The Coding Monkey

How Geeks Misunderstand Economics and Marketing

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:53:41 GMT

As high quality technologists (which I assume all my readers are ;) ), most of us are usually fairly specialized in our field. In other words, we're very good at what we do for a living, and that often comes at a price at not knowing other things, even if they have some importance on our business. For instance, we may be very good at programming in C#, Java, etc. and can tell you the classes in the BCL by heart, or list off the GoF patterns from memory, but couldn't figure out how to make money selling software if we tried. I quickly thought of that as I was reading this article in the New York Times on the cost of text messaging vs. what we are charged:

TEXT messaging is a wonderful business to be in: about 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year. The public assumes that the wireless carriers’ costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain.
...
Professor Keshav said that once a carrier invests in the centralized storage equipment — storing a terabyte now costs only $100 and is dropping - and the staff to maintain it, its costs are basically covered. "Operating costs are relatively insensitive to volume,” he said. “It doesn’t cost the carrier much more to transmit a hundred million messages than a million."

Once one understands that a text message travels wirelessly as a stowaway within a control channel, one sees the carriers’ pricing plans in an entirely new light. The most profitable plan for the carriers will be the one that collects the most revenue from the customer: unlimited messaging, for which AT&T and Sprint charge $20 a month and T-Mobile, $15.

The entire premise of the article is in essence to say, you the consumer are being ripped off, because text messages cost nearly nothing to transmit, while it costs you the consumer significantly more to actually send them. There is even a reference to an investigation spurred on by Sen. Herb Kohl. Clearly, the intent is to suggest that we're being "gouged". Unfortunately, this perpetuates the myth that the price of a good or service needs to somehow be directly related to the cost of production, and that charging more than some percentage higher than the cost is somehow wrong or illegal. Worse yet is when these improper assumptions lead to regulation which then hamper the ability of businesses to market in new and innovative ways. But I'm being too generic here. Let's look at specifics.

If I write some software package and offer to send it to you on a CD for $50 (plus S&H), is that justified? After all, it costs less than a dollar (maybe even a quarter) to actually burn a CD these days. Worse yet, what if I charge you the same for an electronic download which cost even less to distribute? You and I know that there is nothing wrong with that, because we naturally think of all the time and effort it took to actually write the software itself. Part of what we charge reimburses us for our initial time, when we weren't making any money on the yet completed software.

Look at a different example, in the gaming industry. Companies charge $50 - $60 a copy for games on the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii. A significant amount of that cost is actually wrapped up in licensing fees that go to the console maker (Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo). Are those licensing fees too excessive? At first glance, it may seem so. However, when you look at the business as a whole, you see that its simply a marketing technique. That's because the console maker actually take a significant loss on each of the consoles it makes in order to get enough gamers in the market. They then try to recoup that money through licensing fees on the games themselves. In other words, the higher cost of the games is used to subsidize the console. You can't separate the cost of the game from the cost of the console. If they charge less for games, then the consoles would have to be more expensive.

Many people want to demand "a la carte" pricing from cable companies, but that too would come at a price. Many channels are simply not watched enough to pay for themselves if they were priced on their own. They only exist because they can be bundled with more popular channels in a package. Cable companies are able to offer a wider variety of channels for smaller niche audiences because they charge more money than normal for popular ones.

Similarly, it is unfair to look at the cost of text messaging on its own. In fact, cell phone companies work similarly to game console manufacturers in that they actually take a hit on the phone itself, in exchange for your cell phone contract. Text messaging is likewise used a constant overall revenue stream, while the companies take losses in other areas. Looking at text messaging as a whole ignores other areas of the business that may take a loss, or a much smaller profit. If you force companies to charge less for text messaging, then other services may be made more expensive in order to make up the difference in profitability. Worse yet, some services that are offered at a loss may be eliminated because people would be unwilling to pay their true cost, which might cost customers.

Of course, the real problem, once again, is the view that the price charged for a good or service needs to be directly related to the cost in providing it. However, the reality is that the cost of a service is only limited to the willingness for people to pay for it. There is nothing wrong with that. It merely places a value on your desire for a service. As soon as a company starts charging more than you value the service, you simply stop paying for it. The actual cost in providing it is only relevant so long as the company can charge enough to stay in business.

