Howard Young

I need to get into shape for the 2009 Crop Walk next month.  Last year we took the 4 mile stretch instead of the normal 6 mile walk we previously walked in 2007.  This year I’m planning the 6 mile track.

Ironically, I walked to Pookies to pick up some Thai food for and wondered if my $8 lunch would serve better as a donation to help the hungry.

Even though the walk was a short 1 mile round trip to Pookies and back, it gave me enough time to contemplate that if I could cut back on my meals for a month, I could easily increase the donation by $100 and also shed a few pounds.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Add new tag, crop walk, thai food

After procrastinating for a month, I finally broke down and installed TurboTax this weekend.  Except that I didn’t have enough disk space to install the 500 MB application on my Quicken Virtual PC.  Time to clean up some disk space.

I’m really big on Virtual PC and keep my personal and business expenses running and backed up on virtual computers that I run on my pristine copies of Windows 2000 Pro.

The virtual drives are kept small to fit on a 4g DVD which makes backup of the entire system as simple as burning a new DVD.  Before making drastic changes, I always create a copy of the file containing the virtual drive image in case something goes wrong.

Of course it did.

I ran the disk cleanup utility and all the unused files, old system upgrades were compressed or deleted leaving with 1GB of free space.  Plenty of space to install TurboTax.

Apparently .NET needed to be installed taking up 200 MB with the usual reboot.  Somehow pci.sys was corrupted in the intall or the disk cleanup utility messed it up.

I had a backup the backup copy, but it took 30 minutes to do the cleanup.  I decided to mount the virtual drive on another Virtual PC and copy a good version of pci.sys to the bad version.  Rebooted the QuickBooks and hoped nothing else was dorked.

That seemed to resolve the problem and I continued with the TurboTax install and everything installs fine, except …

We’ve noticed that you’re running Windows 2000.  This is the last year that you can run TurboTax using this operating system…

TurboTax, you’re killing me.  Now I got to move my data to an Windows XP Pro Virtual PC.

Categories: Piss and Moan
Tags: Add new tag, TurboTax, Virtual PC

OK, this is a little off topic, but I’m really in a bad mood and I needed to piss and moan.  The mail delivery was jacked with some major delays in the delivery last month.  I don’t know if it has happened to you — or if you even noticed or even care — but it happened to us twice in one month.

The first time I noticed this was that my credit card payment was delivered late. The second time was a letter we sent to Alabama that took over 30 days to deliver.  The strange thing was that instead of being postmarked in Thousand Oaks, it was postmarked in New Jersey.

So, mail your Christmas cards early this year. But at least there are 12 days in Christmas and the USPS will have until Jan 5, 2009 to deliver them.

Categories: Piss and Moan
Tags:

I’ve been getting some really strange questions on this blog like “How do I Write Software?”  Uh, can you please be more specific?  Do you know what you are trying to build, model, etc.?  No, I just want to learn how to write software from scratch!

So, I put on my Professors cap and believe that I can answer many of these “How to Write and Develop Software for the Beginner” questions on a new Blogger blog.  As time permits, and while I’m in the office, I try to any beginner or advance questions on writing and developing software.

Categories: Software Development
Tags: Add new tag

There’s a strange trend going around the web that brings me back earlier in my career when we thought software engineering was going the way of widgets or modules.  In a nutshell, you basically take a widget here or widget there and integrate them to build a large scale application.

We sorta do this today on some apps, but the modules tend to grow with bug fixes and new features.  This usually ends up with a mishmash mash up amalgamation of mush.  So much for the software development world.

What seems to work really well are those dirty blue widgets that you can install on just about every content management system.  One company that really does it right is Clearspring where they can make a widget just about of anything.

Like I said, I’m getting excited about widgets again!

