Optimize Your Code!!!
Last December, Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror wrote that Hardware is cheap, Programmers are expensive. While I certainly agree with the spirit of his premise and eventual conclusion, it is only applicable if you are running Software as a Service. But he doesn’t say this and I wonder if it was an oversight, or if he forgets what it’s like to ship software to other people. There is clearly a case to be made for telling developers to optimize their code in shipping products.
The problem lies in the very first step where there are some major underlying assumptions which you can infer from the list.
1. This is your budget we’re talking about.
2. You have the budget and means to upgrade the hardware.
3. The software isn’t a dog out of the box.
The final assumption is worth taking note of and is the real reason for this post, so let me give you an example. Or “the” example, rather.
Read MoreMike’s Laws of Business
Once upon a time, I wrote an article called “How to bootstrap a consulting business”. It was a good article and was well written for what it was designed to convey. The last line of the article sums it up pretty well:
“The hardest part about the process is having the willpower to make the leap into being self employed. After that, it’s really not that hard.”
If you want to get anywhere, you have to start your own business. It doesn’t matter if you do it alone, or if you have one or more partners. The most difficult thing to do is get started. And that gave rise to Mike’s Laws of Business.
Read MoreLast minute crash
Well, at 5:05pm on Friday (go figure on the time problems started), my computer was acting flaky so I decided to do the normal thing and reboot. Unfortunately, my desktop at the office decided to flake out entirely and for some reason decided it no longer wanted to be part of the Moon River domain.…
Read MoreRepeated Characters in VMWare
For those of you who experience occasional typing problems with your VMWare machines, there’s still hope. Over the past few years, I’ve run into this problem several times, and every time the symptoms are basically the same. When you’re using a remote console to access a virtual machine, as you start typing the characters will…
Read MoreHow to Convert Your Blog From SubText to WordPress
No matter what anyone tells you, there’s more to changing blog engines than just clicking a few buttons and importing data. It tends to be a fair amount more complicated than that. In my last post, I highlighted some of the reasons, both rational and not so rational for my decision to change from SubText to Wordpress.
However, with the research links I found on Google, I still ran into a myriad of problems which the resources I found didn’t address. I felt there was more hand waving than hand holding. I like to hold hands, so here’s how I converted from SubText 1.9.3 to Wordpress 2.7.1.
Read MoreAbandoning SubText
Writing and maintaining a blog is like getting married. Once you choose blogging platform, you’re essentially stuck and changing blogging platforms is about as painless as getting divorced. In the best case, it’s not any fun. In the worst, you lose pretty much everything you ever had.
For more than a year now, I’ve been considering changing blog engines. Interestingly enough, that time frame also coincides quite nicely with my dramatic drop-off in blog posts. Why put more work into a blog if you’re just digging your hole deeper? I knew that every blog post I was going to add was just going to increase the amount of work I’d need to do to perform the conversion and decrease the motivation to actually move to another platform.
However, last week I decided to finally bite the bullet and just get it over with. After all I’d been absent from my blogging duties for nearly a year. With my Masters degree now out of the way, I really didn’t have a good excuse to put it off any longer. So I started at the most obvious place imaginable for how to convert my blog from SubText to something else. Google.
I suppose I should back up a little bit and explain my reasons for abandoning SubText. After all, I do a fair amount of .NET development and SubText is written in .NET with a SQL Server back end. Let me put it bluntly.
I had higher expectations for SubText as a platform.
Read MoreAthens, Greece – Day 4
I was going to write another post about my day yesterday when I got back from the office, but my day simply got worse when I booted up my laptop. It turns out that there is a strike going on here in Athens. A lot of the city services are shutting down, garbage is piling…
Read MoreAthens, Greece – Days 1-2
I’ve been here for literally 10 minutes and I already hate the place. It’s cramped, it smells funny, there’s nothing to do here, the food sucks, and I had to pay $125 to get an adapter so I could plug my laptop into the power outlet. Only 9 more hours before I get out of…
Read MoreReturning from hiatus
So, I’m back. Technically I never went anywhere. Unless you count Indianapolis, Puerto Rico, Raleigh, Durham, Pinehurst, and Indianapolis again. I also have an upcoming trip to Athens. Yep. As in Athens, Greece. I leave on Saturday. Two weeks after I get back, I leave for Las Vegas where we’re sponsoring a conference. Yes, life…
Read MoreJob opening at Moon River Consulting
We have a full time position open here at Moon River Consulting. What’s that you say? What’s Moon River Consulting? Well, it’s the consulting counterpart of Moon River Software. The listing is on Monster.com and you can find out more information about it here. If you’re pretty good with Windows, Unix, and have a halfway…
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