I got this email today from one of our clients at work:

> Hi again! The attached is an enrollment for seventh grade. The
> enrollment fee is not showing up here either, and the technology fee is
> coming up as $35 per course. In reality, the technology fee for online
> courses at the elementary level should be $2 per course per semester
> (see the enrollment packet).

In reality?
In reality, I don't give a crap about your company.
In reality, if you knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't be in this mess to begin with.
In reality, I fix your website. If you want it fixed promptly, you don't want to talk to me like that.

I was just thinking the other day... There's no way I've had that many people download my stuff. It's just not possible.

Then I checked out my statistics pages and I realized that the Googlebot was probably the culprit because I didn't make a robots.txt. So I went ahead and fixed that. I may someday go through my logs and see how many people actually downloaded stuff.

Probably not though.

In other news, I FINALLY convinced someone to get me a copy of Flash. I'm gonna be learning that and possibly making games for it.

Lately, I've been suffering from a serious case of indecisiveness when it comes to the software I use and I've been wondering if other people go through this as well.

I have 18 color schemes for Vim that I like. Or did like. I will work fine with one for a while and then I just have to change it. I wrote a Python script to upload my vimrc because I change fonts and colors so frequently and I wanted to keep my home comp up-to-date.

At least I don't change editors anymore. Although the thought had crossed my mind recently because I've been using Visual Web Developer and switching between that and Vim gets me confused. But it used to be Vim, to jed, to emacs, to vim/cream, to jEdit, to Programmer's notepad, to notepad++, to vim, etc. I don't remember the exact order, but it was something ridiculous. I heart Vim too much to let go now.

I look at least once every other week for a new Opera theme. At one point last year, I was downloading a ton of themes for Windows XP and just ended up going with the classic look again. I don't have as much optimism in the FireFox and Thunderbird themes, so I don't check those nearly as often.

Is this part of a deeper psychological problem, or do other people go through this?

One of the things I hate most about GUI toolkits is the layout system. They are so clunky and I always feel like I don't get to have my window laid out how I want. This is true with java (all of my school projects were absolute positioned), wxWidgets, gtk+ (i imagine -- i never got it to work), xul, etc.

Qt has changed my opinion. It's so simple to work with layouts. Even more simple (and in fact, quite amazing) is using layouts with QtDesigner. Every time I have a form, I click a layout button and magically it's exactly how I want. Well, not always exactly, but I know how to get it exactly how I want and it usually does not take long to get it so.

It's unfortunate that Qt is GPL, and from my understanding that means anything I write using Qt must also be GPL. But, I don't understand exactly how the PC-BSD folks managed to keep their stuff BSD-licensed. Any ideas?

I digress. The important thing is that I'm a very stubborn and picky developer and to find a piece of software that I find makes things easier and actually works how I want it to and expect it to -- well it's almost unheard of. Try Qt and QtDesigner.

Forget linux. I tried out Kubuntu and it performed so very poorly. Worse, in fact, than Windows Vista on my grossly underpowered work computer. Here's a breakdown:
[Read More]

Anyway, forget the last post. Back on Windows. Gonna try and finish stuff.