Marius Myburg's Weblog

Regular readers will remember my post entitled “Ghost! Ghost! An OPD Ghost!!!”, wherein I mention that I saw someone walking in the office where I work, out of the corner of my eye, and it was vivid enough for me to go check for any burglars or people in the office with me, but I found nothing (it was weekend and there should not have been anyone. And there wasn’t…).  Trick of the light.

Well, I am at work again. It is weekend again. I am here alone again.  Or…. am I?  Someone… or someTHING… put on the TV. Yes, when I came in this morning the TV was off (I put it off myself last night when I left). I just went to make me a cup of coffee, and the TV was on. With no-one watching it. And so again, to either 1) find the fellow worker, 2) find the burglar, or 3) find the ghost, I checked every room. There is no-one here except me.

No-one except for me and “THE THING”, that is.

I now officially call the OPD Ghost, “THE THING.”  Because it sounds impressive.

Again I want to make clear – there is no such thing as ghosts. What I wrote here is all true – but there is no ghost here. The electronic circuits in TVs and decoders are extremely complex and all it takes to ’switch on’ a TV is a ‘high signal’ on the switch line. That is not at all impossible to happen.

I have installed Build 7000 of Windows 7 Beta. As you may already know, I am a big supporter of this newest Microsoft operating system. Well, let me tell you, I now see that it is going to truly, utterly, shatter any hopes of any kind of competition that Mac, Linux, or any other OS ever had of competing with Windows. Initially I was very excited about Vista, but soon my excitement waned, and I realised that Vista was, well let’s face it, a flop.  It was nescessary though, for it showed Microsoft how not to go about writing an operating system, and the underlying technology – brilliant and innovative – now drives Windows 7. I can say for certain that Microsoft has a great product on their hands. It is beautiful, elegant, a pleasure to be with, but most importantly deep down, below the prettyness, it is truly magnificent and unmatched. It reminds me of my Lorena

Oh, I can just imagine running Visual Studio 2010 (with C# 4.0) on Windows 7 and developing software on this powerhouse combination. My mouth is watering…

Howdy,

OK, I admit that I MAY be just a little bit… shall we say disfunctional… because of the fact that in recent weeks when I get home from work, I sit in front of my computer and work on a new version of the software that I work on while at work. My mind may be screwed – but be that as it may, the fact remains that my new POS (Point of Service) is unlike anything I have ever seen. It doesn’t come close to my A.I. work obviously, because it is ‘just a business app’ – but holy freakin mother-in-law, POS.Advance is… would it be inappropriate to say ‘the untimate point of service software in existence today’? You would probably think that it is inappropriate and that I am just overly eager. You are entitled to being skeptical. In fact, you should be skeptical. I just know what I know – POS.Advance is unmatched.

What makes it so great, you ask? Good question. The answer can be stated as four keywords: (architectural) simplicity, pluggability, workflow, and  management (host management).

But, as the great Morpheus said; “Unfortunately, no-one can be told what the POS.Advance is. You have to see it for yourself.”

My question to you is; do you want the red pill, or do you want the blue pill?

One of the ‘gifts’ that I bought myself for this year end, is ‘Your Inner Fish’ by Neil Shubin. In it, Neil tells the story of evolution, but not from the old and now-sometimes-boring standard perspective of ‘we are primates’. Instead, he traces details of our physiology and genetics all the way back, to 500 million and more years ago, to the time when our ancestors werevery simple creatures. Neil shows us that, in these creatures, are the precursors of everything that makes ‘us’. He also explains how ALL life, not just all mammals, are all part of one huge family, one great and awesome journey through millenia of genetic change and adaptation, and how, therefore, exactly the same genes that build fly legs also build human arms and legs.

Get this book, it is quite good.

In my opinion, the most important principle for writing good, maintainable software source code, is orthogonality. Orthogonality in programming is nothing more than breaking up the problem into as many seperate units as possible. Here seperate means in terms of actual source files as well as business objects – ideally, each business object should be able to run as a unit on its own, with no dependencies on other business objects (perhaps to work yes, but not to run).