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Sending Secure Mail

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 15:36:15 GMT

As part of my current re-evaluation of my computing systems, backup processes, and so forth, I've also started to take serious efforts at securing some of my data. Along with those efforts, I wanted to make sure that all of you were aware that I do use PGP for sending secure email. If any of you ever feel the need, you can download my public key from the PGP server. You can also find a link to my PGP key on the left side of my blog.

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New Code Monkey Cover

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:29:46 GMT

Jonathan Coulton pointed out this great cover of his song Code Monkey (no relation to my blog) which was done by The Grammar Club. Take a listen:

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How Did I Get Started In Software Development?

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:54:30 GMT

Derik didn't tag me, but I found his responses so similar to mine, that I thought I'd jump into the meme...

How old were you when you started programming? Like Derik, I was a relative late bloomer into programming. I had a IBM PC XT at home, and I had a knack for writing nice and tidy batch scripts, but I didn't really get into real programming until I took an programming class in high school. The normal class conflicted with the AP Calculus class that I was taking, so I took it with a friend independent study. We would get our assignments for the week on Monday morning, finish them all by the end of that day, and then tutor people in Calculus in the library.

What was your first language? Technically I guess it was True BASIC... though I also did a lot with QBasic. I also did a little bit with Pascal back then... oh those were the days. Aside from the basic learning programs in class, the biggest program I wrote back then was an analog clock with real time display and a second hand.

What was the first real program you wrote? I guess the first real program that I ever wrote was a web application (at least that's what we call it know) in Perl for a company to do online dispute resolution. It actually was a pretty major endeavor, and aside from some patent issues, was pretty innovative. To date, that is the one and only project I've ever written in Perl. *shudder*

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming? Duh... of course. I also would have started sooner, not that I ever felt that behind... it's just I would have enjoyed it just as much even earlier I think. I've never had a bad experience programming (aside from some normal bad jobs that any profession can have), that has made me regret being a programmer.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you can tell new developers, what would it be? Document! Save emails! I don't know how many times a decision was made by someone which led to a major architectural decision, only to be undone later by the same person, claiming he had no knowledge of the earlier decision. If someone tells you something important verbally, send them a confirmation email and keep a record of it.

What was the most fun you've ever had... programming? I'd say the last few jobs I've had with a small group of guys from my consulting company have been the best. It's a great group, who knows what they're doing, just does the work, and we drink afterwards. Really... how much better can it get?

Who am I calling out?

I'm not going to call out anyone in particular, but if you do decide to add to the fun, just leave a comment so I know!

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How to Get a Geeky Guy

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 13:31:56 GMT

For all those ladies interested in catching a geeky guy... or keeping one once you've snagged him, here is a funny guide for you. Via @larryclarkin.

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Looking For Some Cool Free Software?

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:27:35 GMT

Check out {codesqueeze} which is giving away Bamboo and SlickEdit Tools in a birthday promotional contest.

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Monday Music - Coulton Craze Edition

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:37:36 GMT

In honor of a fantastic Jonathan Coulton concert in Madison on Friday, I give you a Monday Music twofer! First there is RE: Your Brains

And of course, I would be remiss if I didn't include Code Monkey.

That's the great part about his fan base... they are all perfectly willing to make his music videos for him with World of Warcraft.

I took a few pictures with my camera phone if you're interested. It should come as no surprise that the crowd is very geeky, and almost everyone there was wearing "the uniform"... i.e. khaki's and a polo shirt. And when Paul and Storm announced a giveaway for the first person who could show a 12 sided die, not only was there one person there with one, but it was a race between a dozen people to see who could get it out first. And when Jonathan asked for a Mac Book power cable because he forgot his, there was actually someone there who had one to loan.

