Daynote mail 1999 week 3

Daynote mail: Week of 18 January - 24 January, 1999

Daynote mail and replies -- Week 3

* Link to: last modified at 15:30 GMT+1, on 24.01.1999

Any quoted mail from reader feedback ends up here. This tends to reflect something of the ongoing discussions between myself and readers (and other web-daynote maintainers), provide tips, ask for help, and just be plain fun.

The sidebar "Daynotes"-link, beside each weekday, links to the corresponding day in the daynote file. The reverse linkage is also provided on the daynotes.

General address to mail comments to: bo@leuf.com

(BTW, week numbering is according to the Swedish calendar, which this year started January in week 53. "Current" weekday is of course based on GMT+1.)

Anyone who mails me and wishes the mail to remain private should say so up front. Quoted mail may be shortened and is usually based on my reply quotes. There may be some minor overlap between what's on the daynote page and what is given here in order to give correct context.

Monday 18.01

(There were mail updates put in retroactively to last week Friday-Sunday.)

(No, nothing here today. Go to Tuesday.)

Tuesday 19.01

Bob Thompson remarked today...

Glad to hear you're busy. It's better than the alternative. Now that I've gotten you and Tom Syroid doing daily updates to your web sites, I guess I can confess that it's more work than I admitted. But then you know that now.
Why you devious old so-and-so... :)

On the international validity of the consultancy billing rule-of-thumb...

... I can't say I'm surprised. Our economic and tax structures may differ greatly, but time still runs at its usual one second per second rate regardless of where we live. And that's what consulting is really about. All we have to sell is our time, and the realities of non-billable time don't change when you cross a border.
Only what you get to keep at the end of the reckoning; the net in-pocket-out-pocket fiscal reality. :(
Main problem with many clients is that they have no idea how much work a given task involves; rule of thumb is classic fudge factor pi -- it will take 3 times longer or be 3 times more expensive than they think. I never accept their estimates. I instead try to quote as close to the upper range of my estimate I can without scaring them off. That way if the work comes in somewhere in the middle, they're happy that it was cheaper than the quote.
"It's a great life if you don't weaken..."

Alistair Cockburn (Humans and Technology) weighs in with this considered opinion on consultancy rates (quoting me)...

> A lot of people tend to undercut their optimum pricing with regards to this rule -- i.e. rate should not be less than $100/hour, and ideally closer to $250.
I agree. There are two mitigating factors for people in my business. The market for Smalltalk programmers was $150 - $200 per hour two years ago. It was $65 - $100 per hour for C++ programmers. As far as I can tell, Java programmers are coming from the C++ supply bin, so they are about the same. The second thing is that a programmer on a project can easily bill 2000 hours in a year, because programming is long term, full time, unlike the usual consulting. Actually I don't typically call programming consulting, but outsourcing or contract work. But a programmer charging $100 per hour can plan to make $200,000 in a decent year.
I read in a consultant's guide to plan on only billing 1/5 of the time you put in. That matches my experience. I aim for 30-35% billing time, but then I don't count all the overtime I put in, so the 1:5 formula works about right.
Still, it is reasonably hard to charge people $250 / hour.

Wednesday 20.01

Bob Thompson replies about maintaining Web daynote journals.

> Then it's usually time to insert YAR (Yet Another Rant), or possibly YAROT. Or hope for some interesting mail that can fit in.
Good point. I get a fair amount of mail, and it helps. I don't think I'm cheating by using as much mail as I do, because I usually write pretty detailed responses to it. It just serves to get me going sometimes.
For the most part, inclusion of (snippets of) other conversations does provide variety and liven up what otherwise would be a long monologue. Pros and cons, and of course requiring a decision whether to mix it all in the same page, or separate "journal" from "mail", or just let context decide. For my part, it seems better with the two separated, or risk getting the week page much too large and disorganized. But that may depend on how "off-topic" mail is.

Thursday 21.01

Clas Kristiansson, who is running the course where I will be having my seminar later, notes in a mail today (apropos some earlier discussions):

... I am setting up a link list for the students. I have a few good sites for Java, but nothing for J++, and in particular nothing for OO. Do you have any suggestions? There's no hurry, but you could give it some thought whenever you have nothing better to do :)
I am also sitting sweating with a text adventure in Director. Trashed almost all the code and started again from the beginning. Now even the room are objects, but not of the same class (or "Parent script" as it's called in Director). It would have been fun to instantiate everything in the same class. "You are standing in a small round hobbit hole. You are carrying: the Troll's clearing, Elrond's house. You can go to: A mysterious map."
You may drop me a line if you hear about any site that is about OO in Director. I seem to be alone fiddling with this. Ok, Peter Small http://www.obsolete.com/dug/sorcery/index.html by all means, but he is so careless.
Hm, I don't know...
Director and OO tips:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/director/oops.html
Lingo Tips and Stupid Director Tricks
http://users.aol.com/jrbuell/ (Shockwave and such)
Seems difficult to find anything special.

