Month: October 2002

This weekend was the trick ‘r treating weekend. Emma was a cowgirl and Maddy was a fairy princess, or medeebal (aka ‘medieval’) princess depending on who you asked. We hit the downtown businesses Saturday afternoon until they got tired of walking (about an hour) and then that night did the neighborhood, again for about an hour until they were pooped out. We got lots of candy of course, and we all ate too much, except Mom who is much smarter than Dad or the kids…

Sunday we went out to the relative’s house and did some more. Maddy got tired quicker this time, even though she had a stroller at her disposal, and we went back before everyone else. Still, lots of candy once again. All in all a successful trick ‘r treating experience… Favorite costumes: Home-made SpongeBob costume that someone made out of a big cardboard box, with great attention to detail… also the ‘fancy’ lads, a group of young boys dressed up as girls, quite hilarious…

I started getting back into learning more MySQL this weekend. I didn’t mention this, but I got a SQL book a while back (for 50 cents) titled Teach Yourself SQL in 14 Days. It’s about 7 years old, but the basics of SQL haven’t changed much in that time. In my other life SQL has been learned from trial, error, and lots of hacking. I do a lot of perl related things with SQL, so when I can’t write the SQL to do what is needed, I just do it on the perl side. Learning what I’m learning now should speed things up a bit. Of course I’ve had it more that 14 days, and I’m only 1/2 way through it.

I hacked at Aaron’s weblogUpdates for a few minutes today, and it now supports Weblogs.com RSS Pings… DIY baby… (Note: I think Aaron updated things recently, so I should really check on what he updated…)

Well, I did end up looking at Greymatter again and after a few minutes remembered how poorly written the code was, and remembered why I never used it. Still, it might work for you if security and reliability aren’t high on your list…

Here’s the link I should have had previously, it’s by Eric Raymond from The Magic Cauldron:

First, code written for sale is only the tip of the programming iceberg. …we’ll see shortly that there is empirical evidence that approximately 95% of code is still written in-house…

Most such in-house code is integrated with its environment in ways that make reusing or copying it very difficult. (This is true whether the environment is a business office’s set of procedures or the fuel-injection system of a combine harvester.) Thus, as the environment changes, work is continually needed to keep the software in step.

This is called `maintenance’, and any software engineer or systems analyst will tell you that it makes up the vast majority (more than 75%) of what programmers get paid to do. Accordingly, most programmer-hours are spent (and most programmer salaries are paid for) writing or maintaining in-house code that has no sale value at all-a fact the reader may readily check by examining the listings of programming jobs in any newspaper with a ‘Help Wanted’ section.

I knew I didn’t make it up ;)