Category: Job Hunting

Originally posted May 5, 2007, now archived here.

For further explanation why this post exists, see Intro to Experience Dump. This is the section for software I have written or otherwise been involved in the creation of, be it in the form of testing, customer relations, determining requirements, debugging, management, or whatever. It overlaps with a few things I have mentioned elsewhere, but deserves its own category even had I mentioned it all elsewhere. There are probably things I have forgotten, or that are too small or incomplete to be worth mentioning even if I remember them. Do web sites count as something akin to software development projects? I’m not counting them, but that would be another angle, given the various sites I’ve created or helped create, modified or maintained, even besides blogs. Anyway, I believe this will be the last post that lists software and then talks about it. I anticipate following with other posts discussing my background, experiences and interests, to try to get a handle on the rest of it too. I may also create a master post that includes just the list of software, tools and languages in one place. Just for the fun of seeing it.

Escalation Assistant
Proof of concept internet keyword search engine
Web Response Tracker
Web Coach
WebWizard
Training Evaluation
XTreme Data XChange
XTreme TimeTrakz
XTreme Time Minder
Winlaw
Winlaw Scanning & Archiver Utility
Winlaw Closing Wizard
Kidpaint
Technology Management System (TMS)
Custom groundskeeping billing in Access VBA
Prometheus
Prometheus PDF Supplement
Quote Factory
Icon Extractor
Password Generator
Blood Pressure Logger
Too many samples and snippets of code to count, including some publicly available ones like this textbox tip and sample.

There are things I was more on the periphery of, where perhaps I dealt with a client, or was aware of the nature of the code being written or improved, but was not in a position to see or be involved in it myself. For instance, a stock analysis program co-written on-site with our client at their offices in Rhode Island. Three of my colleagues worked on it, with one of them flying to California to deploy the application and configure Oracle for the client’s customer. For another instance, a CRM/sales management tool for an insurance company in Connecticut.

The item I listed as “Proof of concept internet keyword search engine” borders on that, but I was actively involved in the planning and testing, and evaluating the proposal. That was in the early days; 1997 and just into 1998. Someone had the bright idea, of which we were highly skeptical, of selling keywords. In your TV ad you’d tell people to type “cars” in their browser. No http. No www. Just a word. Remember, this was a long time ago. That would provoke a search at the host site, looking up the URL that matched the word. Then the user would be redirected to the URL; perhaps a page on the car company’s site advertising a special in detail. The guy behind this wanted it to be available in time for the Super Bowl, and wanted the thing to be able to handle the sheer volume of traffic that might imply.

We never got paid a cent, but neither did we provide anyone with code. However, it was serious and, until they ran out of money, apparently well enough backed that we were supplied with a massive HP server to use for testing. It was up there with some of the best machines one might deploy as servers back then. A couple of my colleagues did their magic writing some code. We networked with the server, hit it with massive traffic tests, and couldn’t even get it to break a sweat. That was cool. Then the whole thing fell apart. They didn’t want to pay us realistic money for it anyway, and the guy behind it apparently ran out of funding, so nothing happened. Except for subsequent, presumably unrelated developments online that made the idea look better than we’d thought at the time.

Backtracking a bit, I covered Escalation Assistant in the tech support tools post. I wrote it to add uniformity to and help ensure completeness of the details supplied in the text of escalations to second level Microsoft Visual Basic support. It was kind of cool to have written something, even if it wasn’t particularly large or fancy, that was used by most of the department.

Ditto on having talked about the Web Response Tracker and Web Coach programs before. I believe the former was the first programming project I ever oversaw without writing it myself. It was a great experience. The latter is notable in that my friend and colleague Bob saw me working on it with gleeful intensity and observed how much fun I was having, and that I was kind of a natural at it. That brought home to me that, indeed, he was right.

The WebWizard I had forgotten about until I poked around to see if I’d missed anything. In answering web responses – support requests people left via the web site rather than by calling – there were certain elements that were uniform or recyclable. One of the thing I did was establish certain standard protocols and bits of text used in responses. For instance, letting someone know that the answer above should resolve their problem, and we would close the case after so many days if we didn’t hear back. Something like that saved us having to harass the customer into actively saying they were all set and saved us accumulating open cases that were open only because the customer never replied. In two partially written variants, I set out to automate parts of that. The trouble was, I distracted myself by creating a cool splash screen on which an animated spider dropped down and up a strand of web. It was strictly voluntary and experimental, so no biggie, and I had fun.

The Training Evaluation project is another I mentioned earlier, and another project I oversaw. It was written by my friend and colleague of the time, Nicole.

Programs I called Time Trakz and Time Minder were two different timekeeping programs I created and used for billing purposes. The first had start, pause, resume and stop buttons and would, using them, stopwatch and increment your time for you. We weren’t really using that feature and it was easier simply to type in how much time, and the big client requested a particular way of categorizing work (which six years later they now say is too ambiguous). So I wrote a new version that has been used regularly since, initially against SQL Server 7.0, then with Access. I never “finished” it in terms of things I’d have liked to add, but it has served the purpose. There were times I’d have likes something web-based, or an e-mail parser, but hey.

Data XChange is a big story. The story of the entire business, in a way. A cautionary story about what could and did go wrong.

When I left Tranti Systems and ended up in Word support, I had developed a nearly incurable distrust of companies as employers. I knew I needed and wanted to learn more, but even as I started that support job, I had a vague notion I’d stay there several months or a year, absorb more knowledge, and then leave for some vaguely defined “computer consulting” self-employment. That job showed me how much I didn’t know, and was comfortable enough, especially during the first several months, it diverted my original plan to flee and go out on my own. I never fully forgot it, but it receded. I still have the “memory” of my mental image of myself in a small office, oddly enough located in Halifax, near the current location of Wal-Mart.

While in VB support, some of us were dismayed when comparing our abilities to that of the developers we were helping, who made far more money than we did. That led some of my colleagues to discuss starting a side business. They brought me in on it, after choosing a name but before meeting officially for the first time outside of work. It started as much as a social club as a business, but the initial idea was to write software we could sell in some quantity. That was music to my ears. While we had others who were downright prodigal at programming, I made big plans for product marketing, production and fulfillment.

Another thing we knew from support was that there was demand for a utility to convert between database formats, including things like going backward from newer to older Access. That would be our first product, which we called Data XChange. Since we named it in 1996, use of “xchange” and “data xchange” in some form or another has exploded from nothing to absurd, if not as absurd as the proliferation of use of the word “xtreme” in some form.

That hummed along nicely. Some of us gave feedback on the interface and helped with testing. Others pounded out the code. Within several months we had a 1.0 product that quite literally could have been released with caveats, then patched or updated in a 2.0 version. However, one partner insisted that it had to ship with absolutely complete and bug free functionality. No warning people that it couldn’t handle Paradox indexes reliably, or whatnot, for the almost nobody to whom that would matter. Another partner insisted it had to be completely rewritten from scratch, object-oriented, enabling us to sell an SDK version as well. At that point the creative energy deflated, everyone else steered away from it, and the partner with the big plans to rewrite it never even started. We did manage to get a copy of the code modified to disable all but conversion between Access data versions and made that available as a free download.

We missed the opportunity to bring in enough money to keep people excited and to pay us to continue improving it. The business structure, which fell into partnership by default, precluded the ability to supervise and direct the work in any traditional manner. There were also too many of us, with too many differing ideas of what we ought to do for a buck. Thus we steered into the consulting/custom software direction. Which was always something we were open to, but some of us had a greater desire to go with “packaged” software as much as possible.

Flash forward a bit, and we had a company looking for a limited functionality SDK version of Data XChange, meaning a DLL they could call to do the conversion task. They only needed it to go one way, between Access versions. The partner who’d wanted to do the SDK approach sat down and wrote what was needed within a couple hours. Some quick testing and it was in the hands of the customer. I charged them not for custom, but for what we’d retail it, and I was excited to be able to market even a limited SDK Data XChange product. When I tried to get the code from my partner, he had lost it to an fdisk he’d just happened to do right after writing it and getting it out to the customer. After his pride at how little time it took, he refused to spend the couple hours to recreate it. Meanwhile, it was cool to know that a copy of our DLL was installed in several hundred locations in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, but it was irritating that hundreds or even thousands of dollars in revenue per hour of my partner’s time wound up being tens of dollars per hour. Not even the discounted rate we were by then charging the big client.

This post isn’t supposed to be about lessons in business or software development, but it can’t help but be just that.

I discussed Winlaw under legal software. It was originated by another company, as a custom package for a law firm that ranged between 40 and 52 people in size. They apparently hoped to make it a standard offering to other firms. We imrpoved it, as it had serious problems, and upgraded it to 32-bit. I did a lot of UI tweaks, plus functionality improvements and bug fixes over the years I maintained it.

