Misc. Ramblings

The contract I was working on since the beginning of this month was completed last Friday. I don't know if I'll ever have to do that again but clearly, this kind of effort can be successful only if a lot of people are persuaded to work together.

I was lucky enough to have a team of people who made the contract a priority and helped move it forward in what must be record time. From beginning to end in three-and-a-half weeks is amazing when you consider it takes about that long just to get the tax clearance.

I can't name the people who helped out but I hope they know that I'm thankful for their assistance.

In other news, I am a brand new grandfather. My wife's daughter gave birth to an eight-pound baby boy. He is having some health problems but is getting stronger every day. It is hoped that he will come home from the hospital in about a week or so.

And finally, since I finished the contract and can now reformat my hard drive, I will do my twice annual hard drive deep cleaning. The deep cleaning is intended to get rid of the rubbish that Windows seems to collect over a period of time. As the registry gets bigger and bigger, my computer runs slower and slower (and gets less reliable).

That said, I do have to say Windows XP Pro is much more reliable than earlier versions and perhaps, once the next version comes out in a couple of years, I won't need to do these deep cleanings so often.

By the way, you Linux lovers out there shouldn't get too complacent because I have to do the same thing with whichever version of Linux I may have at the time. The installation and upgrading of applications, under Linux, is so inexact that it is a miracle that you can do any work with a Linux box. The sad thing is, I don't see it getting any better anytime soon because the world of Linux is still so balkanized and I don't see any solution (save one distribution taking control of the market).

Even if one distribution did take control, I don't know if that would be, on balance, better than what we have now. Linux is flourishing because, it seems to me, there are so many different versions that you can find a distribution that suits what you need to do best rather than having to settle for what you get.

If only the different distributions could settle on a core set of directory structures and utilities such that application developers could stop worrying about the differences. If this were to occur, Linux would be set to really take off because installing and upgrading applications would become trivial.

However, as I've speculated before, I don't think this will happen anytime soon (although there have been efforts to do this) because the distributors don't see any advantage to themselves to do so. As long as they think they can lock people into their own distribution by being different, they will continue to do so.

In any case, I'll probably wait until the end of the week to wipe the drive just in case anything should come up. So don't expect any updates on Friday. Monday is a national holiday (Independence Day) so there won't be any post on that day nor probably Tuesday, as it usually takes me two business days to get everything reloaded and back to how I like it.

Aloha!