During a recent lunch outing a discussion came up about one of our clients who doesn’t have enough money for a particular technology related item, but other renovations are happening and people within the group are getting mad. Of course the discussion turned to what all was set forth in the budget and how the IT division was hurting. The typical response is all too common, “There is a pot full of money over there, but we can’t touch it.”
We as programmers need to understand the business side of things, one of which is budgeting. I have made the mistake of assuming everybody is familiar with budget; not only just what they are in general but truly how to use one. Most people understand a budget is used to assign a name for a certain amount of monies, but some of the key ideas behind using a budget is you track throughout a specified time what you actually spend and most important of all the ability to adjust the budget the next time around.
I would like to touch lightly on the first point. If I were to put myself on a diet, I would start out with two things: to write down what I plan on eating, and then to write down what I actually eat. This makes it easier to see if I am really following what I had originally set out to do. Living by a budget is very similar. You absolutely must keep track of what you actually spend, otherwise assigning categories does not do any good. With this said there are key instances where adjusting the budget is crucial.
My wife and I have staunchly lived off of a budget for almost two years. At the end of every month we come together as a couple and decide how we will spend our money for the following month as well as to review the current month’s budget to see how well we did (see which categories we were either short or long on). There are few cases where we have to go over a category in our budget. We have identified a few categories which we deem critical, this means we will (and have) moved money from a noncritical category to the critical category. To get back on topic, in the business world few categories, IT included, are not a critical category and as such it will be difficult to get money moved over to the IT budget.
I view this as a good thing to have in place, I would definitely be in a bad mood to learn some of the IT monies which are needed and instead to be used to make a new awning or some other basically useless item. Developers need to appreciate this particular ‘red tape’ as it is a protection put in place for the company.
With all that said, it is also something we must learn to negotiate with. I do feel most of our needs (note: I did not say wants) are legitimate and came before others. How to battle this bureaucracy is subjective which I will not get into, and this differs dramatically from organization to organization, but is something we must learn to accomplish.
Almost on a weekly basis I get frustrated at other technical people because they do not see value in the things I see value in, or the miss the point. I am quick to judge them and point my finger at them for the blame. Through my recreational reading I have come to believe it is none other than my own doing.
Mark Cuban points out that you do not deserve his time if you are quick to respond with “you just don’t get it”. As he explains it, you are the one at fault if find yourself using this phrase. You must completely understand a subject in order to explain it to other people, then if still feel yourself falling back to the aforementioned phrase that is a tell-tale sign you do not completely grasped the subject you are explaining.
Reginald Braithwaite says the single most important thing to improve your programming career is to give presentations. This is something just recently I have truly enjoyed attending (within the last year). I completely agree with this and feel most presentations I have seen, the presenter either does not completely understand the problem at hand nor do they feel motivated by the topic. My understanding and appreciation of these individuals and what they go through has had a major turn around. I have had the fortunate opportunity of knowing on a personal level a few people who have presented items at my local JUG.
I would like to encourage others to present topics as well. So many people feel as though they do not fully understand a topic as well as others; and this is true. There are few, if any, topics I know better than anybody else, however; this is about improving yourself as a developer and I know first hand your local SIG (special interest group) would be excited to have more people provide presentations.
I just wanted to make a quick post relating to Maven profiles. I was trying some new things about with Maven the other day and decided to put these into a profile as to not disturb the normal build process. Upon performing some trial and error tests, I was getting some strange results. I wasted to much time on figuring out what the problem was, but for Maven it expects multiple profiles to be specified such as the following:
I made the mistake of specifying them as multiple -P arguments. Such as the following … this is the wrong way:
mvn -Pprofile1 -Pprofile2
Maven 2.0.8 (I haven’t check on 2.0.9) does not give any indication of an error or warning from what I can tell.
Do not make the same mistake :)
Update – It looks as though Maven 2.0.10 will correct this issue.
I have upgraded to WordPress 2.6 which was recently released. Looks like there are quite a few new bells and whistles to check out.
See the following video from the WordPress team:
The latest versions of Firefox, IE, and Opera support EV SSL, but still there is no sign of Safari … and this has been pointed out for quite some time. What in the world is Apple up to?
I have googled twice to be sure I wasn’t missing anything, currently I cannot find anything pointing to an Apple article stating it is being developed or status.
I have mentioned this to other people who seem to care less. My only point is that I enjoy having the choice of four browsers instead of one or two. I am hoping that with the introduction of more stable and safe browsers that friendly competition will ensue, and we the users will win out.
I always find it extremely difficult to come up with things to blog about. I have the privilege of working with some very intelligent people whom I genuinely enjoy talking with. A lot of times I point out how they should make a post about particular conversation. I have been told on more than one occasion that they are more of a verbal person than a writer. My nature is usually the same but I see that as a weakness of myself and I will be trying to rectify it as there is tremendous value in being able to communicate effectively in the written format as well. I will be using posts made by people I hold in high regard and give my own thoughts and spin on it.
The other thing I plan on doing, and have done in the past, is to blog about a particular tool and how I find it useful. As you may very well tell, I enjoy using vim and from time to time I blog about a certain command. I do know the help files document these items well and that there are probably countless other tutorials on the web, but this is mainly for myself and honing my skills as a blogger.
In doing so, I hope to encourage the few people who read my blog to do the same.
I am four days behind, but WordPress 2.5 has been released. I have upgraded my own WordPress installation, now I just need to complete my daughters.
Just recently I bought a computer from a colleague of mine. It has been working like a charm since getting everything set up. And today I am installing Gentoo on another machine. So I downloaded the ISO from Gentoo and was attempting to burn it to a CD.
My first problem was that I didn’t have any CD burning software on my machine. But thanks to some Ubuntu documentation I happened to be looking at it mentioned InfraRecorder (a side note: I am extremely pleased with this software).
But I couldn’t get it to recognize my CD/DVD burner. I wasted almost an hour until it dawned on me. When I installed Windows XP and set up all the accounts, I put everybody as a normal user and not as an Administrator (I am trying out the whole ‘running with least priviledges’ concept). Once I ran InfraRecorder as an Administrator it all worked fine. This is the expected case, but I wonder if there is a group policy or something I can modify so anybody can scan the SCSI/IDE bus.
Something to look into.
We all have good friends in our lives, and because of them we will usually learn from them or obtain habits from them. A gentleman I have known for my entire life uses this saying to end a phone call conversation. I feel this simple saying is something most people should live by. After all a bad person can do a good deed to ensure your trust if only for a short while. But a good person … well … is salt of the earth.
I have been anticipating the release of Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition (formerly Everywhere Edition). They have just released it on January 11 2007. I have been watching this project the past few months, and I am looking forward to using this on an upcoming project I will working on.
Quote from the Overview:
“Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition (SQL Server Compact Edition) is designed for developers who need light weight, in process relational database solution for their applications that can be developed and deployed on desktop as well as on mobile devices. SQL Server Compact Edition Runtime can be used to develop and deploy applications on desktop.
SQL Server Compact Edition is a powerful, yet lightweight relational database engine that makes it easy to develop desktop applications by supporting familiar Structured Query Language (SQL) syntax and providing a development model and API consistent with SQL Server. When compared to its previous release, SQL Server Mobile, SQL Server Compact Edition includes new features like |DataDirectory| and ClickOnce support for ease of deployment (Please see SQL Server Compact Edition Readme)”
Have fun and enjoy!
