Kyle’s Blog

Steve Irwin, the “Crocodile Hunter”, died a few days ago. Honestly, I never really watched his shows much. Maybe just a few too many “crikeys” for me. My 9-year-old son loved the guy, though, and I definitely had plenty of respect for his work. There are very few people out there who could stand a few feet from a wild crocodile snapping at his limbs while calmly narrating for the camera. Steve was shockingly good at what he did, and he obviously never felt anything but the most sincere admiration for all the creatures he encountered.

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Sitting here and drinking my tequila and Coke Zero tonight, I wonder about my progress toward a genuine release for “Krome”, the email application for the Treo 650 I’ve previously posted about. Now I’ve contributed to many previous public domain projects and even released entire programs I’ve developed under the GPL, but Krome is the first program that will not be free. Yes, that’s right. I plan to sell it directly to users as sort of a Micro-ISV (basically a one-man software show).

Of course, I’ve already heard my fair share of negativity toward this approach. Actually, I feel like I’ve heard from just about every naysayer on the Internet at this point, but everyone pretty much just rambles off some excuse that falls somewhere between the “there are already a ton of those kinds of apps available” to the somewhat more depressing “one person just can’t keep up with a big corporation”. I don’t know what to tell you guys. I already know all of these facts you’re giving me. I know that there are many email applications available out there for the Treo. I know that some of these apps have relatively large programming teams working for them. I know all of this, and yet still I keep working on Krome. Because the email apps I’ve used for the Treo so far….well….they’re awful.

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The trend in the desktop microprocessor industry is now moving toward multiple processing cores per CPU. Although two cores in a single CPU might help users who run more than a single CPU-intensive program at a time, there are actually very few of those types of users around who need or want or even notice that they do such a thing. Two cores in a single CPU might also help users who run multi-threaded desktop applications, although even fewer of those exist. Most multi-threaded programs are server applications such as databases and web servers. Two cores might also offer a slight benefit if the operating system can do its processing primarily on one core while applications run primarily on the other core.

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You know what kills me about the software engineering field? The sheer number of people writing software for a living who can’t stand to be around computers. Have you ever asked another software engineer what types of personal projects he/she fiddles with outside of work, and get the deadpan response that “the last thing I want to do after a work day is sit in front of a computer”?

Whaaa?!? Then why the hell did you get into a career with computers? Oh, I get it. It’s the money, isn’t it? Well that may be fine for you, but I chose something I love for my career, which means that it’s also my entertainment when I’m at home.

And then it really gets me when these same people denigrate your choice of hobbies by sneering out some insult like, “Well, I have a LIFE outside of work.” What part of life do you think I’m missing out on? What? Watching TV? The hours that you spend turning into a vegetable in front of a TV set are hours that I spend in front of my computer. Guess whose brain is getting more stimulation? And I still have everything else you get out of life, too. I have my friends, a girlfriend, two kids, and I get plenty of exercise.

So don’t berate me with false pride in your voice at how your job for you is “just a job”. My job is one of my lifelong loves, and not only is there nothing wrong with that, but I’d argue that there is something seriously wrong with your life if you don’t love what you’ll be doing 40 hours every week for the rest of your life. I’d say you need to get a life, and this time make it a life that you enjoy.

But I’m not bitter.

Normally I try to reserve space on my blog for writing about software, but as I was talking to a friend of mine in the software industry the other day, I discovered that he is also a musician as a hobby, and he even plays in a small band of sorts on the weekend. Now I don’t know why this should surprise me, because I’ve seen this pattern often in the software industry–people who write software love playing musical instruments–but this time, it brought a question to mind. Why do software engineers like music so much? After rolling this question around in my head in contemplation for a bit, it occurred to me that it’s actually part of a larger mystery. Why do people like music?

I mean, it’s just a pattern of sounds and words mashed together in a semi-repeating pattern. Why does it entrance us? Is there some evolutionary advantage, perhaps related to social skills of some sort, that draws people to this repetition of sound? It really, truly puzzles me. And no matter how long I think on it, I can’t come up with any sort of reasonable answer.