One of the features we were contracted to add was a closing wizard, to more comprehensively gather information about a case as it was being closed. I designed the interface and worked with the client on requirements. With my help and supervision, one of my partners wrote the meat of the code and we ported it from a standalone program for ease of development into Winlaw proper.

Another element of the Winlaw project was the addition of a program for archiving documents. I wrote that one, and made it so it could also be used less emphatically, to make a mere copy of all the documents from a case. That turned out to be the most used feature, as it was used in conjunction with scanning externally sourced paper documents at the time each case closed, to have a snapshot on CD of the documents as they appeared on the server then.

The Winlaw project ended up having elements in common with Data XChange, and our business elements in common with the originators of Winlaw. In the latter case, the story was that the partner whose baby Winlaw was left the company, nobody else there cared about it, and that was why the client had to hire us to fix it. In the former case, my partner who was the primary on the project got a certain amount done and then decided it just had to be written entirely from scratch. The benefit of that would be we could have a more widely marketable version, while also fully satisfying the original requirements and some. That was where Prometheus came in, and as far as it went, it was amazing. In both versions; the first one wasn’t good enough and was tossed when it was mostly complete, to be rewritten from scratch. Then the partner whose project Prometheus was left.

I ended up deploying a version of it in beta for a small firm. That was the hard part. Once in service, it worked great. Until they needed to handle PDF files, and not merely Word and other MS Office file types. While I tried to figure out how to create a plug-in that would work for PDF files, I created a side program they could use to associate selected PDF files with a case, list the ones for a case, and open them. Too much of a kludge, but it was better than nothing for a time.

For me, the whole code writing thing wasn’t so bad, except it didn’t have anything like a current payoff, and quite possibly it had no payoff, ever. In the case of Winlaw, the agreed upon price was so absurd, and not in our favor, that it was barely worth lifting a finger even on the assumption of collecting for it someday.

Kidpaint is a silly yet cool little program I wrote while still in VB support. It’s pretty much how it sounds, and could also double as a demo of some of the graphics methods available natively in VB, which were one of the things I taught in VB training. There’s a drawing area, with a background color that can be change. You can switch between each of the different “pens.” You can select a width. A separate form below the main form has colors to pick from, resembling an old watercolor paint set. A separate form beside the main form lets you click on an icon-sized picture and then click to “stamp” it onto the drawing. Left-click is once only, while right-click leaves it available to stamp over and over. Right draw is randomly multicolor, while left draw is the selected color. You can show or hide the colors or stamps. It’s cute, but not sophisticated.

Technology Management System, or TMS, was a project we did for a long defunct company named Marine Optical. The sad thing is that they showed every sign of being on the verge of going under, and being likely not to pay us for the whole thing, but the money – and somewhat fascinating project – beckoned and blinded us to the signs.

It was a program for people at the company to put in work requests of the IT department. The manager of a department would approve a request by one of their employees. The manager of IT would approve and assign things as the ultimate arbiter. The tough part was the way in which they wanted a combination of assigned priority, time in the queue, and absolute priority overrides by the IT manager to be computed and interact. I ended up being the only one with a clear grasp of what they were asking, but I wasn’t the one writing the code, so I did a lot of explaining. I basically managed the project. My partner spent his last week before leaving the office to take a full time job over at the client’s building, helping the co-writer there prepare it for deployment. Between his leaving and our knowing they wanted to save money, we left some finishing touches and creation of reports to them.

A few weeks later, their employee got stuck, had modified the code in a suboptimal way, and it came back on us. In about five weeks, we almost doubled the cost of the project, fixing it, debugging and polishing it up, and doing after all the things they’d have saved money doing internally. In a way, I had a lot of fun that month, working with another partner (who was conveniently between day jobs), troubleshooting and modifying the code. What happened, though, is the partner who’d done most of it in the first place (Marine’s employee had worked with him, mainly on the user interface) would stop by after work, take over from us, wipe out what we’d done and write whole swaths of code from scratch, concluding that what he’d done initially wasn’t good enough. Hark, a behavioral pattern emerges.

We managed to get it just finished and deployable by the end of the year. Their employee still was unable to deploy it. His boss, the IT manager, left. Once she was gone, after the beginning of the year they were in full throes toward bankruptcy and there was no chance we’d ever get paid, and within a few months he was laid off too. It was bad. The program was excellent, though. Some of the requirements were a bit goofy, but a modified version of the program would probably work fine for many companies as an IT management tool, similar to others, fewer of which existed at the time. Indeed, they wanted custom then because nothing off the shelf quite fit them.

I was essentially manager, customer contact and support person for a custom billing solution for a small groundskeeping business. It was in Access VBA. The biggest problem was probably the lack of feedback from the customer as to precisely what he needed. He simply liked to talk and talk socially, but left us almost on our own when it came to business. He also didn’t have the approval of his wife to have the project done, when she would be the user. In actually deployment, the biggest problems were lack of computer skill and comfort, and ease with which entering bad data would crash it. The good thing was anyone who could open an Access table and eyeball the data could fix it. In theory. It was interesting and kind of cool, but should probably have been done in VB, even if it meant greater cost.

Quote Factory was my name for a project I started and didn’t get much past the UI on. It was for generating printing price quotes. I was at a low point and didn’t engage with it as I should have, but I also saw the warning signs that we would never see remotely adequate, if any, money for the project. There was also the classic mistake of showing the customer a GUI and having him see it as practically a done program. The time it would have required would have been somewhere between two and ten times what the customer would have been willing to pay. I abandoned it. It seemed like a cool enough project I sometimes wish I’d have created it, even if it meant getting screwed.

Icon Extractor is a program I wrote to show and be able to copy to the clipboard any icons contained in a file such as a DLL or EXE. I also wrote a simpler one long before that to display and zoom in on ICO files, and to copy them. Cool, if essentially little more than samples of how to do a particular thing.

The password generator is something I created to give me random looking yet relatively easy to remember passwords for people, based on certain inputs, one of them internal to the user database.

The blood pressure logger would have been completely pointless, except that it gave me something to try writing with Visual Basic 4.0 beta. I would enter blood pressure readings I got, checking sometimes several times a day, and it would append them to a Word document. That way I was able to give the doctor a printout of readings, dates, times, and circumstances.

Finally, the least significant of the above are little more than sample code. There was tons of that. In support, we had to be careful we weren’t writing people’s programs for them, but sometimes we got carried away. Since that was product support, there was more to it than code, including Visual Basic and Visual Studio installation problems, and distribution problems with programs written in VB. That last one could effectively mean being product support for someone else’s program, at least to the point of getting it to install. But I digress.

I want to move on to some other posts, but my next thing after this will be a review of all my sundry experience. It’s a bit voluminous and perhaps lame, but it’s making me think and examine myself. This is the time for that, as one thing phases down and it’s not entirely certain what the next thing(s) will or ought to be.

Experience Posts (links to reposts):

Intro to Experience Dump
Hardware Experience
OS Experience
Word Processing Experience
Spreadsheets and Accounting
Graphics and Presentations
Database and RDBMS
Dictation Software
Communications, Internet, PDA, Blogging
Legal Industry Software
Backup and Compression Software
Miscellaneous Software
Security, Spam, Malware…
Call Center and Tech Support Tools
Languages and Programming Tools
Server Software
Software Creation

Employment and College
Experiences and Accomplishments Scratchpad

Originally posted May 4, 2007, now archived here.

For further explanation why this post exists, see Intro to Experience Dump. This is the section for server software, including operating systems. It overlaps extensively with things I have mentioned elsewhere, and is primarily another way of classifying and discussing some of it. I could be forgetting some…

Windows NT
Windows 2000 Server
Windows 2003 Small Business Server
Windows 2003 Server
Novell
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft Exchange Server
Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)
Microsoft Proxy Server
ArcServe
Veritas Backup Exec
EMC Retrospect
Juris Classic
Juris Next Generation
Norton Antivirus
Sybari Antigen and Spam Manager

Do I include that which can be run networked or not, like Lawyer’s Diary, Turbolaw, Peachtree or Wintitle? Does figuring out how to access an old AS/400 from its lone remaining terminal count as a server? When I set out to make a server software category, I thought it would be straightforward. Most of the afterthoughts technically only use data on a server, so really wouldn’t count in the manner I decided Winlaw, local except the SQL Server backend, didn’t count.

