Posted on by — 3 Comments

I finally listened to my own advice regarding meaningful domain names

For those wanting to cut to the chase, the last paragraph explains that you can now read my blog at http://realityme.net/ with post feeds at http://realityme.net/feed/ and comment feeds at http://realityme.net/comments/feed/. The http://blog.siliconholler.com/ links also still work.

Client: "My email address is irunmyownbusiness@aol.com."
Doug, long sigh once again pondering why he hasn’t written this down: *gives viral marketing speech* *gives who controls your business speech*

The viral marketing speech goes something like this: Every time you send an email you are sending an advertisement for whoever is on the right side of the @ symbol in the email address. That means irunmyownbusiness@aol.com is advertising America Online with every email sent. Even non-techies and computerphobes know they can decompose an email address from irunmyownbusiness@aol.com to http://www.aol.com/ to see the business’ website. Instead, this person should buy the domain http://irunmyownbusiness.com/ (domain names are cheap now-a-days: $5.99/yr).

Who controls your business? You should but when you are irunmyownbusiness@aol.com you are letting AOL control your business. If you quit using AOL and relied solely upon Comcast your email address would change from irunmyownbusiness@aol.com to irunmyownbusiness@comcast.net. Nothing sent to irunmyownbusiness@aol.com would forward to irunmyownbusiness@comcast.net. Instead the mail would bounce (get returned to the sender) and your customers would go elsewhere. If AOL’s mail servers have problems, you cannot do anything. If you own your own domain like http://irunmyownbusiness.com/ then you can create as many email addresses as your hosting plan permits (usually in the thousands). So you can have sales@irunmyownbusiness.com and support@irunmyownbusiness.com and so forth. If your host (the company you rent computer space from and houses your domain) starts having problems you can move to a different webhost and your clients will never know because the client/user looks at irunmyownbusiness.com regardless of which computer serves that domain’s website and email.

More on who controls your business? If you have a domain name, then you can rent some server space (this is called hosting) and setup a website, email addresses, and more. However, instead of spending the $5.99/yr plus hosting fees for http://irunmyownbusiness.com/ many people choose to go with free services like http://korrnet.org/ (now wisely using a better domain name http://discoveret.org/). These free services often put your domain as a tertiary domain to theirs so you become http://irunmyownbusiness.korrnet.org/ which means that at any point in time if korrnet.org goes out of business or changes their domain name that your business suffers. Same thing with services that provide you a domain name as http://discoveret.org/irunmyownbusiness. You are not in control and you are advertising their business.

Let’s talk advertising. Your domain name should be everywhere! It should be on your business cards. It should be in your voicemail greeting. When you shake someone’s hand you should declare "My domain is irunmyownbusiness.com!" It should be on your letter head (you do still send letters right?) and it should be in the email signature of every email you send (in addition to being part of the email address). It should be on your billboards and in your print and television ads. Put it everywhere! Tattoo it on your forehead. Now let’s justify spending the $42 per year by pointing out the savings on printing alone. If you have given out business cards with irunmyownbusiness@aol.com and change to irunmyownbusiness@comcast.net or igotsmart@irunmyownbusiness.com then ALL your old print material is wasted and you have to spend a few hundred dollars reprinting. That business card sitting on someone’s desk for a year has a bad email address and you have lost a potential client. If you had printed on the business card sales@irunmyownbusiness.com and you changed hosting from one webhost to another you do not have to reprint anything and you haven’t lost potential clients!

And a stylistic note. A domain name should not be confusing. http://dashes-and_underscore-makeaconfusingdomainname.com/ Ideally a domain name should be meaningful. http://blog.siliconholler.com/ does not relate to Reality Me. That said, meaningful domain names are sometimes hard to come by. A squatter has http://realityme.com/ for instance. http://www.mccaughan.com/ is not me or any of my family to the best of my knowledge. So, when a meaningful name cannot be acquired, get a memorable name.

It pains me to see people using access provider email addresses such as irunmyownbusiness@aol.com and irunmyownbusiness@comcast.net to represent themselves professionally. There is so much benefit that can be had from your own domain name for $5.99 a year and a cheap hosting plan around $2.99 per month. For those slow on the math that $41.87 per year (probably tax deductible).

And on following my own advice? I own http://siliconholler.com/ and set my blog up as http://blog.siliconholler.com/ but this both goes against my own advice and is a confusing domain name. Additionally, it does not match the title of my blog "Reality Me." So, I finally listened to myself and now have the blog under http://realityme.net/.

I trust 1&1 for domains – Get yours for $5.99 today!





  

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Woohoo! VBA project done.

I love it when a project comes to an end. I have now wrapped up a Visual Basic for Applications project for Excel that created a user interface making it easier for a person to manage the data. The computer wants to see 25 rows of 100 numbers. The person wants to see 10 rows of 10 numbers and then be able to look at those 100 numbers 25 different times. It also had to export data to a csv file and import data from a csv file.

Next!

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Crunch Week

As I stare at my monitors listening to the hvac’s compressor, the whine of my case fan (please be the case fan and not the cpu fan!), the dog chasing the cat, and the otherwise still quiet of the night, my stomach knots in anticipation of a horrid week ahead. I have allowed projects to run overdue. Being late on a project is the world’s worst feeling for me. I want to beat myself up hard for the reasons that they may be behind but that self-deprecating behavior only serves to reducing my productivity so I avoid the would have, should have, could haves and push on optimistically reminding myself that a project ends when it meets all the client’s requirements and not when it is the perfect piece of artwork. Coding is art. And artists can easily find their pieces needing "just one more change" endlessly. Time to close these projects out.