Categories: Software Development
Tags: Add new tag, clearspring, gadgets, modules, widgets

I’ve been burning in the system for over 2 month now and I’m starting to gain confidence that the Dell GX280, or \\PLMS2 is working ok.  The GX280’s were recycled computers which we bought for $50 without the hard drive.  So all you had to do was go out and install a new SATA drive, install the OS a few apps and your all set.

For some reason, the Western Digital 500GB drive was having problems and I was ready to send the drive back to the manufacture for a replacement.  But I decided to replace the cable to see if that was the problem.  Sure enough, that was the problem.

Categories: Hardware
Tags: PLMS2, SATA, Western Digital 500GB

I finally broke down and built another Linux box to replace PLMS1(Pacific Landmark Server 1) which died a graceful death a few months ago.

Initially I recovered the data from the server and installed it on Ubuntu 7.10 desktop running as a virtual machine on top of my XP desktop.

But I’ve been a lucky recipient of a quite a few Dell GX280s which are more than powerful enough to run LAMP as a test bed; SAMBA and a few other applications to keep the infrastructure up and running. These puppies have a small footprint so I have two backup systems sitting around just in case.

Installing Ubuntu 8.04 Server was a breeze except that I thought it would at least install a basic desktop for management. But that wasn’t too difficult to install.  (Just apt-get install ubuntu-desktop.)  Everything else should be easy to install and configure.

Categories: Hardware
Tags:

Sometimes development projects just drag on and on… and sometimes resistance is futile when it comes to NIH. I swear that the Borg got me the last six months when I started switching over to Cake PHP and an MVC Architecture.

It’s not that I like or enjoy assimilation, but every time I analyze the requirements it really comes down to scalability and what it takes to scale and deploy your software architecture as it out grows one, two, “N” servers.

Even though there are some clever platforms, and most of web applications I’ve developed so far can run on a virtual private server (VPS), the Google App Engine by far ensures “scale up to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.”

So I’ve been assimilated. Resistance was futile.  No more Cake PHP …

Categories: Software Development
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Watch tonight, 9 PM ET/PT, and you’ll see how I tossed in my career as a Software Developer and became one of the top stars in Ice Road Trucker.

Joking …

Sometimes you have weird dreams like tossing in the towel and taking a life of a less stressful job like a Truck Driver making runs up and down the frozen lakes of Yellowknife Canada.

I only know of a developer who actually tossed in the towel.  He and his wife sold their house at one of the California housing peaks in the late 80’s.  Quit their jobs and moved to Canada.  Eventually got bored and took a job as a bus boy.

He resumed his development career after he figured out that he was taking the same amount of carp but was getting paid 10x less.

But my Ice Road Trucker dream is still a reality and I’m planning to take off one winter to see if I can at least drive 18-wheels as good as four.  I’m sure that Hugh Rowland would hire me to drive one of his trucks.

Now how do I get this thing out of first gear?

Categories: Computers Suck
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Unlike me, Amit the Super Affiliate, probably should stick to PPC traffic cause he can’t pass a simple SEO Cartoon Quiz. Not that I’m a professed SEO expert, I’ve found that if you simply “follow the SEO recipe“, your pages will rank higher in the SERPS. After all, W3.org is the governing organization which all search engines follow.

Of course there are lots of off page factors and topology considerations that Google, MSN and Yahoo have to analyze the macro view of the web. Each company has their own algorithms to present this view for given search terms.

All we know is that Google’s publication of its algorithm, via patent disclosure, indicates that links to your content are a contributing and weighted factor in determining content ranking. Other search engines have not disclosed their IP, so an educated guess would be that external links are a determining factor.

Even though you follow the SEO recipe, there are supply and demand factors where you are providing the supply side of the equation where Google and the other search engines are fulfilling the demand for their customers. There is enough evidence that suggests Google, with it’s massive parallel operations, provides new information near real-time where other search engines may take days.

Thus, with the proper SEO recipe, it is theoretical to achieve short and long-term results for certain terms that you are trying to market. But if you want to keep it simple, just become a PPC guy like Amit.

Categories: Websites
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