ucantblamem

Don’t you just love it in the movies how anything to do with computers always looks so cool and sleek. Like when they’re hacking into the “mainframe” for example, there’s no command line and no hard-coding; Just sweet looking GUI’s… I think everyone who has something to do with computers in their occupation chuckles a little to themselves when they see stuff like that, ’cause we know that it’s sensationalised.

Over the years I have seen some very cool concepts from Computer Scientists which have brought some of these sensationalised concepts to reality. One such concept is available on YouTube; Boy, I hope this thing comes to a browser near us soon!!!

Not that I needed another reason to find fault in Pure GPL “Free Software” thinking, but I’m just about ready to rip down the Order Posts plugin.

This is a rant and at least a slightly over-exaggerated one at that - hope you don’t mind.

I originally built the plugin to solve a problem I had on Wez’s website and thought I was doing the world a service by releasing it publicly for those who have/had a similar problem. Now, I should point out that it’s been pretty popular with over 800 downloads and plenty of quality linkage. But all the traffic counts for zip really, which doesn’t bother me so much, except that the amount of support I’ve had to do, puts me at a loss.

I know I haven’t delivered on a number of the feature-updates that I wanted to make, but I simply haven’t had time or a need considering that the person I built it for is more than happy with the current version. However, I released the plugin for free (no price tag) and I’d hoped that at the very least the balance sheet would remain balanced.

I just don’t get how people do this… Release their code (and most programmers are pretty precious about their code), with their only return being an inbox full of issues and bad news about their work; This scenario doesn’t resemble anything of the dream I had when I got started. At least at my day-job I get payed to deal with disgruntled customers.

So… I’m thinking very soon that I’d like to pull down the Order Posts site and probably also the plugin. If anyone out there is willing to pick up the project, feel free to contact me and I’ll throw you all the code and details you need.

So you should be well aware by now that I was in the U.S.A for two weeks. I did journal the trip, but until now I hadn’t posted anything on this blog. Well, I thought I’d be lazy and just paste the whole lot straight in here - I hope you don’t mind. I warn you now that while I didn’t document every second of the trip or anything, you’ll notice that it’s still some pretty heavy reading. To those who take the time to read, I hope you enjoy it. ;-) (more…)