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Deeper in .NET Downloads Available

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:40:24 GMT

For those of you that missed Deeper in .NET, and didn't think my live blogging was enough, you can find links to presentation and code downloads at the WI-INETA site here. I highly recommend the slides for The Science of a Great UI and The Scaling Habits of ASP.NET Applications. The information presented in those two presentations were truly unique. The LINQ presentations were good overviews of the technologies and new language changes to support them, and are worth downloading to review, but can also be found easily in numerous books, white papers and MSDN articles.

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Geeking it Out at Deeper in .NET

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 12:56:02 GMT

I found a table right next to a power source, and I have WiFi so things are good. I'm going to be live blogging the speakers as they come up. If you want to see the line up, you can see the listing here.

LINQ Internals with Scott Wisniewski @ 8AM

Scott had an interesting approach which was to write an app using traditional ADO.NET data access methodology to show you how painful current techniques are, and then gradually change the app to utilize the new LINQ functionality in VB9. Not sure this was the best approach given the relatively limited time, since we all know (or should know) how painful the current methods are. It's pretty clear that he's new to speaking at these types of events. He has good information, and speaks fairly well, but there is a degree of polish that is missing, which only comes with speaking at events often. This started to kill him during the presentation because he had a lot to cover, and not being fully prepared meant that his live coding demos were slowing him up.

He started out pretty basic with talking about extension methods. However, he doesn't go into some of the important caveats of extension methods, namely that it's syntactic sugar (utilizing good compiler tricks), and isn't polymorphic in anyway. Scott Hanselman had a good post on this recently because this issue is causing a lot of confusion. This is sort of like how var caused significant confusion with people when it was originally talked about, in that people think it's a variant (from the bad old VB6 days) when it's not.

Obviously in an hour, you can only give just barely a taste of LINQ, but the problem is that there are so many new language features that are required to make LINQ work (extension methods, lambdas, type inference, etc.) that it's really hard to do a good job in just an hour. For most people, getting your head wrapped around some of these things, especially lamda expressions, is really hard.

He also showed the built in XML expressions that is in VB9. C# needs something like this! Normally with .NET, C# would get something before VB.NET (unsigned types, using directive, built-in nullable type support with the ? operator, etc). To my knowledge, this is really the first time that VB.NET is getting a super cool feature that C# doesn't have first class support for first.

Scott recommended Rico Mariani's blog if you're interested in the performance of LINQ. He's got some good posts that talk about how to squeeze the maximum performance out of LINQ. I was surprised that he never mentioned LINQPad. If you want to learn LINQ and use it a lot, get this tool!!! It allows you to write code snippets with LINQ and run them without having to create a command line harness, and gives you powerful looks at your database just like SQL Management Studio, but with better features for navigating the relationships in your tables.

The Science of Great UI with Mark Miller @ 9:45 AM

I'm a usability nut, so I was really looking forward to this one. What was good right away is that he talked about things besides controls, and grids, and code. He was talking about real "human factors" like how your eye and hand movements, if not designed well, can make things harder on your user. Of course, he hardly talked at all about CodeRush, which is too bad because I've wanted to see more of it without installing it at this point because of the cost.

Best quote so far... "You want to be able to spank your data like a porn star."

Mark spent this first part of the talk with observations of common interaction issues. He talked about keyboard shortcuts, mouse travel distance, and poor GUI paradigms that require extra brainpower to run a UI. What seemed strange to me was that use used Visual Studio as an example of these pains. While its something we're all familiar with, the developer is definitely not your typical user, and so it seemed odd. Maybe because we consider ourselves to be power users, we don't mind the pain... but maybe that also encourages us to make poor UI's for other users.

Mark recommended Visual Explanations by Edward Tufte. He's not a programmer, which is a good thing. This is just about how the human brain works, and how to present things in the easiest way possible for the user. Mark talked about showing things with the smallest effective difference necessary, presenting things in serial vs. parallel, and also reducing the amount of noise.

He also recommended using a tool from Adobe called kuler which allows you to pick good color schemes for your UI using good hue combinations. Mark talked a lot of the difference to use contrast appropriately, as well as size. High contrast and larger size both attract your eye, so it should be used for important data, not mundane things like headers.

Another good quote... "This moving in and out, its sort of like coding masturbation."

