... and I don't mean programming. I was reading a blog post explaining an aspect of Haskell programming, and I got to this line:

If you like this style, that’s cool, but if you want to tell me that I should like it as well, be prepared to get punched in the face.

Perhaps I'm missing the humour in it, but that sort of statement is neither funny or enlightening. Reading it makes me hope to never meet the author in person.

Astute observers may have noticed that I've removed several GitHub repositories (duncans_fvwm, duncans_emacs and plumbing) and emptied the andelys repository.

I originally made duncans_emacs and duncans_fvwm public as part of a tutorial series on Emacs, but seing as almost no-one has been making use of them or following the tutorial, I've shut them down and incorporated both into my private Subversion repository. Plumbing has gone west as a consequence of my decision to restart the andelys (Rails-based media player) project using Hobo.

Finally, I've marked the Wuji project as no longer under active development, simply because it does what I need it to and I have no plans for additional features.

Well, that went badly - turning on anonymous comments meant the moderation queue filled with spam very quickly ... so now I've changed it so only logged-in users can post, and kept moderation turned on.

I've been hit by a lot of automated spam recently, so I've changed the comment policy: anyone can post (including anonymous users) but all posts are moderated. I'll see how that goes ...

I'm back on the market again. Armin and I are planning to do some personal contracting for a while, investing a fair proportion of the money we earn into an international marketing campaign for Cobalt, and growing an international reseller network.

I've learned many lessons building OffByZero and our three products (OBZTime, OBZVault and Cobalt). I'm looking forwards to applying them in my next contracting role ... I think the experience of building a profitable startup from the ground up will have a profound effect upon the way I approach things.

Interesting times ...

Persistence is important when starting a business; that's true of marketing too. Here are two (anonymised) lengthy contact logs for two clients. This one lead no-where:

... whereas this one lead to a presentation and a likely sale:

The interesting thing is that you never can tell ... some contacts that seem very promising initially don't pan out, and others that seem quite cold initially turn very promising in short order.

Armin brought Gotye to my attention - makes great coding music ...

From his blog ...

Ummmm, let’s see- I’m recording vocals and various instruments in this barn south-east of Melbourne:

Oh, and I’m using these thingies- stone wool, felt-covered tube traps that my dad made. They’re great for sorting out the acoustic issues known as “barniness”

Love it! :-)

So I visited the Microsoft Partner website today, to profile our Cobalt software licensing solution. To my surprise I found that it is broken in both Firefox and Konqueror ... in fact, it is broken in any browser except Internet Explorer on Windows.

I fired the Microsoft folks a bug report. They replied very quickly:

... we suggest you to use Internet Explorer (IE) as your browser when accessing partners sites which also includes the Microsoft Partner Channel Builder.

I am really sorry for this inconvenience that you are experiencing.

Prompt, polite and friendly support - my experience is that most companies could do with taking a leaf out of Microsoft's book when it comes to support - but not exactly a helpful solution.

Just use IE? It'll be 2010 tomorrow. Firefox is now the most popular browser in the world.

Microsoft has been evangelising a standards-compliant approach for years. They've even supported Moonlight, an open-source implementation of Silverlight. In fact I've been to a Microsoft event here in Melbourne where an evangelist was citing Moonlight as an example of how Microsoft doesn't want to create an IE-only Internet.

So how come the Partner site has been broken for nearly two years?

I've asked whether MS intends to fix the site, & if so, what the timeframe is. I'll update this post with details ...

Updated 31st December 2009: The same Microsoft staff member replied to say that she's escalated the problem to support. I must say I'm very impressed so far; I hadn't expected such short turn-around times from support over the Christmas period. Let's hope the fix is as quick in coming ...

So at the moment I'm taking a look at Visual Studio 2010 - basically test-driving a few features including the test suite and built-in refactoring tools. I thought a good way of doing this would be to build a simple weight & balance calculator for a Robinson 44.

Anyhow, while reading the operating handbook to get an idea of the weight & balance calculations, I came across this gem:

I can't help but wonder who might be happy operating in a fault-intolerant environment like aviation, but still need a helpful safety bulletin explaining that letting their passengers head-butt a rotor whirling at near the speed of sound might be a bad idea.

This guy perhaps?

In case you didn't know, Optus provides free Wi-Fi in Federation Square. Very handy, even if it does seem to be WWW-only (my IMAP connection doesn't work, e.g.).