My big server OS experience is with NT4. I’ve installed it many times. I’ve run networks using it. I helped run it mixed with Novell, then migrate entirely to NT. The trouble was, I was in an environment where it was used well beyond the point when many had switched to Windows 2000 or 2003 Server, so I feel like I was held back in obsoleteville. Not that NT4 didn’t rock, but sometimes you gotta move on.

Thus I only dealt with Windows 2000 Server in the form of adding it to an NT network as a member server, because NT didn’t support the SATA RAID on the new server. It was never quite right – like one of those “haunted” computers you encounter periodically – and the people administering it now plan to retire it as soon as can be managed.

I setup 2003 SBS for a client and thought it was pretty cool. I also helped migrate another client from a Novell server with a degraded drive to a 2003 server. Finally, I did the preliminary setup of two Windows 2003 servers for the client that had been clinging to NT, and have otherwise worked with them.

I setup a client with the version of Exchange on SBS 2003, and have otherwise worked with that version of Exchange. Mainly I’ve used Exchange 5.5 though. I helped set it up initially, reinstalled it multiple times, and installed it on other servers for subsidiary purposes like enabling a backup agent to work. I administered Exchange 5.5 for a firm of 40 – 52 people from late 1999 through late 2006. During that time, I got the firm onto the internet, adding IMC (internet mail connector) via a proxy server.

Which was also when Proxy Server and IIS came in. IIS was required for OWA (Outlook Web Access), and handy for creating an intranet site for everybody not to use. I helped the client select an upgraded phone system that was T-1 based and included four channels of the T-1 for data. Later we switched providers and doubled the bandwidth. Proxy seemed like the best way to handle it at the time, while also feeding the owner’s desire to know and control what everyone did on the web.

ArcServe was the original backup software. It wasn’t bad, but when I had to rebuild the server the tape drive was in, the media was nowhere to be found. At that point we switched to Veritas Backup Exec, which came hugely recommended and was even easier to use than ArcServe had been. I deployed and redeployed that variously over the years, including when we got a new tape drive on a new server because the old tape drive’s 12 GB capacity became too small for even the most important files.

The IT firm that’s taking over most of the work switched them to EMC Retrospect during the network upgrade, utterly ignoring the existing license for a vastly superior product in order to feed their vendor relationship or whatever. Retrospect, which subsequently became an orphan product for which there are no further release plans, is hands down the worst backup software and quite possibly the hardest to use software of any kind that I have ever encountered. Nonetheless, I have to my dismay used the product, as I had to check and change the selections, and try to figure out whether the time the backups took could be reduced. Backup Exec had been taking around five hours. Retrospect was taking around eighteen hours. Ouch.

Juris was covered under accounting-related software. It is very much server-based, so I included it here as well. I supported the classic version, encouraged them to upgrade to the modern version, worked with them arranging it, deployed the new version, migrated the data from the old version, and supported that from then on.

I tried for many years to get the big client to get a corporate Norton Antivirus (or something like it!) license, which they steadfastly refused to do, even when presented with explicit pricing and ordering information and left to do it… or not. They finally went for it when the people we outsourced the network upgrade to insisted on it, which was correct, notwithstanding again the massaging of their vendor relationships. In the meantime, I dealt with Norton corporate elsewhere.

I did get the big client to adopt Sybari Antigen to scan e-mails for viruses, which was a huge help, given that’s the overwhelming source. Prior to doing even this for protection, there were two major outbreaks. One was e-mail borne. The other was simply “hey, you’re connected to the internet” in nature. There were no major outbreaks after I deployed Antigen, which was the most highly recommended product of its kind. Two years later, we added Spam Manager, which was also superlative until replacing the Exchange server disrupted it.

That should cover at least the most important items that can be called server software, even if something is missing.

Experience Posts (links to reposts):

Intro to Experience Dump
Hardware Experience
OS Experience
Word Processing Experience
Spreadsheets and Accounting
Graphics and Presentations
Database and RDBMS
Dictation Software
Communications, Internet, PDA, Blogging
Legal Industry Software
Backup and Compression Software
Miscellaneous Software
Security, Spam, Malware…
Call Center and Tech Support Tools
Languages and Programming Tools
Server Software
Software Creation

Employment and College
Experiences and Accomplishments Scratchpad

Originally posted May 3, 2007, now archived here.

For further explanation why this post exists, see Intro to Experience Dump. This is the section for programming tools, languages and such. As usual, I may be forgetting some that would fit here. Also, lest one get excited, just because I have laid hands on a language, perhaps written a “hello world” program with it, maybe compared its language and syntax on paper, that does not mean proficiency, or even familiarity. It’s merely indicative of a bit of added depth to my overall background. The only things I’d claim proficiency in are VB through 6.0, Wordbasic from Word 6.0, and perhaps VBA as applied to later versions of Word and Access.

Visual Basic 3.0 through 6.0
QuickBasic 4.5
Professional Devlopment System 7.1
Visual Basic for DOS
VBA
WordBasic
Visual Basic.NET
VBScript
JavaScript
PHP
J
Borland C++
Borland Delphi
MS Visual C++
C#
BASIC
Pascal
Cobol
HTML
Visual Interdev
Visual J++
Visual FoxPro
Rexx
MS-DOS batches
Perl

I think I’ve looked at other things like Python or Ruby, but I can’t remember exactly which, so I left them out of the list. I definitely played with, and helped a friend with, Perl. Guess I should add that. J is something I discovered a couple years back, downloaded and played with a bit. I find it fascinating to look at new languages.

The first six items on the list I supported for Microsoft to some degree or another. Officially in Word support we did not support macros, but that was my specialty and we tended to make exceptions to some degree. That carried over into automation of Word from VB programs, which later meant becoming familiar with VBA when Wordbasic was replaced. Right around the time I migrated from Word to VB support, the first Word macro virus hit. Because I’d shown you could do some mischievous things with macros, colleagues jokingly suggested I might have been the source. Flattering, in a twisted sort of way.

The interesting thing about supporting a programming product is that you get a huge range of exposure that you might not get coding a project, but you don’t get the intense depth in one area that coding a project that uses certain features might impart. You also learn how to find things out in support, which is extremely useful. I always emphasized when providing references that the candidate in question might not know a specific thing – there’s too much for anyone to know it all pat – but troubleshooting and research ability on top of the broader knowledge are a huge benefit. Sometimes it was depressing talking to software developers and realizing just how bad many were, yet they were making real money. Sometimes it was weird having limited knowledge about a customer’s question, compared to them, yet having enough knowledge, access to information, and alternate perspective to cut right to it and look like a miracle worker. Despite having started the call in a panic because you didn’t know much about X.

Then there were the obsolete products we supported for a time. The training was all about VB3 and then VB4. If someone called about the DOS versions of Basic or VB, it got really interesting. Even when it wasn’t someone doing something goofy like running QuickBasic from floppies on an ancient PC without a hard drive. (Perhaps the equivalent in Word support was when someone couldn’t make Word 6.0 run on a 286, where I congratulated them for getting Windows to run and could do nothing for them.) It helped that I had dabbled with BASIC off and on since I learned my first bits of it circa 1977.

Before I even got the job in Word support, I had bought and installed Borland’s C++ product, dabbled with it slightly, and eventually read a book and tried the code it taught. The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to C Programming or something like that; great book. I dabbled just as slightly with some of Microsoft’s versions. Most recently was trying to run and compile a component one of my partners wrote in VC++ to be used from Prometheus, our case/document management product.

Pascal and COBOL were classes in college. That and I dabbled with Delphi, which used a form of Pascal. What was weird was when I read the book Code Complete, it gave examples and comparisons in various languages, and Pascal always looked surprisingly familiar to me. It’s kind of like French from 7th, 8th and 9th grade. I can see or even hear French and it doesn’t sound alien to me the way another language other than English or German might. Years later, when I took German, I’d find myself needing the German word and inexplicably remembering the French word for something, and usually forgetting the German in the process. I’d have told you I’d forgotten it long ago, but there it was, bubbling up.

It’s hard not to have learned some HTML, or at least gotten comfortable looking at it, after having web sites for ten years. Still, I am not a wizard and like tools that make it easier. Thus so much of my work having been done in FrontPage, or using blogging software. Except that both, and especially blogging software, very much call for getting into the HTML, the PHP, the CSS; the alphabet soup of it all. I didn’t include CSS on the list and could have. For that matter, SQL could go on the list, and matters more than a lot of it.

I poked Rexx with a stick when I played with OS/2 Warp, having seen much discussion of it ahead of time among Team OS/2 denizens. I don’t remember anything, but I know I touched it and was naturally curious after hearing so much.

