Milestone Progress Leads to Documentary Chores

My various digital logs in various development areas on my machine are an effective way of capturing the progress. I've even put together a quick little Python routine to extract any use of the words "BUG" and "TODO" from those logs as a way of keeping up on things I need to fix. Not that I've done anything about those things but TODO: actually address some of the todo's and bugs.

Well, bugs have a natural way of prioritizing themselves. If they are onerous enough they get fixed. If they stand in the way of a coherent demonstration of the technology, they get fixed. If they are background things that I can easily avoid, they tend to sit and wait for my development team :)

I'm missing an overall log though. I guess my logbook at the home office was fulfilling that role, but now I keep leaving it there. I'm contemplating blogger as a means to capture that stuff. It would be senseless to anyone else, so wouldn't be public, but at least it would be quickly accessible everywhere. The other option is a Goog docs thing, but getting in and out of that is a bit more onerous, the interface is a bit more heavy, and format is less important in a log than it is in a word-processor-type of document.

Anyway, I've made my milestone of getting an end-to-end demo to work. It's not pretty, but at least I can move on to some other stuff, like documentation updates! Oh Joy.

Researchinator dons bathing attire and joins the typing pool...

Food and Wireless

A dusting of snow last night, makes walking a little less pleasant. This morning working on the server based version of my demo and getting a bit more progress. Still some debugging there for less well-behaved clients, but it was nice to successfully deliver media from something other than my laptop.

I'm sure I'll know way too much about Django installation and optimization sometime soon.

Just now I'm sitting in a restaurant below my office, and able to get wifi. How sweet is that. Too bad the prices are a bit steep here. The menu looks pretty good, and I can continue with productive activities which is pretty sweet.

Can't really hear any thumping from above, interestingly. Must be the music and the chatter in the room that helps.

Researchinator is sipping ginger beer...

Successive Approximation Approach to Start-Up Motivation

Our office doesn't have a sink, so there's this camping like feel to being here. I walk down the hall to the washroom where I fill up a campsite plastic water jug/dispenser a couple of times a week to keep the kettle filled up. As my clean cups get used up by visitors I similarly bring them down for a wash, though a rinse and a wipe keep them pretty much clean anyway. Discarded paper town in my garbage cans makes for a good dumping area for small amounts of liquid, and its evapouration probably adds a bit to the dry office environment.

How much longer will I be here, sharing with a massage therapist? Probably a couple of months total. The disruptiveness of karatechopping and bodies flying next door is tempered by the all inclusive rent and no lease. It's a hard balance to strike elsewhere. I'll keep my eyes open, but I suspect any move will be one of three, okay four situations. A) I get some funding, B) I give up C) The RMT's does well and want to get a third working D) I go off the deep end and need to get away from the ju jitsu-a-thon next door and find another good situation.

I seem to do this often in my life when thinking about change - enumerate the likely outcomes and add probabilities to each. Strangely, I've never gone back to find old estimates and scored my success. So who knows if I'm good at it. Anyway, right now I'd say probabilities are: A-20%, B-70%, C-20% D-15%.

That's the first pass, but that's the value in this process. Yes, you mathematical genius, it doesn't add up to 100%. The result is that we make another pass, and in that we see which numbers we feel most confident in. Aha, we've learned something then, haven't we. I think the C and D numbers are pretty good. The A number I'm really not too sure about. The B number seems likely, but maybe too pessimistic. So I revise it based on confidence levels to be:

A-15%, B-55%, C-15% D-10% which works out short, but my sense is then that C,D are getting better, but I'm could probably move my last 5% into A or B. So my final guess is then:

A-20%, B-55%, C-15% and D-10% And I feel pretty good about that. It makes me realize that in spite of the long haul, I still retain a fair bit of confidence about getting some funding. Whether it's well founded or not is beside the point. At this point, I'm mostly concerned about the fuel left in A to avoid B.

Researchinator gains a bit of energy towards finishing the day.

Morning With Other Humans

Morning meeting shortly. Walked thru a cold morning to get in, but alas the sunshine makes a difference, luckily. Productive brain this morning. Thought up a patentable idea for solving the IP address pool issue for home users - but unfortunately that was my old job :). I don't think I want to scrounge up the money to file this one, but maybe I'll prototype it some day if I get spare time ever again.

I cringe when the weather is poor, as the walk in is a fruitful brain time, and I hate to get in the car. There are no distractions, other than avoiding the incompetent drivers. Well sounds like my compatriot has arrived. Meeting begins now.

Researchinator gets ducks into row, no 'duck' tape required...

Server One is Up for Testing

Productive morning so far. The new Ubuntu based server has been very nicely behaved. This will be the first server for the company, and on it I will start to put stable, usable demos of my stuff.

Only issue with it, is it sounds like an idling jet, but it's snappy and was very easy to load and install things like Apache and Django etc. I'm happy that it's stable. I've also loaded SSH onto it, so I can leave it 'headless' and use my nice monitor at my other desk. Maybe from home eventually.

So now shifting back to my main task at hand, and about to walk home for lunch.

Monday today, so the lunch time banging around should start in earnest shortly. A few hours this aft and another day will be in the bag.

Researchinator notes that the time is flying by.

Avoiding Spambots Takes Some Time

My morning is off to a slow start. I did the walk in - yay. Cold but at least not insanely so, and the exercise is valuable to me. But slow getting started so far as some other blog stuff (Wordpress - drat) is causing me grief with the spam bots. My comments are moderated, and I can just turn off the moderation emails I suppose. But I wish Wordpress would offer the human detection that blogger does to better weed out the losers.

Anyway, I made good progress on the application side - both bugs and features yesterday. I really mean to get to server/AJAX side stuff today. Hope I can do so. It's Friday though, and I have to remember to finish on a tidy note so that I can pick up more effectively on Monday.

Meanwhile

Researchinator says casual day, no tuxedos required in the office today...

Stuff to Do...

A whole day ahead of me - what can I do with it? I have a lingering migraine, but I think I can work through it. Also, some snow has arrived and is still coming down - which means I didn't walk into the office, but rather drove. So with the car I could probably chase down a cheap and crappy monitor at lunch time if I'm eager enough. I want to be able to use the linux server more easily, and a dedicated monitor would help that.

I think I'll move onto end-to-end demo capability today. Not sure if I'll do it right off the bat though. Should still put a couple of other feature/bugs to bed.

The American Idol is coming to town today - yes their president Obama. I have to remember not to venture towards downtown at all. Twitter should be all a twitter with play-by-play.

Researchinator avoids the feeding frenzy...