Surrender, I give up !!

Oh man, these lizard feces sucking scum that are also known as spammers are totally destroying me. I get on average 150 spam e-mails every single day on my 3 main e-mail accounts, yup, that is over 450 spam e-mails every single day. My mail client is getting pretty good at identifying them but not enough and he has some failures.

I have given up. I don't think I have ever given up on anything in my life. When I started Studlar Software I had a laptop at home, installed Fedora Linux and built my own e-mail server, web server, ldap and some other things. All with my own hard work. I did install spam blockers on the server and grey listing. Grey listing works really well ( I might explain it a little later ). I got ca 2-3 spams in my mail client in a week, and I did not loose ANY real mail.

But once I started getting real traffic on my sites, I wasn't really happy with the uptime I had on my ADSL so I had to shell out some money and buy hosting. I decided on dreamhost.com. I really like them, and you can't argue with the price.

But when you are hosted, you don't have root access without paying quite a lot more, so at first and for the next 2 years I put up with spam. But no more. Now all my mail accounts go to gmail, and the funny thing is, I never liked gmail until 2 days ago when I finally "got it". Guess this is like so many other things, you need to use it to get it.

Well, gmail is doing excellent work, totally excellent.

But if you want to use dreamhost, use the coupon code trausti and it will give you a very nice discount.

Vacation finally

Me and the family went to Iceland for 3 weeks vacation. I was born in iceland, and I have only been living in Norway for the last 5 years. Man this is awesome.

Some people might get their license key a little later than usual and I am very sorry about that. I now only have 4 days left of the vacation. Time sure flies when you are having fun.

But the time has not been totally wasted. I am currently working on the next release of Osk

What a fantastic year

We will never be in a short supply of people saying that this year (2007) is the worst in human history, not that this is the same people who said that 2006 sucked.

I think the year 2007 is just fantastic. I learnt a lot this year. Me and my wife had our second child this year, a daughter. My business (http://www.studlar.net) had the best year in it's life, quite a short life, but I sold more than ten times as many licenses this year than the year before. Still not even close to be making a profit, but it pays for my licenses and shareware. Doesn't pay for computers and doesn't even come close to pay for my time. But that is not why I am doing this.

If I am not doing this for the money, then why am I doing this ? Why do I not give the software for free ?

I am doing this because of three main reasons.

First reason, I need this kind of software
Second reason, since I need this software, I need more feedback, and I like getting to know people. I have clients in italy, france, sweden, norway, iceland, loads up in Canada, quite a few in USA, and many in the UK.
Third reason, this makes a good showcase for what I do and what I can do, and of course, I would like to be my own boss

What did I do this year :

Became a father again,
Saw The Rolling Stones, live. Man they are fantastic.
Worked for a Dilbert company, and then started to work for a company that is, well, too good to be true (still there).
Had reviews and offers in many magazines, all favorable.
Just about, had a great year.

So many great and fantastic things happened this year. Lets not forget that. Major bad ones happened as well, and as the magazines and newspapers do, they put bad news first and put them again and again. It is so easy to dwell on the bad things, but I am saying MORE good things happened.

Hurt your knee ? Good thing you can still walk
Lost money ? Still have your health
Don't have your health ? The people you love still have their health

Try to see the good things in life, try not to dwell on bad things, if there is some crooked politician in a country you can't spell, it is none of your business anyway and nothing you can do about it. As tragic as it is seeing famous beautiful people doing bad things to themselves, there is nothing you can do about it, AND NO, YOU ARE NOT SHOWING YOUR SUPPORT BY BUYING THEIR ALBUMS.

A few years back I did not look forward to weekends, vacations and such, now I can't wait. I love my life, it is far from perfect, but it is my life and I can control some things about it.

- Life is what happens while you are making other plans. - John Lennon

Probably the best quote ever done. This is so true.

Make the best of what you have, make the most of what you have, and have a fantastic new year.

Mac programming

Ever since I was a lonly Turbo Pascal programmer wondering about if a name should be string[25] or string[50], because if I put name as 50 characters, I had to put address as 23 chars, but I could keep address as 50 chars as 50 if name was 25. My full name is 23 character, 25 with spaces, Trausti Thor Johannsson (25 with english spelling). Then Delphi came out. Turbo Pascal on steriods. Strings became a 1 megabyte situation, in other words, no need to worry about. Man I almost sent a "l love you" letter to Borland. man I loved those people, making string a ONE MEGABYTE, they just could not have done ME more right.

Later when Delphi 1.0 beta was available, me, Kjartan, Kjartan, Siggi and Albert were choosen to show off our department in the Industrial school of iceland, later technical school of Iceland (thank you very much). We four, were choosen to demonstrate why industrial school of iceland was "the place" to study computer science. Between me and you, we were the place, that was before I knew what MVC and MFC was. We learned pointers, objects, records, quick sort, instert sort, bubble sort and a few other sorts, well before you could say "array.sort". But we decided, instead of just showing people what we were learning, we demonstrated Delphi Beta, Windows 94 beta (not 95 but 94). And we became the hit of the show.

Everyone loved us. Quite a lot of people let their children come to us because we were on the bleeding edge. We were it. Man those were the times.

At that precisese time, the universities were breething down our necks, you are not teaching C and C++. You are bad people, you are teaching bad stuff, you are only teaching Turbo Pascal, but bad tech.