Whereas I did a lot with DOS batch files, which do count as a form of programming/macro language/tool. I still do. My most recent VB program was a quick utility to read a couple of fields from an Access database and write out a text file with traditional file I/O (rather than referencing FSO – File System Objects – and going beyond an EXE that would run fine after a straight copy to the target machine). The fields were original and current paths of archived documents. Restoring them called for a mass of copy commands using the two paths. Nothing fancy.

It’s funny; I could probably have gone ahead and done programming for a living. I’m better than I generally give myself credit for, and certainly more of a natural, but I tended to be surrounded by people who were prodigal by comparison. In a business started originally to write software, that was why I was the business guy, along with some testing, user interface work and such. I’m good at orchestrating the activities of other people, understanding requirements, and grasping a whole project. I’m good at debugging existing code. I’m good at making attractive and usable interfaces, or improving existing ones. Sometimes I think about it and it seems cool. Sometimes I think about it and it sounds onerous to have to maintain that level of concentration all day, each day. Which is not actually how it works, because that just isn’t possible, which is one reason why production of code isn’t as voluminously fast as some less technical types might anticipate. These days I think about it and worry about having to get up to speed on new tools.

When dotnet came out, none of us were doing Visual Basic support anymore. That meant we wouldn’t receive the customary training and were on our own. While I and others checked it out on our own to some degree, which was frustrating when it took forever to figure out how to do the equivalent of Form2.Show and other simple things that were the beauty of VB, it wasn’t the same. So I organized a couple of day long sessions at my office. A bunch of us gathered around several computers and banged away at it, getting pointers from anyone who knew more about or was faster to figure out a given thing. It was excellent. We also had some partial training material from within Microsoft to look at. Other than that and playing with it (and C#) a bit before and after, I’ve not used dotnet. Code I’ve maintained or worked on has continued to be in VB6. There was no reason to change that.

Oh, forgot VBA. I’ve used it directly and through automation in MS Office products. I’ve also looked at the VBA kit that came with MSDN, and in at least one non-Microsoft application. I seem to recall that having been Lotus WordPro, and the app-specific commands having seemed rather obscure even by Word VBA standards. One of my partners created an Access-based application using VBA, a custom billing program, for a groundskeeping business. I helped with it some, and was primary contact for the customer. Actually, I ended up doing most of the support, debugging and testing. It seemed best to use Access directly, because of the convenience of generating reports as invoices. It was so shaky (mainly prone to collapse under the slightest bad data) that a real program in VB might have been better and not much more time-consuming. We ended up charging what the customer was willing to pay, which was about a third of what it was “worth” by the hour, yet still very real money. The partner had nothing else doing at the time. At any rate, that was a big education in Access VBA.

There you have it. This will sort of overlap one of the remaining sections, in which I list and discuss software I was involved in creating (or attempting to create) on at some level. I believe all that’s left is that and a partially redundant collation of server-based software. Then it’s on to other things.

Experience Posts (links to reposts):

Intro to Experience Dump
Hardware Experience
OS Experience
Word Processing Experience
Spreadsheets and Accounting
Graphics and Presentations
Database and RDBMS
Dictation Software
Communications, Internet, PDA, Blogging
Legal Industry Software
Backup and Compression Software
Miscellaneous Software
Security, Spam, Malware…
Call Center and Tech Support Tools
Languages and Programming Tools
Server Software
Software Creation

Employment and College
Experiences and Accomplishments Scratchpad

Originally posted April 29, 2007, now archived here.

For further explanation why this post exists, see Intro to Experience Dump. This is the section for call center and tech support related software. As usual, I may be forgetting some that would fit here…

Aspect call center monitoring
Microsoft PSS Workbench
Clarify Compass
Wadle
MSDN
Technet
Escalation Assistant
Web Response Tracker
Web Coach
Training Evaluation
V-BeGone
Regclean

The first four items were a part of doing Microsoft support and, later, being a technical supervisor. MSDN and Technet were tools we also used at times, and sort of indirectly support the use of.

Escalation Assistant was a program I wrote, used in VB support, to gather the appropriate information about a case – ensuring that people did indeed gather as well as include all of it – before escalating to second level support. It would format the details and put it all on the clipboard to paste into Compass. The people handling escalations were very appreciative.

I helped pioneer “web response” online support by the VB team. Initially I volunteered to do web responses between calls, during one of the rare times when we were adequately staffed. One Monday, the second level contact at Microsoft assigned me all the web responses the weekend guy had summarily escalated because he’d not had time to do them, effectively choosing me to do web responses, rather than phone support, full time. Since I loved writing responses and hated taking calls, that was fantastic.

We ended up with a team of people doing them, me in the lead. I supervised the creation of a program for tracking the web responses we did. In fact, it was Dale’s mother who wrote the program and worked with me on getting it just right.

When I became a supervisor (“technical development lead,” TDL for short) and phased out of doing web responses, one of my jobs was “coaching.” That is, listening to people and giving them feedback on their support calls. How do you do that with written responses? How do you randomize it? I wrote a little program to randomly select a case to read, for a selected support tech, during a specified time period.

Finally, as TDL I ended up in charge of training, which turned out to be one of those things I do best (which really is a specific application of a more general trait). Not the training, though I’m good at that too, once I get past the terror of speaking to a group, but planning, orchestrating, and changing the details as circumstances dictate. I did a few parts myself, but for most of it I lined up others with the appropriate strengths.

It had been traditional for the trainees to fill out paper evaluation forms. I supervised and tested the creation of a program to gather the same data, which put it into a more useful format.

You know, it just occured to me to wonder where one might mention things like making Regedit dance and sing, or using sysinfo, dxdiag, or whatever. That reminded me of Regclean, which I seem to recall was originated by someone on the VB (or perhaps developer support more generally) team at Microsoft as a way to cleanup obsolete registrations of OCX files and such. That in turn reminded me of a utility called V-BeGone, written by one of my colleagues. We used it to have people comprehensively get the OCX and OCA files specific to Visual Basic (as it existed at the time) out of the way without affecting third party controls.

Some of this overlaps with one of the two remaining categories of software I have for entries such as this. One is stuff I wrote, managed, or was otherwise involved in. The other, overlapping other categories, is server software. Then I’m done with the list-centric part and can consider moving to the more task or accomplishment or “what I liked doing” part, which some of the above has also overlapped. Correction! Three remaining categories. How can I mention doing VB support and not have a category for programming and related software and tools? Silly me.

Experience Posts (links to reposts):

Intro to Experience Dump
Hardware Experience
OS Experience
Word Processing Experience
Spreadsheets and Accounting
Graphics and Presentations
Database and RDBMS
Dictation Software
Communications, Internet, PDA, Blogging
Legal Industry Software
Backup and Compression Software
Miscellaneous Software
Security, Spam, Malware…
Call Center and Tech Support Tools
Languages and Programming Tools
Server Software
Software Creation

Employment and College
Experiences and Accomplishments Scratchpad

Originally posted April 29, 2007, now archived here.

For further explanation why this post exists, see Intro to Experience Dump. This is the section for security, antivirus, anti-malware (adware/spyware), and related software. As usual, I may be forgetting some that would fit here…

Sybari Antigen & Spam Manager
Norton Antivirus/Internet Security
Norton Antispam
Thunderbyte Antivirus
McAfee
Ad-Aware
Spybot Search & Destroy
Ewido
MS AntiSpyware
CWShredder
Trend Micro Housecall
ZoneAlarm
KEYKatcher

Not a lot to say here. I’ve done outrageous amounts of malware cleanup, with a lot of it being done or completed manually, above and beyond any of these tools. I selected and rolled out Sybari Antigen to the big client, after I finally convinced them they needed at least that level of protection, then two years later we renewed to include the integrated Spam Manager feature. Antigen was never anything but stellar. Spam Manager worked superlatively until a point roughly coinciding with Microsoft’s purchase of the company (of which they’d been a customer after lab testing showed them to be hands down the best), but that may be coincidence.

KEYKatcher is the odd item here. I helped the owner of the large client purchase and learn how to use the unit. It was for seeing what one of his kids was doing online, or so he said. What made this interesting was the first one I got failed in a fascinating way. I ended up working with the owner of the company that makes them, trying to figure it out before sending it back so he could study it, because it was unique. It’s a device (it could have gone in the hardware section that goes between the computer and keyboard to log keystrokes, which can then be dumped into Notepad or any word processor, triggered by typing the right code.

It’s not security-related software, but the most useful thing I ever did, after eliminating e-mail as a virus source, was to roll out Firefox and get as many people as possible to use it unless a crucial site absolutely required Internet Explorer. The malware cleanups became primarily for those who insisted on using IE or, coincidentally or not, had a third-party nagware screensaver installed.

