Well I’ve actually had quite a nice christmas day, but now I find myself in a reflective frame of mind, thinking about the state of Jujusoft, and why my development efforts seems to be stalling lately.

It’s wierd that I started writing this journal as a honest and frank account of Jujusoft goings on… and yet, already I feel reluctant to mention the kind of problems and set-backs I encounter. I don’t want to give away too much negative information. But how sad is that, if I can’t be honest about problems with software that no one’s even paying for yet?

Top 10 things that currently require attention:

1. seems to run out of resources under Win98, meaning that after a small amount of use, redraw stops working and program becomes unusable. This is a particularly annoying bug, because it emerged while my ability to test under Win98 was temporarily removed, so I have very little idea when the problem was born.
2. The Windows list control, one of the standard Common Controls, used for folder views and even the desktop, is intolerably slow with large numbers of items under Win98. This makes almost unusable, causing the program to look like it’s hung every time it updates its display list. Under 2000 it runs fine. Partly my use of the control is to blame.
3. is still waiting for fixes to several bugs brought to my attention by a friend.
4. , with lots of potential, has a hideously inconsistent syntax and will probably just annoy anyone who tries to come to grips with its "language"
5. I still haven’t got a nice jpg/gif loader happening, which limits the potential of any software that might need to display images, especially , where my custom renderer can only display BMP files.
6. , and are currently tied to MFC, which is incompatible with some of my libraries and is generally unwanted. HTML Editor is more entrenched, because of its use of ActiveX controls via MFC interfaces. Book Reader is not so tied, but will become a bigger executable if I remove MFC dependencies. The reasons for this are complicated and annoying.
7. needs a new name and a clear definition of purpose.
8. Aw hell, about a zillion things need doing…

…All these are really just details, and there’s a bigger picture here, with some obvious patterns… So here they are, before I change my mind, the top 10 things that are really hurting Jujusoft:

1. Lack of focus. Too many "active" projects, and none of them finished.
2. Lack of cashflow and capital. Lack of returns leading to lack of motivation.
3. Aversion to off-the-shelf components and libraries.
4. Aversion to reading expensive 600 page books about new methodologies.
5. Lack of business acumen, and lack of interest in acquiring said acumen.
6. Fear of failure.
7. Fear of success.
8. Fear of hoodlums.
9. Windows OS and inconsistencies between different versions. Win95/98 particularly.
10. Hyperabundance of crappy software which makes one despair and give up on the idea of software from unknown sources.

Hmmm… looks like pretty much all of these shortcomings are the fault/responsibilty of yours truly. It’s lucky I can’t fire myself.

Here’s a about web loggers and unemployment, by Chris Gulker.

…is more software. At least, that’s what I have to tell myself, since I am theoretically a software developer. I’m not sure that I really believe it though.

I have so… much… crap… installed on my machine, and yet almost none of it makes me happier or more productive. This depresses me, because I remember wondering [not so] long ago about the amazing things we’d be doing when we had computers with 100MHz processors and 32MB of RAM… And what a surprise, after reaching and greatly exceeding that level, we still do the same ol’ crap by and large. We just do bigger, more complicated crap.

I have 1.94 GB of said crap in my "Program Files" folder, including 2,004 executable files! There are 3,001 DLL files [consuming 483 MB] in my system folder! Now, I realize that I probably have more junk on my machine than most people, but come on… I install a new bit of software about once a fortnight if that, so how did I end up with so much crap?

As a developer, I am greatly disheartened by what I encounter when I browse my hard drive, or when I open the task manager and see the copious number of unfamiliar programs eating memory and processor time. It’s all just so damned messy.

And so I ask myself: Do I really want to contribute to all this mess? Do I really want people to fill their hard drives up just a little bit more with my software, and to end up with yet more shortcuts cluttering their desktops and start menus?

And then I realize, that of the little software that I do use on a regular basis, a bunch of it is actually mine. Of course this is no great revelation, since I wrote most of it based upon my own needs… but at least I do use my own software!

Proprietary

I generally don’t use a word processor, I just use my , since it seems unnecessary to me to use a word processor format when one of the easiest and most useful ways to format information these days is as HTML. Unfortunately I currently rely on the Microsoft DHTML ActiveX component to provide WYSIWYG editability, which was not really designed as a full-blown word processor.

I don’t use Notepad, I use my own , often exploiting its binary modes to explore the contents of unknown files. Also I use it as a source viewer for IE, since it has nice syntax hilighting and such.

I also use my and , albeit less frequently.

Poor old , my first windows app, still gets a look in, running permanently on my server managing 90% of my file downloads (I have a dialup connection). To be honest this is probably more out of habit than anything. It must be over 3 years old now.

gives me extra functionality which I feel naked without. An extended Run dialog and an Open Container option in the shell context menu for a start.

This site is uploaded using a simple command line tool I created, and all my data is backed up using another command line tool.

The calculator I use is written in , and supports complex symbolic expressions.

I guess this is really what being a programmer is all about for me: being able to make my own tools. I’d still be doing it even if I was wealthy. [Pity I’m not, I could buy a nice new computer…]

From the perspective of a prospective enterprise, what I’m really counting on is that the same need which inspires me to spend hundreds of hours writing a piece of software, might also inspire other people to spend just an hour’s wages to buy a copy for themselves. Maybe if some of my software were both available and for sale, I might get some idea of the validity of this idea. Otherwise it’s all just hypothetical.

No work done, since I’ve been away. I’d better update downloads though, coz the 14 day expiry warnings have just started kicking in. So it’s less than 2 weeks till 2003! Argle-Bargle!

That trick never works!

Okay, so Google is still not indexing my site properly… I mean, it’s not that I particularly want people coming here via keyword searches, it’s just the principle of the thing! So now I am modifying my code a little more, taking the extra stuff out of the and