The Codecruncher

On this excellent post, Mark Pilgrim tells us about his current data storage needs, and what he foresees about it. And the solution is, at least, difficult and/or expensive.

Although I don’t have (yet) his storage problems, I was beginning to think about the same issue, so his post has come really handy. And in the comments I’ve seen a recomendation for Infrant’s ReadyNAS, which Amazon resells. At $2,199, the 2 Tb X-RAID NAS seems very likable to me. I think I know where my next bonus pay is going.

Besides, it’s freakin’ cool.

Take a look at this job offer (in spanish, sorry). Just in case you don’t speak it , I’ll translate (and yes, I’ve chosen which words to make bold):

Vacant job: Salesman
Category: Salesman - Sales
Department: GENERAL MANAGEMENT
Number of vacancies: 1
Offer Description: 6 MILL ¹

HEAD OF SALES DEPARTMENT

Will be responsible of any and all commercial actions of the firm.

Will be the head salesman, and his/her main tasks will be selling with virtual reality.

Must be a professional illusion seller, because the product is on construction.

It doesn’t matter if later on the product (on this particular case, houses) does not respond to the initial expectatives, it doesn’t matter if later on the product is a complete piece of crap, even more it doesn’t matter if at the end the product doesn’t even exist. The head salesman has already done his job, he has already illusions with virtual reality (you can talk louder, but you can’t talk clearer) and has already taken home his hard earned money.

This here offer is for construction business, but it can be sadly and perfectly translated to our field: how many examples do we know about salesman execs selling first rate smoke and promising prospective customers virtually anything just to get the customer to sign a contract, the make the sale and get their bonus. And we I mean anything I mean it: the original contract for the disaster project I’m currently working on specifies that the Web application we’re building has to be able to connect to external devices to information treatment purposes. It doesn’t specify if said devices are external servers, Web services, the CEO’s son PSP or his wife microwave oven. Virtual scenario that can seem hilarious to the untrained eye, but if the customer watns to give us a difficult time they can do, and there’s nothing we can do legally. There’s a contract that one of our sales people happily approved and our CEO signed without revising. Not the problem of the salesman, of course: he has already make the sale, he has already make his job; and now the customer wants that his illusions make the step from virtual to real, a trivial task not corresponding to the illusion seller but to the software developers. People that, funny enough, on most cases don’t make six million¹, neither they make five, nor even four on some cases for the ungrateful and unsung job of making right the awful wrongs usually made by the illusion sellers.

1.- Six million pesetas/year, gross. Roughly equivalent to €36K/year, gross. Though Spain is not using our old currency, the peseta, since 2002 at least there are still some job offers speaking the old language. By the way, that kind of figures more or less matches the salary of a well paid project leader.

I’ve just realised there’s a bug in Peeker, my image preview application for Windows Explorer.

To check out the bug, simply make a right button click on any image of your hard drive, and then click on the image preview in the context menu of Peeker. You will open, as usual, a new window with the fully scaled image. Close that window. Now, try to delete the file from Windows Explorer. That’s right, it doesn’t work. Windows says that the file can’t be deleted because it’s being used by another process.

What’s happening is quite simple: while closing the full size image view form I don’t specifically free the loaded image, so Windows finds the file is not free when trying to delete it. It’s not a show-stopper, in fact is already corrected in my local version, but it’s got me thinking.

I want to add more functionality to Peeker, besides correcting this and any other bug that could appear; but I don’t want to add a new post every other day stating that a new Peeker version is avaliable. And I’m quite willing to develop a WinForms application with an auto-update feature, so I hope that really soon you’ll be able to download a new and final version of Peeker which will auto update, so we don’t have to pay attention to this kind of things.

Yeah, if you look closely to the right bar you’ll see a new section: Software. On it I’ll make avaliable (as soon as they’re finished and tested) those little programs made by me which could be of some use. Sometimes they’ll come with source code. Sometimes they won’t. Nevertheless, I hope they’ll always be for free.

First on the list is Peeker; a shell extension for image previewing made thanks to the EZShellExtensions component I’ve reviewed on the previous post.

I hope you like it.

Update 03/29.- Mike Gunderloy has kindly noticed Peeker!! Thanks, Mike!!

Today I’ve read something funny. I already knew about Mort, but today I’ve learn that there are also Elvis, Einstein and now Hugo.

Good grief.

Yesterday night I was finally (that’s the problem with not having a MSDN subscription, you have to wait) able to install at home IE7 Beta 2 Preview. If you’re gonna download and try it, two advance warnings: your operating system has to be Windows XP SP2 or Windows 2003, it doesn’t work on Windows 2000 or earlier. Second, your system has to be approved by Microsoft’s original software validation check. And no, this time you can’t simply skip the validation process and keep installing.

I really like it. Much. I haven’t been able to try it out a lot, simply my everyday home navigation: Bloglines, GMail, some interesting links I’ve received by email and little else. I’m going to try it a lot more in the next days, because it’s already my main navigator, having displaced Maxthon as my default browser.

One curiosity, though: I had stored on Favorites precisely the spanish and main internet adress of this blog, www.picacodigos.com; but I had it just like that, without the http://. IE7 refused to acknowledge it as a valid link because of that.

Update 08/02/2006: It’s really beta. I like it, it works and it has a really beautiful simple and elegant design,… but it has too many errors for now. Back to Firefox. Sigh.

In order to uninstall it, just in case you find some trouble, use Control panel -> Add or Remove Programs, but be sure to have cheked the Show Updates option. It’ll be at the bottom of the list, just below all the Windows XP’s Service Packs and patches. Uninstall it, reboot the machine and that’s done.

Well, after a while thinking about it, I’ve left Blogger. For the (main) Spanish version of this blog I’ve hired a domain of my own (Picacódigos) and some hosting. There I use a .NET blogging engine, the excellent open-source dasBlog, but for this I’ve chosen WordPress as the engine and the excellent Irish guys at Blogsome for the free hosting.

The idea is making Codecruncher a much more technically focused blog than in previous incarnations, although that doesn’t mean I won’t write about any other things. I hope with these new tools to be able to write longer articles, for once.

That is, at least, the idea.