Experience Posts (links to reposts):

Intro to Experience Dump
Hardware Experience
OS Experience
Word Processing Experience
Spreadsheets and Accounting
Graphics and Presentations
Database and RDBMS
Dictation Software
Communications, Internet, PDA, Blogging
Legal Industry Software
Backup and Compression Software
Miscellaneous Software
Security, Spam, Malware…
Call Center and Tech Support Tools
Languages and Programming Tools
Server Software
Software Creation

Employment and College
Experiences and Accomplishments Scratchpad

Originally posted April 26, 2007, now archived here.

For further explanation why this post exists, see Intro to Experience Dump. This is the section for a few odds and ends of industry-specific (other than legal), hard to classify or one of a kind software. I may be forgetting some that would fit here…

Dental practice software – a couple of them
Restaurant menu creation software (may have been MenuMaker)
UPS Worldship
wINDEX
Grammatik
Lotus Organizer
MS Project
Brother’s Keeper
Family Tree Maker
WavePad
Lyris (music program)
iTunes
Winamp
Nero Wave Editor
Automap Streets
Google Earth
Lantastic
Norton Utilities
PC Tools
Norton Ghost
FMS (Franchisee Management System) for PDA (Property Damage Appraisers)
ADP automotive estimating software
Mitchell’s estimating software

The dental stuff is from free advice to my dentist, and a look at her new system when she got it, and evaluation of dental software for another dentist my partner didn’t quite manage to land as a small client. I’m not counting the quick showing off of their new (a few years ago) wireless data entry system my doctor showed me, which I also read about. Very cool, and now they’re going completely paperless as far as patient charts.

The menu software was on a machine I replaced for a restaurant owner, so I installed it on the new one and got to play with it a little.

I’ve encountered UPS Worldship in a couple of places. While in one I mainly just installed and configured it, in another it was a major troubleshooting exercise in the office in the client’s warehouse when it wouldn’t work properly.

wINDEX was an old DOS program for creating book indexes. I got to play with that years ago when a friend was contributing to her family’s income by doing indexes, which frequently used to be farmed out to people like her working from home.

I bought Grammatik as part of a package along with WordStar 5.0, and found it a highly entertaining early effort at grammar-checking. Considering how long ago that was, and that grammar checking still doesn’t work, almost but not quite to the point of uselessness, it was a surprisingly good effort. Ironically, a grammar checker is most needed by someone who can’t write, but people who can’t write have a harder time knowing when the software is being silly and ought to be ignored.

Lotus Organizer wasn’t, IIRC, also an e-mail program like Outlook, but more of a standalone calendar an PIM. I liked it a lot, though never used it heavily myself.

If I recall correctly, the main reasons I ever looked at MS Project were curiosity, and because a customer was trying to use OLE (COM) automation of it from a VB program. Come to think of it, I may also have helped my brother-in-law, who had actual uses for it.

Brother’s Keeper for DOS and Family Tree Maker are my dabbles with genealogy software, mainly the former. One of my colleagues in VB support was trying to write his own, which I thought was cool, and got some help from me. I still use Brother’s Keeper, and only recently learned that it still exists as a product and now has a well-regarded Windows version.

Naturally I have used or played with or helped with various music and sound players, creators and editors. I find that kind of thing especially cool, which makes me eager to see my brother get the computer and gear he needs to do his own basic recording, editing, and music CD creation.

I love maps! I used to buy and hang wall maps in my room. I love atlases and globes. Google Earth has mostly superceded it, but I was a huge fan of Microsoft’s Automap Streets. I’ve owned a couple different versions, dating back to when I had a discount available.

Lantastic should probably have gone under the online and communications part of things, and may yet fall under a partially duplicative server and networking post. I knew it inside-out when I did support Tranti POS systems. On one level it made sense to use an off-the-shelf network solution to link the machines. It ended up being a problem, as there were just enough issues with it to create bad situations over which they had no control. If your 50 ohm terminator was bad, we could replace that. If something funky with Lantastic or the environment made one of your drivethru order station stay in an “off” state when the rest of the system registered an “on” state… that was ugly.

Which also leads me to note that besides legal software, other specialty or oddball software not included here is the above, timeclocks, accounting-related, call center software, and things I wrote or was involved in creating.

Aw heck, I’m going to add a couple of orphans to the list before I’m done. I’ve used at least a couple of incarnations of Norton Utilities. I used to swear by PC Tools. I think I used at least two versions of that, also. There may have been other such utilities. Certainly other utilities, anyway, including some things Microsoft eventually incorporated into the OS, or things too obscure to mention, like disk copying software. Ooh, make that three things. I’ve also fought with Norton Ghost. Which should probably have gone in a different section; I just happened to remember it now. There’s just been too much for me to remember it all. This is meant to be a “mostly” overview, making clear the scope and range of experience, not an exhaustive list. I also have no plans to include games anywhere, though getting some of those to work at times has given me some of my best challenges.

Update May 7, 2007 – Added FMS, which I mentioned in passing under databases, then forgot to include here (or under accounting, which would also be valid). Also added the two automotive estimating software packages I have supported. Amazing I’d forget them. There were some other utilities used in the same office, like one for dialing a service with salvage yard pricing and parts availability, but they were less significant and I don’t remember their names.

Experience Posts (links to reposts):

Intro to Experience Dump
Hardware Experience
OS Experience
Word Processing Experience
Spreadsheets and Accounting
Graphics and Presentations
Database and RDBMS
Dictation Software
Communications, Internet, PDA, Blogging
Legal Industry Software
Backup and Compression Software
Miscellaneous Software
Security, Spam, Malware…
Call Center and Tech Support Tools
Languages and Programming Tools
Server Software
Software Creation

Employment and College
Experiences and Accomplishments Scratchpad

Originally posted April 20, 2007, now archived here.

For further explanation why this post exists, see Intro to Experience Dump. This is the section for backup, compression and associated or related software. It was going to be the various backup software only, then I realized that burning a CD and using something like Winzip are related things, and it would reduce the size of the “and other utilities” category. I may be forgetting some that would fit here, but you get the idea…

Microsoft Backup
ARCserve
Retrospect
Veritas Backup Exec
Stomp PC Backup
PKZip
Winzip
NERO Burning ROM
Adaptec/Roxio
Stacker

Stomp and my first look at Retrospect were help with evaluations or troubleshooting by my partner for someone he had as a personal client without putting them through the business. The big client used ARCserve from way back, original under Novell. Later they switched to Veritas backup Exec, which I liked even better and which, at least at the time, had a reputation as best of its kind. The people we outsourced their upgrade to last fall completely ignored the presence of the infinitely superior Backup Exec, replacing it with Retrospect, now an EMC product, which gave me some experience fighting with it and trying to puzzle out how anybody could have created such an obscure maze of unusability.

I used to be able to make PKZip dance and sing, and even resisted Winzip for a while. Eventually I bought five Winzip licenses to reward them for being so good and useful. I don’t recall ever using a Winzip competitor, but I did do a support call once with a guy who told me his product competed with them.

NERO is my favorite CD burning software. I found it entertaining when Microsoft adopted Roxio as the native software for XP and made sure NERO as packaged with CD burners wouldn’t work. The archiving and CD burning computer at the big client still has Adaptec software, which works just fine. That machine has a fancy SCSI Plextor burner in it, which added over $200 to the cost of the machine back when ordinary CDRWs had already fallen below $100.

Putting Stacker into this list is a bit of a stretch, but I did use it heavily in its heyday, and was entertained by the whole Doublsespace/Drivespace thing. I never used Stacker or anything similar again after it killed my original 60 MB MFM drive, which was cannibalized out of my Packard-Bell 286 to build my original 386. I still have the corpse of the 286, the 386, which probably still runs, the MFM drive, the MFM controller, and I think I may have bought a replacement MFM controller in case that was ever the problem. I had a grand scheme of making the 286 work again, as original equipment as possible, as a “museum piece” of sorts. Heck, I still have the Color Computer 3, which as far as I know is primarily afflicted by partial failure of the external floppy drive. I loaned it to my brother for a while, circa 1989 or 1990, and he had fun but it wouldn’t write to disks. Ah, the other problem was it stopped sending a video signal to my old 13″ black and white TV, which apparently had more to do with the TV or the splitter box than with the computer. But I digress.

Experience Posts (links to reposts):

Intro to Experience Dump
Hardware Experience
OS Experience
Word Processing Experience
Spreadsheets and Accounting
Graphics and Presentations
Database and RDBMS
Dictation Software
Communications, Internet, PDA, Blogging
Legal Industry Software
Backup and Compression Software
Miscellaneous Software
Security, Spam, Malware…
Call Center and Tech Support Tools
Languages and Programming Tools
Server Software
Software Creation

Employment and College
Experiences and Accomplishments Scratchpad

Originally posted April 18, 2007, now archived here.

