been assigned to them by the Administrator.
7. An Administrator adds Workers, Managers, Projects, Tasks, and other Administrators to the system.  They also configure what Projects/Workers are assigned to Managers.
8. The system must be easy to install and update.

The statements above reflect only the bare minimum the system would have to do.  On top of this, you could build a pretty nice system.  For example:

1. Costs could be assigned to hours worked, by individual Worker rate, by Project rate, by Task rate, etc.  It could even be a dynamic (e.g. scripted) so that for each “System”, we would create a custom billing model to match up with your particular business model.
2. The current Time Tracker system for generating reports (filtering by Project/Task/Worker) could be expanded to include graphs, “cheat checking” (this is a whole other topic).
3. Limits could be placed on Projects, Tasks, Workers, etc., which would be pushed down to the creation of records.

Implementation Quirks

In order to create this kind of system, the data for the system has to “live” somewhere that every user of the system can see.  Looking over the competing products for this system, it looks like the “first” choice is “just use the web” for the system.  That is to say, everybody gets to see web pages and use web pages.  This has some really good advantages:

1. All the data and code lives on a machine somewhere that the clients don’t have to configure and the developers don’t have to test for.  This also avoids the problem of creating a central server at the customer’s site.
2. Updates are immediate to everybody in the world at the same time.

On the other hand, there are a few disadvantages as well.

1. You don’t have to support every type of machine, but you do  have to support every browser.  There are LOTS of browsers.
2. If their access is down (as a company or as an individual) they can’t track time.
3. Updates are immediate to everybody in the world at the same time.  Sometimes, when you deploy an update, you want to test it at a control site (with some benevolent and forgiving users) before unleashing it on the unsuspecting general populace.
4. Developing for the web is extremely limiting.  It’s not hard to get text, some images, etc. up on a browser.  It is very hard to get dynamic forms to work correctly (without Ajax, Flash, etc.).  Doing these kinds of things is relatively easy in a desktop application.
5. If your site is hacked, EVERY customer is in danger of losing their data.

Business Questions

1. How much of a market is there for this product?
2. Can we produce a product that is competitive with what we see on the Web already (but at a lower price or with some other factor that provides an advantage)?
3. Is there any other product that we can pursue with a better chance of either (a) making us money or (b) making us happy?

From Here…

Right now, this project is still on the drawing board.