As far as animation goes, be careful with it. Animation attracts the eye (like moving a window in and out from the side), but you can't work with the dialog until the animation is done. Use changes in opacity instead because you can start moving towards your target in the middle of the opacity change and it's less jarring to the eye and brain.

For making keyboard shortcuts better, utilize context better. Make the same keyboard combination do different things in different contexts. One drawback of this that he doesn't talk about is confusion. One of the beauties of keyboard shortcuts is that they're viewed as "global", and by adding too many meanings to the same combination, it might confuse the user.

He talked a lot about wanting to have UI's reorganize themselves based on context, or move the mouse if the dialog get's shifted, etc. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of libraries that do this for you, so you'll spend a lot of time rolling your own for these ideas until someone does it for you. He did talk a lot about the beauty of monochrome applications, but I'm concerned about physical eye strain, and really didn't have any information on that. You don't want to physically tire out your users, and that might be a concern.

Speaker Q&A Panel @ 11:30

I'm eating, networking and not paying much attention. Mostly its people complaining about this or that not being in Visual Studio, and what blogs people like to read. Heard it once, heard it a thousand times. Why do they always serve pizza and Diet Mtn. Dew? I mean, I enjoy both... but how much more do we need to self identify as geeks? Honestly.

The Scaling Habits of ASP.NET Applications with Richard Cambell @ 12:45 PM

Way too much information about his personal history that took away from what the topic of the conversation was. I mean seriously, it's good to know who you are, but I'm here to listen about specific topics. Get to it already. He did push .NET Rocks, Hanselminutes and RunAs Radio, which are all good developer podcasts. Once I figure out how to integrate podcasts into my life, I'll start listening to them I'm sure.

He had really good information about all the details around performance calculations. I know its boring, but there are lots of things that people forget to account for when doing those calculations, and reminded us of those. You know, things like Round Trip Time, extra HTTP Requests, etc.

Interesting thought... performance is how fast something works with one user. Scalability is how fast something works with multiple users. The difference between the two should be as small as possible. It's ok to sacrifice single user performance if it improves multi-user performance. Most testing is with single users, so some changes will seem as if they killed performance, when they in fact they improved scalability.

He does talk about using Firebug and YSlow. You need to be careful with YSlow though, because it is skewed towards using things like Content Delivery Networks which really are only useful for certain types of users. Jeff Atwood talked about this at length.

Funny perspective on software versions:

Version 1: Make it work.
Version 2: Make it work right.
Version 3: Business Traction (now the app is important).
Version N: Business Success.

What does failure look like? It's usually not a smoking server. So what is it?

.NET Memory consumption over 80% (because the physical server may still have 1 gig free)
Processor consumption over 100%
Request queues grow out of hand (usually during a GC b/c requests can't be served during a GC)
Page timeouts
Sessions get lost
People bitch at you.

Nobody ever needs 100% reliability. The cost difference between 99% reliability and 100% reliability is huge (on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars).

His view on optimization made me sad. What is the cost of tuning your code vs. buying another web server. It's usually cheaper to buy the second server. How many people will simply use that as an excuse to write bad code? *sigh* Sometimes optimization makes your code harder to understand and more buggy though. So there is a tradeoff. Often times caching isn't used as much as you think, and you pay a memory cost. So always instrument your cache code to decide whether its worth the penalty.

Building Next Generation Web Applications Using Silverlight 2.0 with Jason Beres @ 2:30 PM

Holy cow, he mentioned Silverlight as being similar to Flash! Now we know he doesn't work for Microsoft. Basically this talk is marketing talk about Silverlight from someone who doesn't work at Microsoft. Kind of boring really. Hardly any code.

Silverlight is still pretty Beta. In Visual Studio 2008, the graphical display is read only, and so you have to know XAML and be able to edit it in order to do anything. At that point, the graphical display area will correctly re-render with your changes. This seems to be by design. Expression Blend has all the drag and drop that you'd expect. It seems that Microsoft is enforcing this idea of having developers separated from the designers. That's great if you're working in the Flash model, but the reality is that most companies will have one person doing both. Why do I need two software products then?!