For further explanation why this post exists, see Intro to Experience Dump. This is the section for legal industry software. It’s less likely I am forgetting things than in some other sections, but it remains possible.

West Publications Premise
West Publications LawDesk
Lexis-Nexis
Loislaw
Shepard’s Citations
Couch on Insurance
Wintitle
FRED.net
Winlaw
Prometheus
Amicus Attorney
Legal Files
AbacusLaw
Lawyer’s Diary PC Edition
Turbolaw

Naturally I’ve worked with the legal research and associated software, mainly Premise 3.72 and 4.0. I helped with evaluation of Lexis-Nexis and Loislaw research.

Wintitle and FRED.net are associated with real estate practice.

Lawyer’s Diary PC edition incorporates and expands upon the content of the annual bound Lawyer’s Diary. Most people prefer the book, but some are avid about the extra features in the (rather oddly designed, IMHO) software. They make it such a pleasure to update a network installation, I look forward eagerly to doing so twice a year, much as I look forward to root canals and such.

I once had lunch with the guys behind Turbolaw. It’s a package centering around templates and automation of Word and Excel to populate the appropriate forms you’d file in certain types of cases, like family law (divorce) and worker’s comp. One attorney needed it. I noticed the name of the company was Promethean Software, and I mentioned to them that we were working on law firm software named, or at least codenamed, Prometheus, so their name caught my eye. That led to a lunch meeting up in Fitchburg between a few of them, me, and my partner who was primarily responsible for Prometheus, and the name. At first, on the phone, one of them thought the name was no big deal. Later they asked us not to use it, to avoid confusion. Oddly enough, despite some of us not having cared for ‘Prometheus,” and people jokingly referring to it as “Promiscuous,” we never did come up with a catchier name. We showed them some printouts of screens as it stood then, and talked about what it would do. They were terrified by it, because had we wanted, our product could easily have incorporated the functionality of their less comprehensive but more specialized product. There was some discussion of sending them a beta to play with when it was ready, and doing joint marketing of the two products. That would have been a huge boost. Subsequently my partner stopped working on it for a while, then started over from scratch.

Which brings me to the whole case/document manager thing. We did some evaluation of products in the genre, which is part of what led to Prometheus, as we thought we could do it better. Which when the iron was hot might have been true.

Winlaw was the reason we even knew about such things. Winlaw was software by a company named The Counsell Group, or TCG, which eventually dotcommed itself into being Breakaway Solutions and then defunct. The big client hired TCG to create Winlaw, as apparently nothing available “off the shelf’ at the time would do. TCG had plans to make a version for wider sale, and even trademarked the name Winlaw to reserve it for legal software purposes. It’s a great name, especially when you consider it dates back to the days of prefixing software names with “Win” being all the rage.

There were problems. Mainly the problem was that it was a VB3 app using a shared Access 1.0 database as the backend. Access data was never meant to be shared by 40 – 50 users. It locked. A lot. To the point of being down something like 45 minutes per day per user.

We were hired to fix it. The client settled with the original vendor and got full and unfettered ownership of the code for the purpose. We improved performance, ported it to VB5 and later VB6, migrated them to SQL Server as the real way to eliminate any locking, and had it stable since the beginning of 1999. Subsequently we added a utility to enforce data gathering about each case at the time it closed. I improved the user interface, made it so some defaults could be set, made it so searching could be done for exact or “like” (wildcard) matches, and that sort of thing. I also discovered and fixed a longstanding bug in the original code, whereby it could and did, fortunately rarely, overwrite a document with a new document of the same not-quite-random name. I also wrote a separate utility that could copy all the documents for a case to a specified location, or archive them, which was the same except for deleting the documents from the server if it copied them successfully.

My partner got it the majority of the way done, then decided it would be far better to write an all new program. We would offer the client a version specific to them to satisfy the project requirements, but also be able to market a generic release to other firms. That was Prometheus. The first incarnation of it, largely complete, was used by a couple people in a small firm. They stopped using it only because it was overly oriented toward the types of cases the big firm handled, and was overkill for them. When I pushed for a more complete version because we had someone else wanting to use it, who would test it more effectively, my partner quickly created a new (admittedly improved) but similarly undercooked version of Prometheus. I managed to clean up some loose ends and make it installable, so we had six people using it for a couple years. The main problem ended up being that it couldn’t handle PDF files, and I couldn’t rapidly enough make it do so.

It remains kind of cool, but simple compared to most of the case/document/practice management software out there. I had wanted to put out a basic version, even just as freeware/shareware, just as basic document management for anyone. That never happened, but it might.

Besides Winlaw and Prometheus, I have actually supported Amicus Attorney, which didn’t impress me. I’ve played with Abacus, and possibly others I’m forgetting. Legal Files is the excellent, if somewhat complicated, product the big client is moving to from Winlaw. I helped them decide on it. I’ve played with a demo version and worked with the sales and development people there on migrating data and documents from Winlaw.

Have I forgotten any legal-oriented software? Probably. I didn’t forget Juris and its associated apps, which are under spreadsheets and accounting. Other software, like Quicken, isn’t legal-specific and I dealt with in other than law firm environments. If anything comes to mind, I’ll update.

Experience Posts (links to reposts):

Intro to Experience Dump
Hardware Experience
OS Experience
Word Processing Experience
Spreadsheets and Accounting
Graphics and Presentations
Database and RDBMS
Dictation Software
Communications, Internet, PDA, Blogging
Legal Industry Software
Backup and Compression Software
Miscellaneous Software
Security, Spam, Malware…
Call Center and Tech Support Tools
Languages and Programming Tools
Server Software
Software Creation

Employment and College
Experiences and Accomplishments Scratchpad

Originally posted April 17, 2007, now archived here.

For further explanation why this post exists, see Intro to Experience Dump. This is the communications and internet related section. It probably leaves off various modem dialing software I’ve forgotten, but remains a long list covering a ton of ground. I considered breaking it down further, but what the heck. In no particular order (actually, I’m attempting to group things logically), the list as best I can remember…

Blue Wave offline reader
Wildcat!
Procomm
Various modem software
Various fax software

Outlook
Outlook Express
Thunderbird
MS Mail
Exchange client
Lotus cc:Mail
Lotus Notes
Eudora

Exchange Server
Ipswitch Mail Server
Internet Information Server
NSlookup

Internet Explorer
Lynx
Firefox
Safari
Netscape Navigator
AOL software

FTP Explorer
Cute FTP
Filezilla

Webex
PC Anywhere
Remote Desktop Connection

FrontPage
w.bloggar
pMachine
Wordpress
Expression Engine
Movable Type
phpBB

Blackberry software
Various Palm and other PDA/cell phone utilities
Microsoft phone software

AOL Instant Messenger
MSN Messenger
Yahoo Messenger
Google Chat

Arrow mailing list software
Lyris List Manager
Mailman

Wow! You got that all? Basically it’s miscellaneous early stuff, e-mail clients (dedicated or multipurpose), server stuff and utilities, web browsers, FTP clients, remoting tools, blogging tools and web page editors, handheld and phone stuff, and chat software. Added later, it includes mailing list software too. There are undoubtedly things I don’t remember, even apart from what’s covered under “various…” whatever entries. For instance, I know I used DNS tools on the same dedicated server that had Ipswitch mail, but I couldn’t tell you what that was called. I’ve used other utilities of that sort, and also you wonder when is it networking and when is it internet or communications related. Now for some details and history, which promises to be somewhat lengthy.

I wanted to get a modem for my Color Computers, but it would have plugged into the same funky slot used for the overpriced external floppy drive, making it kind of hard to run the computer at the same time I connected to one of the numerous local BBS numbers the anomalous (and short-lived) clueful guy at Radio Shack gave me. My first modem went in my first 386 instead. As I recall, that was 1200 baud, followed shortly by a 2400 my mother got me for Christmas. I knew a guy who ran a BBS in Boston named Tangent. I became addicted to that, which already included people I knew. He got UUCP feeds of newsgroups, including the VB and Robert Jordan ones at my request, and of course was on Fidonet. I checked out other boards, but mainly that was home.

Through that, my very first internet e-mail address ever was @tangent.shore.net, before he got a domain. Unrealized by me at the time, my second e-mail address was @microsoft.com, via Microsoft Mail, through which we were directly on their mail system, even though we were outsourced. Ultimately Tangent got a domain, vader.com, so my first non-work, non-subdomained e-mail address was there, using the same alias I use for blogging. I posted a lot on the comp.lang.basic.visual.misc newsgroup, in the heyday of a guy named Jens Balchen, along with some other regulars. Probably a little weird to work all day supporting VB, then post free answers for people, but I’m a geek. I specialized in setup wizard and app distribution, and in automation of Word from VB apps, so I tended to latch onto those posts. My very first web browsing was through the BBS, too, via the Lynx text browser.