Posted on by — 2 Comments

University of Scoutings was awesome

Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending the day at Pellissippi State for the Boy Scouts of America’s University of Scouting. I had some classes in the Order of the Arrow which I found very enlightening in regard to this organization within the BSA. I also took a class on lightweight backpacking which was terrific. They highlighted some of the fancy equipment that we like to buy like nalgene water bottles which may weight 6oz and cost $7 whereas an empty Gatorade bottle is "free" (came with the drink) and weights less than an ounce. So what’s 6 ounces? Two nalgene bottles weight almost a pound without water. That’s significant when you are trying to keep a pack under 25 pounds. A pack should weight 25% of a person’s weight so a 100 pound person/child should be carrying no more than 25 pounds. The outdoor cooking class was fascinating. And the class on the Cumberland Trail was enlightening. It never occurred to me that established trails like the Appalachian Trail change over time due to land rights, mining, etc. Made me want to get out and do more frequent hiking.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Earth is growing

In today’s science, a video purports that the Pangaea theory is wrong and that the continents are not being pushed around by the tectonic plates. The video claims the world is growing and it gives a pretty decent argument. There are still questions about how the Earth can grow but keep the same density. Is there any real evidence to support the growing theory? Today the ScienceDaily reported that the Earth’s crust is missing in the middle of the Atlantic.

Scientists have discovered a large area thousands of square kilometres in extent in the middle of the Atlantic where the Earth’s crust appears to be missing. Instead, the mantle – the deep interior of the Earth, normally covered by crust many kilometres thick – is exposed on the seafloor, 3000m below the surface. [Source]

Could this gaping wound be where the Earth has grown and simply not yet reformed the crust? Of course, if the Earth is growing, seems like with today’s technology it would be fairly simple to measure.

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Reduce laundry by half! Environmentally sound.

My wife disagrees with my latest efforts to save the world. I figured bathing once a week instead of once a day would save on water and electricity. Then it occurred to me that our real water usage is in laundry! So if I wore every outfit 2 or 3 days in a row instead of just once a day we could really cut down on water consumption and electrical usage! Imagine the savings! And we could do even better if we used one pair of underwear a week instead of per day! We could cut the heating down a degree or two if I could get my wife to start sharing the bed with me again. I really miss her hugs.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

What is legacy code anyway?

Legacy code is software that was written previously by yourself or another developer, left to rot probably undocumented, then after a time brought back to the table as a project to be improved upon.

Code ages. And quickly! Low budget projects tend to be created with little documentation and lots of hacks or workarounds. "This will do for now. We’ll fix it in the next version." Only the developer saying that does not document the need for a fix or revision. This is called firefighting or bandaiding. As time passes techniques or functions that were once hot and vogue become passé and deprecated and sometimes altogether unsupported. One of my recent projects left me scratching my head for a week because the php function session_register() is deprecated and excluded from version php 6.

These legacy apps are also known as evolutionary prototypes. Evolutionary prototypes build features and changes upon the existing functioning application. They have a limited life. After a number of revisions, the application starts to fail miserably. It is like adding more and more plumbing to the house. Eventually you forget what that one pipe does but it exists therefore it must be important. Unfortunately, most clients just see the number of dollars spent building up to the current revision of their application and have trouble justifying the expense of a total rewrite.

Legacy code can be extremely painful to troubleshoot and down right painful to modify since the modifications might mean having to work in the awful practices the previous developer employed rather than using good, professional coding techniques even when the previous developer was yourself. However, most applications will fall into the category of legacy code so a good developer should treat all projects, even the small and under budgeted, as ongoing large scale applications with appropriate documentation of assumptions, explanations of hacks and workarounds, suggestions for future updates, test documents, and so forth. Clients should plan on a total rewrite after 3-7 evolutions.

Posted on by — 1 Comment

And they call themselves programmers…

Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood made me cry today. I wanted to laugh but it was so painful all I could do is shake my head and cry. Two days ago he made a very good post asking "Why can’t programmers.. Program?" He referenced Imran on Tech who uses a simple problem to figure out if his prospective candidates can code. Imran also has good tastes in WordPress themes. One of Imran’s test questions:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”. [Source]

The result was programming types completely missing the point of his post. The tears come in the comments. The first commenter rushed to get his solution to the problem before anyone else. Naturally, many other commenters followed with solutions in different languages or varying degrees of optimization. Why did I cry? Almost every solution has an error!

I also like the debate between the academics and the professionals about recursion. And yes, my view is that recursion belongs in academia and rarely (if ever) in commercial software.

Sadly, it appears that indeed programmers cannot program and, better yet, they cannot even read for comprehension!

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Self-doubt – killer of good times

Am I ever having some serious self-doubt over agreeing to take Noah on the Okefenokee trip! Yes, money is a recurring issue in my head but when I think about it rationally that is just an excuse for me to bail. The real reasons are my work schedule (can I have my deadlines met before the trip?), some separation anxiety (am I being fair to Cathy?), fairness to the rest of the family (shouldn’t this money be put in a savings account to go toward a family Disney trip?), and are we properly equipped for such a trip. This seems like a wonderful and rare opportunity for Noah. I know I will return refreshed and chilled (these trips are like tranquilizers for me). I usually follow my gut and my gut seems to be telling me, "don’t go." Of course, other signs do point to going. When I went to ask if they still had adult and child openings (this trip is limited to 20 scouts and 5 adults), I was told, "someone confirmed you and Noah in an email."