At that time, I was feeling quite bad. I was feeling like I was missing out on something. I was missing out on pointers, C and C++. Later I got a job using Turbo Pascal. No one was looking for people using C or C++, everyone was looking for Turbo Pascal. Delphi was a huge plus. Knowing Paradox and Btree was a huge plus. Still I was feeling left out because I did not learn C.

Then I got a job at a huge company, like 200 people working there. Iso 9001 work preventions tactics. Either my report was to short or to long, no one complained about my code. I will fully admit today that my 1998 code was perhaps not very good, but it was not bad. Quite a lot of creation behind it. Anyhow, I got really fed up in this work prevention tacticts, so I left and became a programmer who did system administration instead of being a system administrator who did programming.

Now 2007, I am still a system administrator who knows programming. Only difference, I know I am good.. I am real good. Both as a programmer and system administrator. Easy for me saying I am good, but I am good. Need someone doing you work, system administration or programming, just ask me.

I know C, C++, Pascal, OOP Pascal, Basic, REAL Basic, Visual Basic, Python, Ruby, Perl, Ojective C and much more. I know IIS, Apache, Linux, Unix, php, perl, Solaris, HP /UX, A/IX, A/UX and much more. I love what I do and know exactly what I do.

I know I know nothing, I can do almost nothing.

One friend of mine, very very old friend of mine, BRE, one that wrote a irc server in java when it was supposed to be impossible, said, knowledge is a piramid upside down, when you know something you find out 2 square 2 items you did not know. If you think you learn 2 things, and find out about 4 and then 16, and you understand, then you do not know about 64 other things.

I know this.

My thing is this. I use REALBasic instead of Objective C or Visual C to make my software. For 20 years almost, people are still saying noting serious is made with "not C " language. Still amost no one is asking for C programmers, still no serious C application is being made. My idol, Wil Shipley is saying that no real application is made with garbage control language, but is making Delicious library 2.0 in Objective C 2.0 which is garbage controlled, so no one can be trusted.
Objective C and Cocoa is cool, real cool, just not cool enough, and yet, Real Basic is in the exact same situation as Turbo Pascal was in 1993. Not a real programming language, even though everyone was using it.

Bullshit, REALBasic is not Basic, not gosub 200, not goto 10, not 10 print "I am the bezt", it is a real object oriented language.

I am tired of hearing 20 year old bullshit, that something that is not C is not real programming language. Stop this shit. C is still not it, it is still not the language, go figure

Fantastic article

One of the delicious monster people, Mike Lee, has posted what is probably the longest blog article in history of mankind.  I usually do not read blogs that are lengthy, but after reading a few lines, I was hooked, totally.

How he managed to put Adam Smith together with hating SUVs is beyond me, but he did totally masterfully.

This article is awesome, and here is the link

PRESS ME HERE

p.s. Do not be put off by his blogs name

Genealogy software

Like everyone who knows me knows, I make genealogy software called Osk, and I have a company called Studlar Software.

It has now been less than 1 month since I released the 4.7 version which I must say was one of the best versions I have ever made. The biggest problem with it was explaining to other people what was new, how do you put into 3-5 words that you can add siblings and the software will guess your parents, not only that, but it will guess which parent is the mother and which is the father ? A lot of these issues have been added, changed and fixed, and it is quite remarkable how these kind of changes are totally not describable !!

Well, anyway, everyone should go and grab a copy, visit www.studlar.net

Todays apps are not bloated

640 KB is enough for everyone.

Well it used to be, I used to have no hard disk in my computer and my first hard disk was 30 MB. Now I have applications that are far bigger than 30 MB and that application does not do all that much, or does it ?

Back when 640 KB was enough for everyone, it actually was because applications were different.
Not only did one application tie your whole machine up, it had to have its own drivers for graphics, printers and its own spell checker if it had one. You can forget about using copy and paste between apps, you had to save a text to a disk (floppy or hard disk) quit your software (or reboot your machine even) start the other software and read in the file.

Wordperfect today and back in 1988 have almost nothing in common except for the name. Back in 1990 when designers were using heavy duty DTP (desktop publishing), all they did was edit text, line feeds and columns. Every single picture they used was just a black square. Wordperfect would allow you to have pictures, and these pictures were 3 KB or 13 KB and were only loaded when I went to a graphical viewer and viewed the page. So a final thesis of 50 pages or more actually did probably only take 300 KB in memory at a given moment, of course you thought things were fast.

Now when you use a simple word processor you dump pictures, fonts, layouts and more all into a file that is all in memory, of course you need Gigabytes in memory, you are doing a whole lot more than you used to, you just don't notice.

So if we do a simple calculation, if 640 KB was more than enough when you had 30 MB disk what are they same sizes today :

640 / 30 000 = 0.021

Now today, my computer has 2 GB memory and 120 GB hard disk :

2 000 000 / 120 000 000 = 0.0167
for those with 1 GB memory :
1 000 000 / 120 000 000 = 0.0083

So given a flaky logic to this, software today has actually gotten smaller and uses quite a lot less space and actually does a lot more and do not forget, one app does not take over your computer.

So to conclude, the app that people see as great engineering back when people took care of their code and that application only was 230 KB, well given above faulty logic that app was the bloatware, not the clipboard application that is over 5 MB.

Todays apps are not bloatware.

For those needing a clipboard application, turn to www.studlar.net and download Container