It's been a while since I've last written a blog post. Much to my amazement, there has been a few changes in the past n months that are scary and exciting at the same time.
I decided it is time to leave behind an old project and start to look ahead. I'm starting by taking a 6 month contract position with someone, and be forced back into 8 hour shifts, so I can get my full day stamina back. The past three years has been rather hectic with family woes and pulling many days on the road, not to mention, many late night coding/testing sessions to support a client base that I never had access to in the beginning.
A business contact discussed a new business venture with me that if all works well, we should be starting in the next six months, right after I finish the contract position with whichever company I choose to work with. This venture is going to be a culmination of everything that I've done in the past 5 years, utilizing the recent education of learning how to properly deploy an application, how to use the latest and greatest in technology, and to even now be able to use some technology that is still being developed from the folks at Microsoft. I can't wait to get started... it should be a wild ride.
As we go, the hope is to keep posting occasionally on the progress of the project, and maybe a tidbit or two of what the project is. Again, I can't wait to get the project going, and to-market... it's going to be a wild ride!
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
Building a licensing system... thoughts on EULA's
In software development, it seems as if the devil is in the details. You just get a great whizz-bang product built, spent 100's of hours on getting every last detail to work just the way it needs to in order to work in the market. Now, it's time to sell the product.
Initial thoughts from potential customers are hopeful, but a few create a backlash with you. They say that you're asking for too much for the product, and then come back and purchase a license anyhow. What do you do to control them from distributing your product 100's of times? Ahh... the need for product licensing just arose.
Now, although there are 1,000's of tools on the market for just this situation, I have decided to roll my own. My reasoning comes from the not-invented-here attitude, meaning that I do want a bit of the god-like control over how the software system works. I have special needs that I only know about, and that I don't want anyone to have the intellectual knowledge of how I did it just yet, because I want to avoid having an end user override my licensing scheme until after I have it written. I have done many different projects, and they all have a custom list of what needs to be controlled. I also don't like the fact that I've not seen much where the EULA can be created in a single format, and then exported to PDF/RTF/HTML/etc., so that's another sticking point.
The system will be constructed of the following:
My hope is that I can get something respectable that will work for my needs, and maybe market this little tool to other software developers as time goes on.
Initial thoughts from potential customers are hopeful, but a few create a backlash with you. They say that you're asking for too much for the product, and then come back and purchase a license anyhow. What do you do to control them from distributing your product 100's of times? Ahh... the need for product licensing just arose.
Now, although there are 1,000's of tools on the market for just this situation, I have decided to roll my own. My reasoning comes from the not-invented-here attitude, meaning that I do want a bit of the god-like control over how the software system works. I have special needs that I only know about, and that I don't want anyone to have the intellectual knowledge of how I did it just yet, because I want to avoid having an end user override my licensing scheme until after I have it written. I have done many different projects, and they all have a custom list of what needs to be controlled. I also don't like the fact that I've not seen much where the EULA can be created in a single format, and then exported to PDF/RTF/HTML/etc., so that's another sticking point.
The system will be constructed of the following:
- a WPF application that will allow data entry.
- a WCF web service to allow license key activation.
- a website (v2) to allow end-users to purchase and issue their own keys.
- 1 dll per product to handle licensing. This will lend to better custom rules needed on a per-product or per-addin scenario, where buying an off-the-shelf product may not be able to handle this as well.
My hope is that I can get something respectable that will work for my needs, and maybe market this little tool to other software developers as time goes on.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
family woes... or how finances never seem to work out
It seems just when things in life are starting to get back to a better time, something worse starts in that puts you 5 steps behind where you started. Again, that is the day for me today...
Things are going well, as my mother's surgery has finally turned life around for her. She is handling the healing process, and is pulling through quite well all in all. Then the issue of insurances has come around, and when it's time to pay the piper, we can't seem to get the finances in order to handle the incurred costs.
So, now it's time to whore myself out and try to help better support the folks until such a time as they can get back on their feet. Looks like the road continues, although I thought that they finally got themselves to a point where they could handle things. Bummer.