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I recently read (or more accurately, listened to) the book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and I really enjoyed it. One idea in particular captured my attention regarding the concept of self-employment. Among those software developers who consider the possibility of starting a business, there are basically two camps: those who want to follow the road to independence through contracting and consulting, and those who want to write and sell a software product. In my opinion, both options are valid. It’s all just a matter of potential.

If you are a software contractor or consultant, there is no doubt that it is possible to make more income than you make as an employee. In fact, if you are even moderately good at networking (social networking, not the other kind), then your odds of making at least the same money as you once made as an employee are very good and the odds of making a much better income are still pretty good. However, the potential to generate a really significant amount of money (millions of dollars) is practically zero.

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Did you know that you have a constitutional right to copyright? Those of you more familiar with copyright may think this obvious, but not everyone realizes that the legitimacy of copyrights is rooted in the U.S. constitution. Specifically, Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8 of the Constitution provides the U.S. government the following power.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

This one-liner in the constitution grants Congress the power to create laws that provide authors a monopoly over the ability to make copies of their original creative works. The problem is that the authors who drafted the constitution left this line just a little too vague. Specifically, the phrase “for limited times” has resulted in the classic “blank check” scenario because, after all, what time-frame is considered “limited”. A year? A decade? A century? A milennium? Wouldn’t any time frame other than “forever” be a limited time frame? Yes, unfortunately, and Congress has opened this loophole wide enough to drive entire content industries through, leaving behind the rights of the original authors for whom this clause was originally penned and obliterating the original intent of the constitution to promote progress in science and art.

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I had an interesting train of thought the other day that led me to a picture of a possible future that I thought I’d share. As some of you may know I write an Intellivision emulator named Bliss that is released as open source under the GPL. From time to time, I receive emails from various other developers letting me know that they have ported this emulator to another platform. The most recent email I received along these lines was about an ongoing effort to port Bliss to the GP2X platform. Now I had previously heard of this platform, but didn’t really pay that much attention to it up until this point. This particular email piqued my curiousity, so I decided to look at possibly purchasing one for myself.

These GP2X devices have an SD slot that you can use to load home-brew software on them and I already have a 1GB SD card for my Treo 650, but I thought I’d just buy a new larger SD card for my Treo and use the 1GB card for the GP2X, should I decide to buy one. This led me to start looking at the price of SD cards. I had purchased my 1GB SD card about 6 months ago for about $90. Much to my surprise, I can now purchase a 2GB SD card for about $65, and there are already 4GB SD cards already available for about $170 with 8GB SD cards coming just around the corner.

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If I hear the words “Web 2.0″ again, I’m going to be really sick. I heard it yet again in this video.

Wyse CEO proclaims ‘perfect storm’ for thin clients

There is no Web 2.0, everyone. The idiot non-geeks who are using this term have no clue. I’m calling the bluff. I’m exposing the little man behind the curtain. I’m tattling to the emperor about his new clothes. The web you see now is being built by exactly the same software engineers using exactly the same tools but they are just getting slightly better at using the tools they’ve got. That’s all. Nothing else. Calling it Web 2.0 is like buying a kitten now and then five years from now calling him “Fluffy 2.0″. It’s the same friggin’ cat!

Can we please talk about something else?

In a previous post, I explained how I believe that writing software is very similar to writing fiction, and that writing excellent software requires a personality with a special blend of creativity and logic, rather than the logic-centric personality that is anecdotally accepted as the “norm” in this industry.

So what can we learn from the writing industry that we haven’t yet learned in the software industry? That industry is much older than ours, after all, so they’ve had many, many years to streamline the process of writing fiction. Well, one important point to notice is that it’s difficult to get a consistent, quality product if you have 30 people working on the same book. I believe this also applies to software, and I’m sure many of you who also write software for a living would agree that very large projects often produce low-quality software. Sure, there are exceptions, but on the whole, most software products I’ve seen that involve development contributions from more than about 6 people turn out poor quality.

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