Strange side note, he pulled one of the Silverlight assemblies into ILDASM. Who still uses ILDASM?! Doesn't everyone use Reflector? And if not, you should. Its also important to note right now that Microsoft Expression Blend is still in CTCP, and is free to use until July 1st. By then, you should be able to find a free license of it somewhere.

Best quote so far... "It's super fast! It's like running an old VB5 app on a 2.5 GHz machine!"

Deep Zoom was freaking cool. It allows you to take an extremely high resolution picture and break it into grids of higher and lower resolution sections so that you can display the picture at lower resolution, and then zoom in quickly without the huge bandwidth penalties all at once. Sort of like how Google Maps works, but at a much finer resolution. Matt Berseth has as some really cool examples of this.

Sadly, when he finally got to the demos, they basically all blew up.

The Essence of LINQ with C# 3.0 with Charlie Calvert @ 4:30

This will be interesting because we already heard a LINQ talk with regards to VB.NET, so now we'll see it from the C# perspective, and also whether Charlie can accommodate the fact that we heard some of it before earlier in the morning. So far he's covering the same stuff we heard this morning, but in a slightly different way. Scott Wisniewski did this by showing us old code and new code, while this guy is doing it by talking with a single PowerPoint slide up.

However, he is talking about some of the features of LINQ that Scott never hit, like the ability to write custom providers like extensions to use LINQ to go after reflection data in assemblies, or use LINQ to go after web services in a query like fashion as opposed to a function call like paradigm. For instance, there is an extension to query Amazon web services using LINQ to get book information.

Why is nobody using LINQPad? Seriously. Who needs to write a console app in Visual Studio when you can have the results immediately delivered in an output window for your demo?

He did explain the true nature of var, and that fact that you need it for anonymous types. A lot of people are using var to be sloppy in their coding though, so they don't have to think about the types they're using, even though they ought to be able to know the type easily.

At least he is going into more detail about what Lambda methods are, along with the new enumerator syntax (with yield return), etc.. These are really hard core changes into the language that you have to know in order to get the most out of LINQ. It will either be really successful, or it will be the downfall because of the perceived difficulty, even though the result is easier code.

You can tell that he's a compiler geek. He's getting really, really, excited about about Expression Trees when realistically, for someone writing a business app, you could care less. Why can't these demos be more practical? Seriously. Show me how it will make my life easier writing a real world application, not masturbating over how cool the compiler can figure out parameters in a lambda.

Summary:

Well that's pretty much it everyone. Some pretty good speakers, and some interesting topics. I'm off to the After Party... we'll see what other tidbits I can get out of them next.

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Happy Programmer's Day!

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 21:18:54 GMT

Since today is the 256th day of the year (the largest binary multiple possible in a year), it has been officially declared Programmer's Day. So give a hug to a programmer you care about.

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Has It Changed Your Life Yet?

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 15:27:50 GMT

I'm kind of curious. There was so much iPhone hype... and then people rushed out to get them... and I saw a flurry of "I'm posting from my iPhone posts" and "I'm taking a picture from my iPhone pictures"... but now not so much. So now that the new toy feel has begun to fade... was it worth the money?

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Happy SysAdmin Day

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 19:40:20 GMT

Today is System Administrators Day. Have you kissed your SysAdmin lately... or at least remembered to change your password?

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Engineering IS Art

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 13:50:48 GMT

Here's a pretty cool story. My alma mater, MSOE, is building an art museum on campus:

MSOE is constructing a full-blown art museum on its downtown campus - complete with curator, exhibit manager and a permanent collection of 600 European and American paintings, prints and sculptures that date to the 16th century.

Ahead of an Oct. 20 opening, workers last week installed the steel-frame dome that crowns a four-story atrium entrance at E. State St. and Broadway.
...
What makes the art so valuable to MSOE, Viets and Grohmann concur, is its single unifying theme: work and workers in hundreds of manifestations.