Things are going well, as my mother's surgery has finally turned life around for her. She is handling the healing process, and is pulling through quite well all in all. Then the issue of insurances has come around, and when it's time to pay the piper, we can't seem to get the finances in order to handle the incurred costs.
So, now it's time to whore myself out and try to help better support the folks until such a time as they can get back on their feet. Looks like the road continues, although I thought that they finally got themselves to a point where they could handle things. Bummer.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
dealprocessor 1.5 => last of the 1.x series
After much deliberation about this, I am finally going to bite the bullet. Deal Processor v1.5.xxx.yyy is going to be the last of the installable versions of Deal Processor.
After evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of using Silverlight, I can fully attest that for the client base that we are targeting, being able to offer the COR application as a Silverlight-based application, and then providing a local winforms or WPF application for use by the reps is going to be the way to go.
Look in May/June for more posts about V2, and it's benefits.
After evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of using Silverlight, I can fully attest that for the client base that we are targeting, being able to offer the COR application as a Silverlight-based application, and then providing a local winforms or WPF application for use by the reps is going to be the way to go.
Look in May/June for more posts about V2, and it's benefits.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
$79 Million dollar government project a waste?
I'm an avid user of Facebook. A friend's mom put a simple post out on the site saying the following:
Our country spent 79 million dollars creating jobs. Keep in mind what it costs to do that, and the amount of resources needed, the facilities, etc. To explain how the 79 million dollar project created many jobs:
You need to purchase things like equipment, raw materials, facilities, etc to reach the goal. You also need to pay salaries to the administration that is running it, the "Shop Floor" workers, the maintenance guys, the trainers, etc.
Out of that "paid" money, you are now enabling many companies to now keep their staffs employed and paid. All of those staffs, and the NASA staff are now enabled to go and umm... how do I say this, pay for necessary human services... (Hair Cuts, Dr's appts, Dentist appts, etc.)... they are then also enabled to go to concerts, restaurants, ball-games, dances, ferry rides, amusement parks... All of the lower-rung "SERVICE" based business.
Now, when you understand that underlying the entire economy are service-based businesses (since a good part of the traditional manufacturing is overseas), you'd understand why the 79 million dollars, pending 78.9 million of it wasn't lining the politicians pockets, was a decent investment.
To put another spin on this... Most of the current recession has been more of a correction in the market for bad decisions over the past years... From what I've learned in the past, no point in time up until recently (past 10-20 years) has there ever been so many foolish mistakes in the US economy... think about how easy it was (no more than 2 years ago) for an 18 year old to get a credit card. I can recall getting 3-10 offers a month. Every month as well, I got "checks" with my credit card statement that allowed me to "Access my credit line"
No-one ever told the 18-year old that he'd be paying 22-30% interest, and if he only paid the monthly minimum of $10, he'll never get it paid off, but keep racking it up even if he NEVER charged another item on the card again?!?!?! This has been discussed on many news programs enough that anyone that has a pulse can reference a report on it by now?!
The funny thing with this is that most of the time, again and again, everyone wants to blame the public school system and/or the government... that someone didn't police the credit agencies. That the credit agencies were allowed to offer sub-prime loans for housing, etc.
In reality, it's up to the individual to READ THE FUCKING FINE PRINT on the application! I feel like it's quite ridiculous that at 26/27, I know so many people of my own age that are in debt (outside of student loans) to the point that they can't dig themselves out to save their lives.
To go a bit more globally on that subject, us Americans should take a queue from the Irish... they don't purchase anything until after they can pay cold, hard cash for it... it's just not part of their culture, and us Americans need to learn how to adopt that part of their culture. We have so much to learn.
Credit is such a sham, and it causes drops in the economy that everyone wants to blame the damn government for, instead of themselves.
one other spin... watch the movie "The Aviator" when he goes to court and is asked about the failed projects. Very insightful view, and also quite applicable to this subject!
My plan was to never use this blog to do anything political, but this is one that I simply cannot leave go, and I really need to vent the frustrations out with this statement... Oui!We're in a recession with people losing their jobs and homes and our country just spent 79 million on a rocket to shoot a hole in the moon?!
