Proud Programmers Blog

Tags: Thoughts
You new and shiny purchased application crash with a bang, and when you contact the software vendors support, you hear it works on my machine" .... My latest software test was the BugTrap client/server system from Intellesoft, which amongst other stuff consist of a server part intended to run as a service on a Windows server. First of all, BugTrap is a module which can be linked into your Win32/64 applications, to catch uncatered errors. This will collect information about  the application crash, and potentially submit it back to my BugTrap server. Very briefly you can replace the following ...



with a much more comprehensive ...



BugTrap sends off the collected information to the server, and potentially this can help the developer make better products.

Posted by Robert Ibsen Voith At 8:32 PM Location Nøtterøy, Norway | Permalink | Comments (3) |      

Tags: Thoughts
Today I received a newsletter from "Genius Inside" <imelchner@geniusinside.com>

It looked like this;


Does it look like a genius? Me thinks not!

In fact, I feel embarrassed on behalf of the the person that sent this newsletter and didn't debug it better. In fact the code says;



Probably not

My own morale; hope I never do this myself!!

Posted by Robert Ibsen Voith At 1:00 PM Location Nøtterøy, Norway | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Tags: Question Thoughts
Several members of my family are interested in genealogy, and sometimes need to pass over genealogy-data to each other. The integration is often conveyed via GEDCOM files, and thus each user has to import and maintain their own genalogy databases on each computer. Has anybody experience with such tools?

Of course an ideal tool would be Domino based, with the following top features;

• Utilize Domino's strong security features to assign responsible persons for their own families within the complete person-hierarchy. This means that my uncle can be responsible for his familiy and any decendants, while my aunt can be similar responsive for her familiy and decendants. This will spur collaboration and ownership of the family data "near you". This would be much better than sending off some GEDCOM file to the authorized Genealogy-nut in the familiy which may or may not add your data.
  
• Present the familiy data in cool, web 2.0'ish ways, created with DoJo or Ext.ND or similar. I foresee person, familiy and tree-views.
  
• Wiki-like editing possibilities for authorized persons. This means that changes can be reviewed, acceped and rejected. All edits are saved.
  
• Blog-like interface about edits in the database. RSS-feeds are important for some
  
• GEDCOM export. Authorized users may export the data as GEDCOM files for other usage - such as report generators. GEDCOM import. Authorized users may import GEDCOM to start off a family-tree
  
• Good image support. I will be willing to offer free usage of my Import Image 2 Lotus Notes (II2LN) for such tools! (BTW, Blogsphere users already have this possibility, see here).
  
  One day - perhaps several, independent familiy trees can connect and we thus have the start of WikiGeno - see who you are related to?  

Posted by Robert Ibsen Voith At 11:47 AM Location Nøtterøy, Norway | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

Tags: Windows 7 Microsoft Office Thoughts
My initial impression about Windows 7 is that this Windows-version is what Vista should have been. This is probably the feeling of the programmers in Redmond too, which operates with the internal version number 6.1 on Windows 7. Windows Vista has internal version number 6.0 ...

Microsoft is already pushing Windows 7 very hard, and thus spreading the conception of Vista being a middle-version. This stirs up the customer base, which is currently mostly sitting on the fence, watching Microsoft make up their mind about the Windows future. Here in Norway, many (MANY...) customers still uses Windows XP, and wisely let others "test" Vista for them. They probably won't install Vista at all, but waits until Windows 7 is ready for launch. The lack of Vista-focus and "here we go again with another new OS"-attitude from Microsoft, gives open source projects like Linux, Open Office (and off course our own Lotus Symphony!) bigger momentum for every day Microsoft doesn't deliver a proper OS. Take a look at the latest distributions of Linux such as Ubuntu for example, and pair that with the powerful applications in Open Office. Both the functionality and the look and feel of these packages are now creeping upwards, and making them feasible candidates for both companies and people. Especially when you look at the cost-perspective

In December 2008 we had a major news-case in Norway, where the Northern Norway Regional Health Authority (Helse Nord RHF)  after a licence-review, had to pay Microsoft approx. 40 million NOK (around 5.5 mill USD) as a response for missing licences. Of course Helse Nord has to pay for their actual licence usage, but it probably shows how easy it is to get lost in the count of licences, and super expensive it can be to fix it
I bet someone is the finance department is thinking real hard on whether the functionality of Open Office and Linux could actually replace Microsoft Windows and Office in the very near future ...

The Office-Coffin
I can't stop feeling that Microsoft is loosing on the Office-part, as the functionality and looks of open source packages comes to par very quickly. An average user only uses minimal features in Word, Excel and Powerpoint anyway, and the counterparts in Open Office can clearly fulfill the ordinary users needs. In the case of Helse Nord, they can obviously save a bunch of money by having most users on Open Office, while only the most techno-savvy users continue to use Office. This is even more clear as Microsoft entered the open source XML world by introducing their document formats as  standards. This forces Microsoft to open up their previously propriotory document formats to the world, and after a while - who will use locked document formats when you can just as easy use open formats? So, perhaps Microsoft got their XML standards approved by slight tricking, but they may not realize that they at the same time hammers down another nail in the Office-coffin.

Seeing the Office-coffin in the horizon must make Microsoft think real hard on the remaining OS-part - at which they haven't decided completely yet My guess is that we don't have to wait until 2010 to see Windows 7. They have to surface it sooner than that!

Posted by Robert Ibsen Voith At 5:30 PM Location Nøtterøy, Norway | Permalink | Comments (0) |