In a way, the first killer e-mail and newsgroup app for me was Blue Wave. Even on a dialing plan that made Boston free, occupying the phone line ad nauseum wasn’t always a Good Thing. An offline reader was perfect, and it was a great program. I wrote in praise of Blue Wave in a team newsletter I published (and ended up writing most of) when I was in Word support. Somewhere I probably still have floppies full of QWK packets I saved for future reference, though I eventually recycled many such floppies for other uses.

I never ran a BBS myself, but I got a copy of Wildcat and played with it wistfully, which helped me understand the sysop side of things even better. By the time I might have been thinking of hosting a BBS, I got on the internet proper. My first ISP was a fly by night named Nexus, and my first e-mail address via my very own ISP was @nexuswww.com. That company closed without notice and walked away with about five months I had prepaid. I turned to a more stable outfit then, ICI, and was with them or their successors from… that must have been 1996… until early 2004, and then for another year or two as a backup ISP for work, and finally I am still with them on an e-mail account only basis, eleven years later.

But I think this qualifies as digression, even as detailed and history-recounting as I mean for these posts to be.

The e-mail clients are almost self-explanatory. When I was at Corporate Software/Stream, we used cc:Mail internally, and eventually that switched to Lotus Notes Mail. We used Lotus Notes all along, for other things. I was at the periphery of some actual Notes database work one of my colleagues did, though I don’t recall doing that myself. Nobody liked Notes mail. We also used MS Mail, while we were still directly on Microsoft’s mail system. Eventually that was pulled. Then later still, when customers expected to e-mail us things @microsoft.com, we again got Microsoft addresses, routed through and administered by the Mail and Exchange support team. I believe that was when we used Exchange client. I know I used it at some point.

I’ve used Outlook Express extensively, Outlook some, and tried Thunderbird a couple of times. I helped someone with Eudora. I’ve supported Outlook extensively, mainly 98 and 2003.

As mentioned, Ipswitch (IMail) was both what I used for webmail at one time, and what I administered for a year on a dedicated server. Later I got the big client on the internet, via four channels of a T-1 that was otherwise used for phone service, and setup e-mail to go through their proxy server to Exchange. I installed and administered Exchange 5.5, IIS, proxy server, set them up to use Outlook Web Access. Later I got other clients online through DSL, and one of them on Exchange under Small Business Server 2003. I’ve recently done some of the administration of Exchange 2003 for the big client.

I mentioned Lynx. Naturally I’ve used IE. I preferentially use Firefox. I swear I remember using Safari once, can’t remember exactly where, and think it must have been on the Apple laptop of a graphic designer/marketing person I worked with on the big client’s web site design. Which means I’ve used more than just the two Macs eons ago I mentioned under hardware. I don’t think I have used Opera, but I could possibly have tried that or other browsers. Oh! I have used Netscape Navigator, come to think of it (he exclaims, scrolling up to add it to the list, which just wasn’t big enough already). I’ve actually supported AOL hands-on for people, which is why that is on the list. Always exciting.

I am a command line FTP person going way back. I still resort to it sometimes, depending what I’m doing and whether there is a decent client handy. To do something like upload every file for a new WordPress install efficiently, you want something like Filezilla. Not FTP Explorer, which tends to “forget” files if you have it do an upload that includes files in subdirectories. For one or a few files, command prompt works great. At least, it does if you’ve long since learned all the basic commands and can whip them out and employ them any time.

I’ve used PC Anywhere off and on since 1993. Host was loaded on the primary workstation POS on the Tranti systems, and we could call in using PC Anywhere Remote. That was used more from home, given the limited PC resources we had available at the office.
I also used it to administer a dedicated server, and in helping with computer support for my father’s business.

With Webex, on the other hand, I have only been on the receiving end, working with Juris support on a major problem that after tens of hours of my time turned out to be an obscure file version mismatch. It’s cool. As is remote desktop connection, which I’ve employed recently, enabling me to do almost everything from home that I’d have gone on site for before.

I created my first personal web site in 1996 or 1997, and have maintained a business site since 1997. While I’ve naturally learned some HTML and such over the years, I always found FrontPage handy. Even if I’m using blog software, it can be handy for prototyping or comparing color combinations.

Obviously I blog. I’ve used Blogger, which isn’t listed, and the other blogging systems that are. I most recommend WordPress or Expression Engine. This is the item that particularly made me wonder if I should divide this up, as I could mention details about my blogging experience. However, what that really means is that I should tout things like running Carnival of the Capitalists in a later section that doesn’t center around a software/online tool list and elaboration thereon. I added phpBB to the bog list because a while back I made an extensive but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to help another blogger fix problems with it.

Did you know Microsoft once made phones, and voicemail software used on your computer in conjunction with them? Yup! I bought that system sometime after moving to Quincy and ran it on my old Pentium 200, which I replaced in 1999 with a P3 500, which wasted no time in frying completely – worst computer failure I’ve ever had, personally, and maybe the worst I’ve encountered at all – and being replaced by the P3 1000 I am typing at now. I’d still have it if the phone portion hadn’t died. It was pretty cool. At one point I figured out how to get WAV files of people’s messages out of temporary files to keep them for posterity.

I’ve helped various people with cell phone synchronization, and done a lot of installing Palm desktop software and helping people with it. It was years ago I first supported a Blackberry. One attorney bought a used Blackberry and got the service such that she could have e-mails forward out to it if she left her computer and Outlook running. I filtered it so she’d get only the most important stuff. It may have been that experience that led me to get a Blackberry myself last year. Price probably didn’t hurt. Luckily mine is direct, not relying on slinging e-mail back out from my computer as it arrives. I synchronize my Outlook tasks and calendar, and my Outlook Express contacts. Addiction is a terrible thing.

I’ve used the various chat programs, speaking of addictive. I’ve actually broken the habit long since. It was too easy to be interrupted by people you might not have wanted to know you were at your computer. I later started an AIM account specifically for support, then never used it. I think such a thing has potential, so we’ll see.

One of my friends and former colleagues discovered that MSN Messenger exposed an object model through which it could be automated with VB code. To a degree, anyway. I recently made the same discovery about iTunes. I was whipping together a simple program to automate restoration of archived documents (batch file does the work, but the software builds the batch file, rather than a lot of copy, paste, edit, replace trickery), so it would take me a few hours rather than, say, twenty. I briefly tossed in code to launch iTunes and start playing the default list, just for the sake of curiosity. Anyway, I helped a little with the MSN automation, and trying to fix it once Microsoft broke it by changing the object model drastically. That was helpful of them, and I don’t believe we ever succeeded.

Finally, there are mailing lists. I have run a mailing list for former colleagues in Visual Basic support for upwards of seven years. For a while I ran one for former Access support people, and one for job hunting, to share both positions available and wanted, share advice on resumes, etc. I forget what tool I was using on the original web host, where e-mail was Ipswitch IMail. Later I had an overpriced 64k partial T-1 connection in the office. I checked out Lyris, but it was Linux-oriented and wasn’t going to work for me. I found an excellent, easy to use list software called Arrow and ran that on an old P90 with NT, right in the office. Eventually I ended up using Mailman, associated with the web hosting. I use the same thing for the Carnival of the Capitalists mailing list.

I guess that’s it. I still wonder if maybe I ought have divided this section into smaller bits. Or perhaps explained it less. And this doesn’t count whatever I’ve forgotten…

Experience Posts (links to reposts):

Intro to Experience Dump
Hardware Experience
OS Experience
Word Processing Experience
Spreadsheets and Accounting
Graphics and Presentations
Database and RDBMS
Dictation Software
Communications, Internet, PDA, Blogging
Legal Industry Software
Backup and Compression Software
Miscellaneous Software
Security, Spam, Malware…
Call Center and Tech Support Tools
Languages and Programming Tools
Server Software
Software Creation

Employment and College
Experiences and Accomplishments Scratchpad

Originally posted April 13, 2007, now archived here.

For further explanation why this post exists, see Intro to Experience Dump. This is the dictation related section. This is a short category. In no particular order, the list as best I can remember…

Dragon Naturally Speaking
IBM Via Voice
L&H Voice Express
Phillips handheld dictation/transcription software

There may have been other software that would fit this category, but these are the big three voice recognition products, plus the one digital device and its associated software I am currently supporting.

