Update to the blog

Well, I am taking a new direction.  This blog has been private for a few months.  My partner and I were using it to communicate software ideas and do pro/cons of those ideas.  However, none of them were ever fleshed out.

So I have gone through and deleted all those posts and made the blog public again.

I am also still looking for my killer idea.  Mainly this is still looking at what “pains” I face day to day at work.  One of the big pains that I have been dealing with has been in keeping track of passwords.  I am an ops tech for a large telecom company.  As part of my job, I have to interface with multiple systems (both internet/intranet and legacy systems).  Most of these systems do not use the standard NT login.  They each use a username of different lengths, have different password requirements (length, complexity and number of stored passwords before you can reuse them).  One person that I talk to regularly in the company keeps his usernames/passwords in a Word doc.  Another has post-it notes plastered over his monitor.  I have kept mine a little bit safer (I email them to myself).

None of these are good solutions to the problem/pain.  So I hacked a simple VB.Net program together that encrypts everything and stores it in a XML file.  But it is definitely not ready for primetime!  So I could clean this up and try marketing it.  But the market is definitely full of password managers.  What would be my USP (Unique Selling Proposition)?  If I were to try marketing this, I would definitely go for the corporate market (not B2B though).  What I mean is that I would market it as ideal for a business user to purchase.  They would not need admin rights to install it, as it would not need to be installed to be used.

Argh, I am sooo fed up with crappy UI

Or how I spent this evening.

My one goal for this evening was recovering files from a hard drive.  The hard drive had lost its partition information.  The program that I regularly use for this purpose (RecoverMyFiles) was not working well.  It gave me a divide by zero error when trying to do a Fast Format Recover.  The Long Format Recover took hours (around 12 hours if I remember right) and was not able to recover much of the files.  It could not rebuild the folder structure and a lot of the filenames had @s in the names.

So I go searching google for lost partition hard drive or something like that.  I downloaded a couple programs to try out.  One had a nice looking UI, but the button images did not make any sense at all.  And that one wanted to phone home when exiting.  ZoneAlarm caught it doing that, so all it guaranteed was that I was going to uninstall it.  Somehow the clueless wonders that wrote the program didn’t manage to get it listed in Add/Remove programs.  Luckily they had a uninstall link in the start menu programs folder.  Both of the programs that I downloaded had big readability problems.  Poor english, using custom boxes for “tips” that did not have scroll bars, so you could only read about half of the tip.

Another program thought it was so good, that there wasn’t any reason to offer a trial version.  I paid for that, realized it would not work, and then had to open a support ticket to get a refund.  If I do not get a reply back by tomorrow evening, I will have to charge it back, which means instead of a $25 sale, they get $0 in sales and $25-30 in bank charges.  Maybe that will make them rethink not having a trial version.

Well I finally got the files recovered.  I used a DOS program called SpinRite to fix the hard drive, then a program called GetDataBack for FAT to recover the files.  A whole evening wasted!

And I still don’t know why I get that divide by zero error in RecoverMyFiles.  I am waiting for a response from support about the bug I sent them.  They did give me a debug version so they could capture more information.

First post

This is the first post in this blog.

I plan on using this blog to flesh out ideas that I have regarding development, sales, and marketing my software product.

Right now I think that I will begin working on a database application that I will be able to use at my day job.  It would have entries for each piece of equipment in my office, and allow me to trace paths from one piece of equipment to another.  Sortof like if you had a room of servers, switches, cat5 patch panels, etc.  My app will have an entry for a switch, and then each port on the switch will be traced to where it plugs into. 

I believe that this will help a lot in untangling the web of wiring, panels, and equipment that I have to deal with.  Yes, my current employer has a huge database that has all this information in it.  The problem with that database is it is huge (containing every panel in 70+ offices), and hard to find the information that I am looking for.  The other problem is that each time my office was purchased by another company (2 times in the last 2 years), the migration from one database platform to another is difficult.  As a result, most of the information that I can put my hands on is in Excel spreadsheets.

For one office, the huge database platforms are too much.  I want something that is easily updatable and searchable.  I will be able to put a customer name on a path, along with what the ID is now, what it was last year, and the original order that installed it.

Anyway, that is where I am at now.  More info to come.