Screened out

I just tried very hard to purchase " ISO/IEC 42010 IEEE Std 1471-2000 Systems and software engineering - Recommended practice for architectural description of software-intensive systems"

I failed.

I need to join IEEE (How much does it cost? That information was not prominent on the home page), and pay further for digital subscriber privileges (How much does that cost?).

Given 40 years of hand-wringing about poor software construction practices, such document probably ought to be issued under a Creative Commons license.

System Modal

In the interest of outstanding user experiences, here are the guidelines Tinobox uses for employing system modal dialog boxes:

• Impending asteroid strike.


• Impending tsunami.

Yes, that's right, if we know you and your computer will be subject to these annoyances, we will certainly break your attention with a system modal dialog box. Otherwise, we assume you have better things to do than be annoyed by poorly designed software.

Java mini-rant

I wrote my first Java code in 1996. Really, I did. You can probably find the applet on the wayback machine. I even wrote a custom Fortran compiler to convert LAPACK to Java source code in 1997.

Eventually, I gave up Java as unworkable on the desktop, too slow in the browser, and too difficult on the server side (Tomcat ca. 1991 anyone? Ugh).

It's now 2008.

I have a choice: use the JRE, or listen to iTunes.

But not both at the same time.

Since I am sure this must be a user error, I'll have to put in a CD and get back to c++.