Saturday, July 31, 2004

Let's do Lunch

I charged over to SoftPro Books (one of the best software bookstores around Boston) at lunch yesterday to look for a book on SSPI. No joy, a book they kindly put on hold for me barely described what it is for, not how to program it.

After this, my first choice for lunch was the D'Angelo sandwich shop in the same plaza. I walked in, looked at the empty line and the six people waiting for their sandwiches to be made to order, and retreated to Pluto (or more precisely, the Burger King drive through.)

The reason is simple, Although I loved their sandwiches for 12 years, the chain doesn't seem to execute well any more. Anything which implies a failure (like a backlog of customers waiting for orders, even though they may have been standing around for mere seconds) sent me running.

Their quality has slipped and thus they have lost the trust with came with fast execution and good product. That's how you kill a relationship.

Friday, July 30, 2004

Ignore the web site behind the curtain

A word of warning for you.

I don't actually do my blog posting via http://www.blogger.com, but rather I run MovableType on the local machine running Kendra Electronic Wonderworks.  So if you see this post, you're likely not seeing the the real blog; head directly over to my real blog to get my latest.

Your Every Need

Stolen from my spouse Katherine's blog is a link to this story about Microsoft Money's online component having a multi-day outage.

Is Microsoft less reliable than other software companies? Probably not, but their breath and depth of market share makes them more visible. If they are less reliable, it's not any one KLOC is worse than anyone else's, but that their attempts at tight integration cause the failure to be seen in more programs.

Thrashing

Microsoft Windows, unlike most UNIX varients, does not use OpenSSL for secure connections over the Internet. Rather, they use their own implementation, which is controlled by an interface called SSPI. (That's not a dig, they have reasons for doing it differently, namely to make it fit in with other security support.)

Writing a program (merely an interface actually) to use SSPI in place of OpenSSL should be a week's work. But somehow I cannot seem to get my head around it after over two weeks, and I don't know why.

It's not a technical problem, per se. This back end glue stuff is what I do for a living. But I seem distracted almost by choice, be it by chasing after the cats, going to my sister's wedding, posting photos from same (sorry no link), reading the news on the web three times in an hour, or ... writing this.

I need to break down the problem and more simply, get cracking.

The Eye of the Tiger

You don't want to be here. Go read our more light-hearted web log on our cats

Friday, July 9, 2004