http://www.howardyoung.info Hi, my name is Howard, and I write software... Wed, 10 Dec 2008 17:20:03 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.howardyoung.info/piss-and-moan/mail-delivery-is-jacked-this-month 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 ... http://www.howardyoung.info/software-development/professor-youngs-office-hours 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 ... http://www.howardyoung.info/software-development/im-getting-excited-about-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 ... http://www.howardyoung.info/hardware/plms2-still-running-strong 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 ... http://www.howardyoung.info/hardware/another-pacific-landmark-server 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 ... http://www.howardyoung.info/software-development/the-google-borg-assimilated-me 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 ... http://www.howardyoung.info/computers-suck/software-developer-becomes-ice-road-trucker 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 ... http://www.howardyoung.info/software-development/websites/besides-software-i-actually-know-very-little-about-seo Guess what? On May 1, 2008 your Quicken 2005 will become NFG when you can't access your financial accounts anymore.  Now of course, if you enter all your records by hand, you don't have to worry. Perfectly great software going down the drain. Please, someone at Intuit tell me why?  The ... http://www.howardyoung.info/computers-suck/goodbye-quicken-2005-hello-quicken-2008 Simply put, one of our computers crashed and I'm not too happy about it. Old Faithful, PLMS1 Linux file and email server, RIP. Now instead of enjoying my weekend, I'm going through the process of restoring email, Perforce and whaever else was lingering on that file server. I've ... http://www.howardyoung.info/computers-suck/sometimes-i-just-hate-computers