Howard Young

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.

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.

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!

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.