Voice recognition software is of special interest to me dating back to 1984 or 1985. For my major we had to take two computer science classes, plus a “data processing” class that fell under the Management Science department rather than the Math department. At the time, the class was a relatively basic “all about computers.” Which was pretty weird, because most management students were taking a very similar computer class offered just for them by the computer science people, then taking BASIC. A semester or two after I took it, they got PCs, courtesy of a donation from Shaw’s Supermarkets in thanks for a big study done for them by the marketing students, and the class changed completely. They taught segments on Lotus 1-2-3, some word processor, I believe some other packaged software, and some elementary RPG (Report Program Generator) stuff. Which I might not have known, but I actually helped a couple of classmates with their work for that class, even though I had never taken it or learned the stuff myself. Classic me. When I took the class, we had a great professor named George Ladino, who not long after left to work in “high tech.” Which seemed to me the thing I might want to do, but I thought I’d always be behind the curve and never have adequate qualifications, connections or whatever. Heh.

Given my terror of speaking before a group such as a class, it is particularly notable that he required us each to do a presentation to the class on an assigned topic. Mine was voice recognition. After all, computers were getting all advanced and stuff by then, so why should Scotty have to settle for quaintly typing. Talking your computer down from the ledge had to be right around the corner.

That was how I learned about Ray Kurzweil, the work he was doing, along with the work IBM was doing, and how tricky an exercise it was. The fascinating subject helped ease the pain of public speaking, to the extent that was possible.

Flash forward to 1998. Well, sometime before then, really, when I first saw Dragon being promoted at computer shows and thought here was the eventual result of all that early work on voice recognition. In 1998, though, when we first connected with the big client, they’d been dabbling with voice software. Several of the attorneys had Pentium 200 machines, for which they’d seriously overpaid, with Windows 95 and awful no-name sound cards, on the idea they would dictate using IBM Via Voice. Between the hardware, the state of the software at the time, and the natural dragging of heels that never stopped, that didn’t go over so well.

They were still interested in the idea. At least, the more tech savvy people were, though the owner, who never participated until recently, had been partially behind the original push. He dreamed of paperlessness from way back, before it was remotely as possible as now. It’s a schizophrenic dichotomy, bouncing between grand vision and revulsion at spending to even get part way there.

It was the desire of some to dictate using voice recognition software, and the clear failure of the earlier software and hardware at the task, that prompted them even to think about starting to replace computers in 1999. There were computers that were obsolete in 1999, the last of which was not retired once and for all until November 2006. The last retiree was replaced by a machine that had been new in 1999 and was obsolete in 2006, but hey…

In early 1999 we purchased Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred 3.0, and the corresponding current versions of IBM Via Voice and Lernout & Hauspie Voice Express. We and a couple of the lawyers tested them. Dragon won, no contest. It wasn’t even close. As I recall, IBM was the next best option. Varying numbers of people have used Dragon ever since; 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 8.0 and now 9.0, which is as astonishingly good as the reviews say it is. If I didn’t type so fast, I would want to use it. Sometimes I think about it even so. It’s been one of the things I’ve supported all this time, though it’s required minimal support. Usually the problem is that sound quality goes and there are ways to test and only so many things it can be. Headsets and microphones die or get frayed cables. Sound cards die, if rarely, and these days the sound is usually integrated into the motherboard and is both adequate and stable. User profiles get corrupt and new ones have to be created, much as it sucks to lose all the training you’ve done. That kind of thing. Windows Sound Recorder can give an idea how the hardware is working. It’s so big now that installation can be fun, and the hardware needs are great. Dragon 9.0 won’t run on Vista, so you have to download a major update. That’s how I came to support Vista without having actually used it myself yet.

Who knew that a tiny category list would generate so much commentary and history.

Experience Posts (links to reposts):

Intro to Experience Dump
Hardware Experience
OS Experience
Word Processing Experience
Spreadsheets and Accounting
Graphics and Presentations
Database and RDBMS
Dictation Software
Communications, Internet, PDA, Blogging
Legal Industry Software
Backup and Compression Software
Miscellaneous Software
Security, Spam, Malware…
Call Center and Tech Support Tools
Languages and Programming Tools
Server Software
Software Creation

Employment and College
Experiences and Accomplishments Scratchpad

Originally posted April 13, 2007, now archived here.

For further explanation why this post exists, see Intro to Experience Dump. This is the database/RDBMS (relational database management system… or is it software?) related section. It’s particularly important to see the initial commentary/caveats following the list, for this category. In no particular order, the list as best I can remember…

PC File
Paradox
Access
MSDE
Microsoft SQL Server
Sybase SQL Server
MySQL
DB2
Oracle
bTrieve
dBase
FoxPro
Lotus Approach
Microsoft Query

Some of the above items are there because I have direct and even extensive experience. Others are there because I supported the use of the product or database format programatically, mainly from Visual Basic, and had some degree of associated training. So, for instance, the presence of Oracle or DB2 on the list does not imply I could jump into a hardcore DBA job with one of those products. I have also left out some of the incidental data sources that can be used programatically or with Word mail merges, including Word, Excel, and text formats, be they CSV, tab separated, or fixed field width.

I believe my first database experience was with PC File, by shareware pioneer Jim Button’s ButtonWare. It was used circa 1990/1991 on my 286 to administer and print mailing labels from the Arisia database as it existed at the time.

When I worked at Tranti Systems, I got a taste of Paradox, which was a hot skill half the people there seemed to be trying to learn at the time in hopes of getting better jobs.

Later I worked with people who supported Microsoft Access, and have used most versions of it myself. Because of the limitations of SQL Server 6.5, I use Access with attached SQL tables for administrative ease. I’ve supported and trained clients in using it the same way to query their data in both SQL Server (Winlaw) and bTrieve (Juris Classic). I helped my partner create a custom billing “program” in Access (at the time and for the desired results it seemed easier than VB with an Access backend). I also helped him to a lesser extent with a similar but less complex Access database/app for tracking employee vacation time. The lack of something just like Access was for me the main failing of earlier versions of Star/Open Office.

My main server database experience has been with Microsoft SQL Server, from the standpoint of having installed, reinstalled, configured, administered, etc. Besides having accessed, or helped others access, data on it programatically or via other front ends.

MySQL I know manly from blogs, and having gotten into the admin tools to do queries, export data, even do mass cleanups.

MSDE is sort of where Access intersects SQL Server. I used that for distributing at a test site a beta version of a case/document management software, codenamed Prometheus, that will likely never be completed. At least not in its intended form. Personally, I could use it to manage my own documents, and have thought about releasing a shareware version, or open-sourcing the code as it stands. I also supported MSDE as used by the newer, Windows versions of Juris until the 2 GB size limit became a factor.

bTrieve used to be an inexplicably popular backend for applications. Besides supporting the use of it with VB, it was used in Juris Classic and a program called FMS (Franchisee Management System) by Property Damage Appraisers, both of which I’ve supported. I believe it was used in some aspect of Tranti Systems 2100. Or something at the company; I clearly remember it being around, if not any specific unpleasant experiences with it.

I worked with people who supported FoxPro, so got a little exposure that way and through VB/Fox interactions calls. More recently, I dealt with Fox in the form of a couple of FoxPro-based applications, one more raw than the other. One was a custom order entry system. I did a little brief support of it, helped migrate the server side from Novell to Windows 2003, and helped make sure it ran after the workstations were upgraded to XP. The other was Wintitle, a program used in real estate closings, in which the Fox aspect was mainly useful in understanding its peculiarities.

In VB support I was never what you would call a “database person.” I got by. Similar to my emphasis on good user interface design, my big thing is proper relational database design. It’s surprising how often you run into poor design, even from people who are supposed to be experts. It’s one of those little things that stick out like a sore thumb to me, bothering me all out of proportion. I’ve never been as clear as could be on the distinctions between different join statements, but if you name your tables and fields funny, if you aren’t clear on your one to many foreign keys, and your many to many linking tables, that sort of thing, I will notice.

Let’s see, what’s next? Probably e-mail, communications and internet-related software. Then it gets weird; utilities, specialty stuff, small categories. Which stands to entail less listing and more narrating. Not that the above wasn’t excess narrating…

Experience Posts (links to reposts):

Intro to Experience Dump
Hardware Experience
OS Experience
Word Processing Experience
Spreadsheets and Accounting
Graphics and Presentations
Database and RDBMS
Dictation Software
Communications, Internet, PDA, Blogging
Legal Industry Software
Backup and Compression Software
Miscellaneous Software
Security, Spam, Malware…
Call Center and Tech Support Tools
Languages and Programming Tools
Server Software
Software Creation

Employment and College
Experiences and Accomplishments Scratchpad