Mar/080
Mac Port!
Finally, a week after I got my first Mac, I have a Mac port ready for my 2D graphics engine. It is soo cool to be able to make same code run on two different platforms! 
Only thing I had to do was to replace one file in order to get it running on Mac. The engine and test application code compiled very well, without any warnings or errors and ran correctly, which means I succeeded on making it portable.
Soo, now I just have to get Mac demo out for somebody who has a Mac, so that I can verify it works on other Macs also. If you happen to have a Mac, please e-mail me and I’ll send you the demo. Won’t do public release before it is tested.
Screenshot on Windows :
Screenshot on Mac :
Mar/081
Balanced Life
Lately I’v been trying to balance my life as I found out that some of my problems were caused by doing too much work. Working 12-18 hours a day doesn’t really pay off, I tested this for a month by reducing my work time (yea, I worked 12-18 hours each day). By working only up to 10 hours a day I was able to be a lot better in many things :
- I didn’t make so many mistakes.
- I got more great ideas.
- I was very motivated.
- I didn’t feel sleepy or bored.
- Had more time to spent with my family.
- And so on..
So, as you can see it really doesn’t make any sense to do loads of work. Of course there are times when you’ll work more but if you balance your time usage most of the time you are able to feel better, perform better, etc.
To start balancing your life you’ll need to think about what kind of problems do you have. As I have mentioned before, you cannot improve / fix anything if you don’t know what is causing it. Example questions for youself :
- Do I feel sleepy most of the time?
- Am I motivated?
- Do I have enough time to spent with my family?
What about your co-workers? Try to get them to balance their life and get excited about their life again. Tell them how it affected your life.
If you think about this it really makes sense : have you ever fought with some problem many days until you fell a sleep and then woke up middle of the night and realized the solution for the problem? Well this is exactly doing that.
At least give it a try, balance your life. I’m not saying this should work for everybody (I don’t know that), but I’m sure that it will work for most of the people.
Mar/080
Site News
I have been really busy at work and at home. My daughter was really sick a couple weeks ago, it took all of my energy and it has taken some time to recover.
But to sum up what has been going on :
- Last month’s unique visitor goal was not reached.
- I got only 1500.
- Made a first release of my 2D graphics engine.
- Sold more Software Tips & Tricks – books.
- Bought a MacBook.
- Will be porting my 2D graphics engine on to it.
- Will be at holidays during 12.3-30.3.
- Meaning that I probably won’t be writing much here.
- Closing Tips & Tricks Service.
- It just did not work out as I didn’t have enough energy to keep marketing it.
Well that’s it.
Mar/080
Importance Of Change Control
When you are working on a software project you have agreed to deliver certain features to your customer. But what happens if these features change during the project?
Well first of all the changes will most likely change your project budget / deadline. Example changes :
- Adding New Features
- Dropping Features
- Someone was able to be honest?
Add Features
When adding new feature you’ll have to change both deadline and budget. If you change only the budget the project will delay. If you change only the deadline the project will not be profitable.
Drop Features
What comes to dropping features, that is probably a good thing, but why were those features dropped? Learn why and improve for the next project.
Conclusion
To control these changes you will need a change control process. What I would do is to pick up a few key persons from the project team and create a change control group. For each (major) change they will have a meeting to decide what is to be done for the change. Also they need to be documenting and tracking these changes somehow, e.g. use excel to track changes and document all the meetings so that people can see why the decision was made.
Change control is just one way to have more organized way to react to changes. Why it exists is because any change (problem) from customer side must never be taken lightly as those can kill your project. And that can happen very fast, I’v seen it.