Lost in OK

Joel of Joel on Software has another fabulous article out on his website, this time on software pricing. It’s well worth a read even if you could care less about pricing because he’s a pretty funny guy when it comes down to it. For example:

I’m going to start with a little economic theory, then I’m going to tear the theory to bits, and when I’m finished, you’ll know a lot more about pricing and you still won’t know how much to charge for your software, but that’s just the nature of pricing. If you can’t be bothered to read this, just charge $0.05 for your software, unless it does bug tracking, in which case charge $30,000,000 for it.

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By a weird coincidence, I discovered a solution to a problem via a blog at the same time I was wrestling with it. I accidentally deleted a document that I was working on which sent me into a conniption fit about having to recreate it entirely. However, a blog post from Crooked Timber popped up at the same time which solved all of my problems. If you have Google Desktop installed on your system (if you don’t, you should), you can find historical version of your documents in its local cache. You lose all of the formatting of the document, but at least get the text of the document. It also lets you see how that document has changed over time. Really cool and a life saver if you lose something important.

Man, this is just starting to get real funny to me. Here’s another great quote from a newspaper editor furious about the increasing popularity and pressure from the online publishers:

In July, he [Randell Beck, executive editor of the Argus Leader] explained to readers that “true believers of one stripe or another, no longer content to merely bore spouses and neighbors with their nutty opinions, can now spew forth on their own blogs, thereby playing a pivotal role in creating the polarized climate that dominates debate on nearly every national issue. If Hitler were alive today, he’d have his own blog.”

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Well it took long enough, but finally the fight is over. Maybe now they can all be friends:

Reuters - Business software maker PeopleSoft Inc. has accepted a sweetened $10.3 billion acquisition offer from rival Oracle Corp., ending a bitter, 18-month hostile takeover battle, the companies said on Monday.

Even though everyone else and their dog is posting on this, I though I would pass it along for those who are living in a whole. Google has a new beta version of their search interface available called Google Suggest. It’s pretty incredible; allowing you to see what kind of results you can expect from your search string before you’ve even search. God, would I love to see the hardware/software setup on this one. Amazing product, hopefully it will make it to production.

OK, this one was just kinda funny so I though I would pass it along. I was listening to C-Span radio with my new satellite radio at lunch and overheard a rebroadcast of a press conference given by James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis) regarding immigration policy. One of his major points was his desire to see the border fence between California and Mexico completed. Pretty standard stuff overall. However, he makes what I have to consider as the funniest reason to prevent illegal immigration:

As you may have noticed, I’ve released a correction to the background image so that the prominent repeat lines are no longer visible. Thanks to Andy Sheppard for the fix, though I have to say the simplicity of the fix makes me feel real stupid. (See Previous Post)

First of I should apologize for the rambling nature of today’s posts. I just finished up a four hour requirements development meeting which has turned my brain into the consistency of tapioca pudding. The new project that I’m working on is a massive undertaking and we are working our way through a very short but incredibly massive requirements development phase. One of the issues I’m trying to grapple with is the difference a complex system and a flexible system. I’ve worked in internal IT for my entire career. Internal IT usually attempts to make a system that conforms to the specific business rules of the institution. For example, if you were building a billing system, you build a application that bills specifically for the services or products that your company offers. However, this seems to, over time limit the usability of your systems. As your business changes and grows, the system tends to become less and less relevant to your needs. This leads to more and more patches to your system, which as all of us programmers know, eventually leads to an unsupportable and rigid system.

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but here’s the big life update for the Radical Wacko. The rigors of work and my little side project Tom Waits for No Man have kinda left this site high and dry. Well, work is still whooping up on me, but I’ve killed the Tom Waits site so I at least have a few minutes to dedicate to this site. So, what have I been up to???

For fans of tech blogger Joel Spolsky and his website JoelOnSoftware.com, he is doing a net seminar with Software Development Magazine Thursday at 2:00 PM ET. He will be joined by three other speakers speaking on a variety of subjects. According to his website, Joel will be giving “a scintillating 24 minute presentation by me about social software, squeezed down to fit in 20 minutes, which will involve talking really really fast and leaving many proofs as exercises to the reader.” ([Via Joel on Software])