Feature Creep

“Shipping is a feature.”

— Attributed to Software Developers Everywhere

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February 25, 2005

Hunter S. Thompson

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

— Hunter S. Thompson 1937-2005

The odd thing is that I was just thinking about this phrase yesterday, I never knew who coined it. Little did I know I’d see it splashed over a thousand weblogs 24 hours later.

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February 21, 2005

Hillary Clinton and Pragmatism

From NewDonkey today: Hillary Clinton has just given us all a textbook case of what it really means to “seize the center”: it does not mean “moving to the right,” it means moving to higher and stronger ground.

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February 16, 2005

Final Fantasy Games – How to Find/Buy

I’ve been thinking about buying a Super Nintendo for a while, just so I could play Final Fantasy 3/VI. Yesterday, though, I was at a Best Buy in Bellevue where I ran into a copy of Final Fantasy Anthology for Playstation that contains FF5 and FF6. I decided to put together this list to save others the trouble of trying to figure out where all of these things are available today.

Final Fantasy – Available currently for Game Boy Advance.

Final Fantasy II – Available currently for Game Boy Advance.

Final Fantasy III – Never published in US. More info here.

Final Fantasy IV – Published in US for SNES as Final Fantasy 2. Available for Playstation under Final Fantasy Chronicles along with Chrono Trigger.

Final Fantasy V – Available currently for Playstation.

Final Fantasy VI (Originally published in the US as Final Fantasy 3). Available for Playstation.

Final Fantasy VII – Available for Playstation and Windows.

Final Fantasy VIII – Available for Playstation.

Final Fantasy IX – Available for Playstation. Apparently not available on Amazon.com. Try checking on eBay.

Final Fantasy X – Available for Playstation 2.

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February 12, 2005

Interview with Neal Stephenson in Reason

Mike Godwin (best known from the EFF) with Neal Stephenson: It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war.

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February 9, 2005

Chimp Tunes and Musical Taste

One thing that Chimp Tunes has taught me is that not everyone listens to Top 40 drivel. Say, for example, like the person who listened to Make it Big by Wham!

Let me be the first to say that I have no clue whatsoever about who these guys are, but I am proud to salute my 1980’s hair overlords.

The Chimp Tunes website will still be officially in Beta for a while yet while I iron out a few more kinks, but iRooster 2.1 is finished and will be released soon.

Thank you, that is all.

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February 6, 2005

Release Candidate

I fixed one more little bug in Lullabye earlier today. It would prevent alarms from working after Lullabye had been used. The problem that caused it was that iTunes would not quit before the computer went to sleep, which would cause some issues with iRooster upon wake-up. I feel that I’m almost ready to release iRooster 2.1, and I’ll probably do it later today or tomorrow morning. I’m excited, it’s taken me about three months to get here, and I’m very happy to have this particular project almost finished.

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February 6, 2005

What Would Evil Spock Do?

Forget the Son of God… What Would Evil Spock Do? (WWESD)

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February 4, 2005

iRooster Rocks!

Couple simple things:
1. I’m getting set to release iRooster 2.1 Beta 3 or RC 1. I need to try and repro a couple bugs that have been posted on the forum, and then I’ll evaluate it from there.
2. I had my best month ever for sales with iRooster; I’m definitely not at the point where I could live off my shareware, and even if I was it wouldn’t change anything (“I love this company!” after all). Nevertheless, it’s very exciting to see such a great reaction to Beta versions of my product. I believe that I’ll continue to see a great response in the community at large to iRooster 2.1. I just need to make sure that its release is driven entirely off quality, and not any particular schedule.
3. I’m beginning to evaluate other projects to work. iRooster certainly won’t be cast aside… In fact, I am very firmly committed to releasing iRooster for Windows in the next 5-6 months, and I am seriously considering a version for Smartphone, and possibly other platforms. Pocket PC seems like a no-brainer, given how easy it tends to be to port code for the .Net Compact FX between PPC and Smartphone. Palm is a more interesting platform, and I’ll have to evaluate what the circumstances are once I reach that particular fork in the road. I’m not very excited about the idea of maintaining 3 1/2 seperate code bases (Mac, Windows, Smartphone+PPC, and Palm), but I’ll do it if the demand is there.

As a continuation of this, I’d love to see a little more platform/API unification across different operating systems. I sincerely believe that .Net and C# are the way to go here, but I’m not convinced that I’d be able to base a commercial product on Mono and Cocoa# any time soon. Java isn’t the solution to my problem either, given how iRooster works. It wouldn’t solve my needs on Mac OS X, Windows, or any other platform today or tomorrow.

Additionally, I’m considering giving a free copy of iRooster to anyone currently on active duty in the US Armed Forces. This seems sort of trivial, but I’d like to make any kind of gesture I can that is not actually politically oriented… Sigh. Thoughts? Elize?

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February 1, 2005