Review

Gosh, it’s the end of another year. I just read my 2003, Year in Preview and was relatively impressed that from December a year ago, I got several things right (and, umm, mutter, several, mutter, wrong!)

The Year in Personal Review (and general review)

This has been a hard year for me, personally. It has been one of continual coding with no end in sight, of building a business, architecting systems and planning how an office should work from an IT perspective. I have 3 partners, but they are business people, not techies, so there has also been an element of training. Layered on top of that, I have been handling the effort of managing a variety of folk that we contracted for work, which has been a real mixed bag of activities. There is that statement somewhere about being too busy too look around…

The year started with trying to hack a mess of code out of a hole. It was a failure waiting to happen, so in the end we cut our losses and ran. I spend time doing Use Cases and capturing the business logic of what we needed to do. Then we did some planning and headed of to the races. The technology I chose was Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP).

The open source movement has been one of the shining stars this year. IBM, Sun, and several other big vendors have taken to Linux or other open source initiatives with gusto. The emergence of the SCO accusations in respect of theft of Intellectual Property (IP) in Linux have been a constant source of amusement for many, but it marks an interesting turn in the way companies are using Open Source products. SCO clearly feels they will be out of business if the Linux bandwagon is allowed to continue unabated. How many other companies are out there looking at open source projects wondering if their IP has slipped out of their grasp into a public project, perhaps through the activities of former (disgruntled) employees?

The PHP web site has been a big effort on my part. It is an application on the web, not just a web site. This became particularly evident as I loaded in TV ratings data to my database and found that I was looking at Gigabytes of table space.

I have been very impressed with how the various products on the web side of things have performed. PHP has been extremely robust, rarely ever crashing. Linux has been bullet proof. And Apache has had only the odd issue. Even the MySQL database has been a standout in terms of its ability to cope with the development cycle abuse. There are many commercial products that could take a leaf out these products development efforts.

At the end of the summer, after months of coding we moved into office space in the Empire State Building. I went out and bought a couple of cheap clone PC's to act as office PC's and a server, and a few cheap Toshiba laptops for my partners to pound on. A bunch of UPSes (Uninterruptible Power Supply) kept the buildings' very wobbly power mostly in check (advice - don't move into a building that was built before the calculator!)

The equipment manufacturers have had a pretty good year. Initially, they were buoyed by corporations getting into emergency replacement cycles, but latterly there is evidence that new technologies are having a profound effect on product lines and sales. Wi-Fi has really exploded, so all those wireless accessories are in demand (access points are nearly impossible to find at the moment.) Items like VPN routers also took off as vendors found ways of putting more in a box for less and as a consequence of the endless viruses and Trojan attacks on peoples computers, be they at work or at home.

Less impressive was my success, or lack thereof, with the new Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Getting a (legal) copy and finding that , no matter what I did it would not install, was a major headache. Even the Microsoft newsgroups were of no help. In the end, under pressure of time, I reverted to a Windows 2000 Server install which has been working just fine. This is not my first run in with Win2K3 issues, but it was the most harrowing. Look out for those "Designed for Windows Server 2003" logo's or you might be in real trouble.

By Late summer we were looking at a new business options. We were looking at doing work that would not be made available outside the office, at least not from a processing standpoint. That work I spec'ed out as a C# implementation using MySQL as the database and hanging a bunch of technology from the Microsoft School on the design. So now we are also on the Web Services / Remoting bandwagon! The use of the .Net framework has been interesting and it has proven to be fast and generally reliable.