Among the oldest pieces are canvases that show primitive Flemish iron smelters and old German foundries, dark and dramatic with flashes of hot orange ingots. The collection covers a gamut of realism, impressionism and expressionism - glass blowers and miners; sweaty muscles in blast furnaces and pastoral images of farm fields; railroad yards and stone quarries.

Of course I'm a little biased, but I've always considered engineering to be art. It is the art of taking cold scientific knowledge, and combining it with craftsmanship, in order to create a useful object for the real world. Quality engineering is something you want to have in your home, and use every day. It's a stainless steel toaster that you don't put in your cupboard when you're not using it. It's an iPod (or iPhone) which you proudly wear on your belt.

Engineering is the art of combining form and function to make everyone's life better. A good piece of engineering is a thing of beauty to behold.

No Errors Or No Latency?

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 13:35:47 GMT

Apparently the Internet is almost full again. These sorts of predictions come and go quite often, and I don't pay much attention to them. They generally show people's lack of understanding in the TCP/IP routing system, and the amount of dark fiber which still exists from over speculation during the dot-com boom/bust. What bugged me the most though was this piece of inaccurate information:

"Video is real-time, it needs to not have mistakes or errors. E-mail can be a little slow. You wouldn't notice if it was 11 seconds rather than 10, but you would notice that on a video."

Well that's just completely inaccurate. Real time has nothing to do with whether it has mistakes or errors. There is an inherent difference between latency and errors. More importantly, real time video always has errors. That's how you get real time streaming video! You sacrifice quality for speed. When video is streamed to a client computer, packets get dropped all the time. That's why the audio is sometimes choppy, and the video sometimes has visual glitches.

In fact, the very nature of video, and the ability of the human brain, allow this to work successfully. Your brain can fill in 1/4 of a second of missing sound using the context of the rest of the audio. An email has to be perfect. If a sentence is missing from the middle of an email, you will notice that.

What's Your Programmer Personality Type?

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 14:39:50 GMT

Your programmer personality type is:

DLSB

You're a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a Low level.
You're from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don't mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.

You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There's no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

You can take the test here to find out what kind of programmer you are. Via Chris Sells.

Give Away Your Old Computers

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 17:35:10 GMT

I blogged about this about two months ago, but it bears repeating. Developers always make sure to have the best computers, and we upgrade often. After all... it's our job to stay up to date, and as geeks we always like to have the best toys. But what do you do with your old machines once you've decided it's too out of date for you? Odds are that even though it's out of date to you, it's still a pretty good machine for someone else.

I just did this with my old laptop, and I've done it a few times before. Don't sell your old computers on eBay. Find someone who needs a computer and can't afford one, and give it away. It won't take you long to format the drive and put a fresh install of Windows on it. Now your computer can have a good hardy second life. Odds are that it will have a more useful life than with someone who buys it on eBay just to scrap it for parts.

In one case, an old computer I gave away was lucky enough to have a third life. After the person I gave it to was able to get something better, she asked me whether I wanted it back. I laughed, and told her to find someone to give it away to. And so it went on to serve yet another master to someone who needed a computer at a key time in her life. My only regret at the time was not having something better to give away myself so she could have something better than a third generation hand me down.

It feels good to do, and it's something that we as developers can easily do.

Should I Upgrade to Vista?

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 19:49:38 GMT

As I mentioned in my last post, I just bought a new laptop. I'm currently in the middle of the long process of installing everything on there that I use on a regular basis, and also getting it set up just how I want it... or as I call it... Nickafication. Along with that, I'm also copying over all the data from one machine to the other so I can wipe the old machine clean for it's next life. One of the reasons that I was frustrated that my old laptop started to break on me when it did was that I wanted to wait until Vista was out in the wild longer before getting a new machine.

This laptop came with Windows XP on it, but I have the option to go to a Dell site and get a free upgrade until the March 1st I think. So... what are your opinions? Is it worth it? I ask this question from a couple perspectives. First of all, does Vista provide enough features to counter any performance losses? Can those features be gained through other means? For instance, I can get most of the WinFX feature set on Windows XP, so I'm not sure that is a good argument for an upgrade. Also, is it worth the potential pain of a problem during the upgrade? Has anyone had a bad upgrade experience?