Our country spent 79 million dollars creating jobs. Keep in mind what it costs to do that, and the amount of resources needed, the facilities, etc. To explain how the 79 million dollar project created many jobs:
You need to purchase things like equipment, raw materials, facilities, etc to reach the goal. You also need to pay salaries to the administration that is running it, the "Shop Floor" workers, the maintenance guys, the trainers, etc.
Out of that "paid" money, you are now enabling many companies to now keep their staffs employed and paid. All of those staffs, and the NASA staff are now enabled to go and umm... how do I say this, pay for necessary human services... (Hair Cuts, Dr's appts, Dentist appts, etc.)... they are then also enabled to go to concerts, restaurants, ball-games, dances, ferry rides, amusement parks... All of the lower-rung "SERVICE" based business.
Now, when you understand that underlying the entire economy are service-based businesses (since a good part of the traditional manufacturing is overseas), you'd understand why the 79 million dollars, pending 78.9 million of it wasn't lining the politicians pockets, was a decent investment.
To put another spin on this... Most of the current recession has been more of a correction in the market for bad decisions over the past years... From what I've learned in the past, no point in time up until recently (past 10-20 years) has there ever been so many foolish mistakes in the US economy... think about how easy it was (no more than 2 years ago) for an 18 year old to get a credit card. I can recall getting 3-10 offers a month. Every month as well, I got "checks" with my credit card statement that allowed me to "Access my credit line"
No-one ever told the 18-year old that he'd be paying 22-30% interest, and if he only paid the monthly minimum of $10, he'll never get it paid off, but keep racking it up even if he NEVER charged another item on the card again?!?!?! This has been discussed on many news programs enough that anyone that has a pulse can reference a report on it by now?!
The funny thing with this is that most of the time, again and again, everyone wants to blame the public school system and/or the government... that someone didn't police the credit agencies. That the credit agencies were allowed to offer sub-prime loans for housing, etc.
In reality, it's up to the individual to READ THE FUCKING FINE PRINT on the application! I feel like it's quite ridiculous that at 26/27, I know so many people of my own age that are in debt (outside of student loans) to the point that they can't dig themselves out to save their lives.
To go a bit more globally on that subject, us Americans should take a queue from the Irish... they don't purchase anything until after they can pay cold, hard cash for it... it's just not part of their culture, and us Americans need to learn how to adopt that part of their culture. We have so much to learn.
Credit is such a sham, and it causes drops in the economy that everyone wants to blame the damn government for, instead of themselves.
one other spin... watch the movie "The Aviator" when he goes to court and is asked about the failed projects. Very insightful view, and also quite applicable to this subject!
Friday, September 18, 2009
Starting work with Silverlight...
I've been amused by the toys out on the web that have been developed in Flash/Flex and Silverlight over the past few years. Even some as big as the Olympics being broadcasted over the world in part by these technologies... and now, with Microsoft finally releasing Silverlight 3 to the web a few months ago, it has enough "brass" available that someone can build a decent LOB application.
I've been pondering converting dealprocessor to be hosted for many reasons, inclusive of the support nightmares I've already had with only two companies running the software. My hope is that by having the COR hosted on a web server "in the cloud" somewhere, I can relieve at least one headache for the businesses that will start to purchase the software. Only time will tell... and it's going to be one hell of a Ride... I can't wait to be able to start posting preview links for the app!
I've been pondering converting dealprocessor to be hosted for many reasons, inclusive of the support nightmares I've already had with only two companies running the software. My hope is that by having the COR hosted on a web server "in the cloud" somewhere, I can relieve at least one headache for the businesses that will start to purchase the software. Only time will tell... and it's going to be one hell of a Ride... I can't wait to be able to start posting preview links for the app!
Monday, September 14, 2009
POS 2009 - Timeforge Integration
We're in testing... although I don't see many POS 2009 dealers jumping for joy... most of them are not quite willing as of yet to bit the bullet on this new system. I hope that things improve for SP1, and that more dealers come on board, or Microsoft will lose a pretty sweet opportunity for third party integration.
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