Perhaps some reader can give tips on any of the above, i.e. sites specifically for J++ and OO, and also sites that deal with the OO aspects of programming Lingo in Director. I checked out Peter Small's site, and tried to follow the links to email him or download the site contents as suggested, but the daemon replies...

<peter@genps.demo.co.uk>:
Sorry, I couldn't find any host named genps.demo.co.uk

So it goes.

Robert Webb sent in a mail just to say:

I have been reading Jerry Pournelle's and Robert Thompson's day notes sites for about 2 months now. Just thought I would add yours to my daily reading list.

Thank you and welcome aboard.

Friday 22.01

Most mail has been personal today, or dealing with a writing project. Plus one of these periodic blitzes of "make money from home", so-called "bulk email". Yeah, thanks, but I already work from home, and no thanks, and I don't really think I'll bother to dial this 1-800-number anytime soon.

Geez, I wish these guys with this kind of mailing list had to pay recipients before they could even send their junkmail. You know, a sort of filter with millicent technology, so that while approved mail goes right through, other stuff might be accepted only if the sender pays me something online in order to submit it. This would cut down volume a lot -- not that I am excessively bothered, but there are days when I wish...

Saturday 23.01

Clas Kristiansson sent the following...

I am home in the middle of the night, unusual, and am reading your page: www.geocities.com/~bleuf/articles/1999w03m.html.
The intro looks terrible. One word on each row and the screen is probably about 20,000 pixels wide, in MIE 4.71 at any rate. On my system. Something like this...
Mail inclusions in the daynotes was building
I hope it's not contagious.
Help, it is!
It's never too late to give up.

Duh, I dunno... Is MIE 4.71 perhaps doing something strange with "em" width specifications when applying the CSS? Anyone else experiencing rendering oddities lately? Bob Thompson sent me once a few screenshots when we were discussing excessively small rendering of some of my "comments", and the into seemed ok there.

Bob Thompson comments:

Well, it doesn't look like that in IE 4.72.3110.8 (IE 4 w/ SP1 applied).
There are, however, dramatic differences in the way your pages display with IE 4 and Nav 4. For example, your daynotes pages have a lined "notebook" background in Nav, but just a plain yellow background in IE.
Hm yes, this is probably an artifact of Netscape, one I've noticed before, in how it mishandles "current directory" interpretations. Essentially, to get CSS to render correctly in Netscape, one needs to have "flat" references relative the html-page. I tend to have some climbing up and down directory levels, since site-common images and background stuff reside in root directories.
Just goes to show how important it is to have decent degradability in the rendering options. And to preview stuff in other browsers.

IE is, as it happens, more W3C-html compliant than Netscape.

Sunday 24.01

In an exchange with Tom Syroid, I had received an attached html file saved from Word... This message was seemingly normal, although it had a blank intial body, then two attached parts -- the text note and the document.

Weird part was that when I "replied" to it, I got a trash subject line and the mail program crashed so that bits of Dr Watson reports went skittering out into the hall. :) Doubly weird was that when I came back up in the mail program, the offending mail had completely vanished.

Talk about letter bombs...

*Bob Thompson replies about browsers...

I don't much like Netscape, although I'm hoping that their new Gecko-based browser will fix most of the problems. Frankly, I don't know why anyone uses it. Nav is much slower than IE, crashes much more frequently, and is just generally pathetic in a direct comparison.
I have Nav on my system mainly to view my web site with. If I could have multiple instances of IE configured differently, I'd never use Nav for any other purpose.
I think the final straw that saw me give up on Nav4 was the CSS inconsistencies, but before then I had been increasingly bothered by how it crashed more often the more windows you opened. Especially when searching for material on the web I tend to open whole trees of views and then continue looking at other things while the views load (or not, as the case may be).
I might have gone with IE, except I kept ordering the latest IE CD from MS and never got it. Feh. I'm perhaps not about to surgically remove IE vestiges from the OS, or refuse to use a version that is shipped with the OS, but as it stands NT4 shipped with IE3, and that's just too out of date to use.
But in any case, a 1 Mb download of Opera convinced me that I really did not need either of these two browsesaurs. Granted that it's a bit retro these days to pay for a product when free versions exist, I did not hesitate to buy the licence for it.

There was more to Sunday's mail, but I'm including it in the next page instead.

All original material copyright bo@leuf.com.
Comments and discussion welcome.

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