Let The Fun Begin

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 16:09:31 GMT

Last week Thursday my laptop decided to break on me. I've had it for about 4 years, and it has worked amazingly well all this time. I bought a fairly high end machine at the time, and what's amazing is that I've never felt a strong urge to replace it in all this time. I figured I'd need to probably buy a new Vista machine in the next 6 months, but really... laptop specs haven't improved terribly since I bought the last one. Memory is a bit cheaper, and video card options have improved. You can get a dual core machine which is nice, but really, clock speeds aren't being pushed up because the clock is one of the main power draws on a laptop processor. The faster you push the clock, the more power you burn. And when it comes to a mobile computer, battery is life.

For whatever reason, the hinge on my Dell decided to lock up on me. When I opened it up, I heard this cracking, creaking noise, and the top facing above the keyboard started to pull away from the case. I've messed around with it quite a bit, but can't seem to get it to work properly again. It is still usable. It boots, and I can open and close the case, but the facing is cracking and the screen is unstable staying up. So I went back to Dell and bought a new laptop. This one had been very, very good to me, so I decided to go back to it. Once again, I paid for a very nice machine, and full expect it to last at least another 4 years.

It's actually quite strange that I'm not the type to constantly turn over computer hardware. Hell, my Uncle (who really only uses his computer for buying and selling stuff on eBay) goes through computers faster than I do. My problem is that I'm very picky about my computer setup. And once I have my machine setup just the way I want, with everything installed on it that I want, I just can't imagine going through all that again on a new machine. I figure it will take me at least a week before I'm able to stop using my old laptop at least partially, and probably at least another full week before I feel really comfortable on my new machine.

I will definitely give it up for Dell though. When I ordered my new machine last Friday, they said the ship date would be the 22nd. I figured I could make my old machine last for that long. Then Sunday I got notification that it shipped. That's right... more than a full week ahead of schedule. They said it would be at my door step between Wednesday and Friday. I got it Tuesday. However, I do have a few complaints which I will air here.

First, like any boxed computer, they put tons of useless crap on it that I don't want. There were so many trials from so many different companies, it took me a full hour to remove them all. Secondly, they set up the screen resolution terribly. It's a wide screen laptop, and they had it setup as 120 dpi, so all the fonts were horribly distorted. Had I not been an expert in my field and immediately recognized what was causing it, I would have probably had to call their technical support line for help. Not smart on their part.

Now I have to decide what I want to do with the old machine. Normally with my old computers, I reformat them, refurbish them, and give them away to a needy friend who has a really old machine (or in one case none at all) and could use an upgrade. Several of my old computers have had long, healthy, second (and in one case, third) lives... and it just feels good to do. But with this one physically failing this way, I don't feel good about giving it away. So now I have a dilema. One possibility is that I tear out the guts, and see if I can turn it into a cool digital picture frame, ala Picture Picture. The other is that I take it out to a field somewhere and recreate a classic scene from Office Space:

Any thoughts?

Happy Birthday Edvard Munch

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 14:57:48 GMT

One of my coworkers IM'd me this morning...

See Google's main page?

Every now and then they change the logo on the main page, either to celebrate a holiday or some other event. Today is Evard Munch's birthday, and they have a Google Logo featuring one of his most famous paintings, The Scream.

As it happens, one of the many trinkets that fills my cube is an inflatable version of the main character in The Scream. I also have a version that I use as desktop wallpaper on my computer sometimes. So I wish a very happy birthday to the now departed Edvard Munch, who so aptly painted an event that I sometimes want to recreate at work on a daily basis.

Yes It's Geeky, But It's Useful Too

nick@thecodingmonkey.net (Nick) — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 10:12:00 GMT

Normally I try to only post the really geeky stuff on The Coding Monkey, but this is so damn useful, that I have to cross post it. There is a new beta site called Zamzar, which is a free site for performing any of 150 different conversion types. You see the complete list here. Need to convert a Word document to PDF but don't have Acrobat? Done. Have some AC3 files you want to move over to MP3? No problem. Go check it out.