serious business

My company, Consumetrics, is currently in the process of raising money for operations. (Please forgive the terrible website. We know, and we’re working on it!) We’re considering several options for raising our first tranche — angel investors, high net-worth individuals, even a couple seed-stage venture capital funds — but our most recent attempt at raising capital was with the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.

Writing software is hard. If the guy next to you hasn’t created ten new bugs, management hasn’t added 10 new features, the customer hasn’t tightened the due date by a week, and your technical lead hasn’t passed a new programming commandment (“Thou shalt not use identifiers with fewer than 4 characters!”) – all by noon – then it’s a good day in Developerstan.

Writing software is hard enough just dealing with the practical, every-day, mundane bits without even having to think about the difficulty added by the actual technical work itself. To write really good, clean, correct code, the programmer has to have a million tiny things in his head – “What does Integer.parseInt() throw if it fails?” “Which directory is ServletContext.getResourceAsStream() relative to?” “Which language is this product in again?” – before he can even write a single line of code. And the really good programmer has to check all his assumptions and return codes before he can even get down to business.

Wouldn’t it be nice if your tools yelled at you when you miss something?

You know, I made a promise to myself that I would blog during the MSTC program to help me remember the process and the material they covered. That worked really well, until the choice came down to getting 4 hours of sleep, or writing a blog post. Based on my posting history for the last year and a half, I bet you can guess which one i chose.

Anyway! Internet, I’m back, and you’re not safe anywhere. Lots has happened in the last 18 months, and I’m looking forward to getting back on the old blogging bronco to talk about some of it.

After trolling on Reddit for a year, I finally signed up. (My user name is aboothe726, look me up and say “Hi.”) I’ve submitted my first link and it did really well. I think I’m addicted.

One of the reasons I waited so long to join was that I just didn’t think I had anything to add the Reddit community. When I was on Reddit this morning, though, I saw a story about Linux filesystem defragmentation with results that are really misleading and no one seemed to be talking about the right way to interpret the data, so I was inspired to start commenting. I was very encouraged when people responded positively to what I had to say.

I was setting up my SIGPWNED emails to forward to my GMail accounts. I thought I had the forwards configured properly, but my test emails never came through, so I thought that GMail might be flagging my SIGPWNED messages as spam. To rule out that possibility, I thought I’d install a “not spam” filter to make sure the emails got through the spam filter and into my inbox. Imagine my surprise when I found that GMail defines no such filter type:

Cam-Trax is program that claims to offer Wii-like controls to any PC game. Cam-Trax uses a webcam to interpolate the motion of your chosen control object — morocca, sprite bottle, whatever — in 3 dimensions and presumably acts as a USB HID to generate the appropriate application-level input events for that user input.