Category: Kev’s Blog

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Ars Technica: Connecting a TRS-80 model 100 to the internet

For some reason I find connecting any dial-up modem era computer or earlier to the internet rather interesting. Not because a computer this old would make a great device to use to surf the net, because of course it doesn’t. It’s a terrible user experience. This article therefore over at Ars Technica caught my attention, about connecting a TRS-80 model 100 laptop to the internet, using homebrew serial cable connections and various other technical noodlery to get working.

Maybe it was this intro to the article that got my attention:

The true test of a man’s patience is crimping pins onto the end of a cable that leads to building a custom serial cable—especially if it’s the first time you’ve even handled a serial cable in a decade.

Yep, been there recently. I posted a while back on G+ about connecting an Kantronics Packet Radio TNC (Terminal Network Controller) to my Atari 1040ST, for no other reason than at the time that this was the only computer I had available on my desk that still had an old school style DB25 serial port connector.

I’ve been shopping for a while to add network and/or SD Card disk support to my Atari ST, but still wondering if I really want to spend this much on adding support to something that I only tinker with occasionally? On my shopping list is either one of these or one of these, but maybe a better option would be one of these FPGA boards with support for a number of different hardware devices. This will probably give me more flexibility to tinker with a number of platforms. Choices choices. 🙂

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The Unavoidable Compromise of Business Driven Development

Given enough money, time, experience,  technical experience and creative input, time has shown as an industry we can build awesome things. Unless you’re working on a self-funded project with unlimited supplies of cash and time, it’s unlikely that most of us will ever have the experience of working with minimal or no resource constraints.

Software development in ‘the real world’ is really no different from any other business, and the concept of the Triple Constraint has been well understood in Project Management for some same. This describes the inter-relationship between 3 attributes of:

  • schedule
  • scope
  • cost

and how they interact to affect quality of the final product. At a high level, it’s generally understood that you can have ‘any two’ of these, but it’s impossible to have all three at the same time. Each of these attributes translates to desirable qualities of:

  • fast (deliver the product in less time)
  • good (include all desired features)
  • cheap (deliver at low cost)

So, you can have fast and good but it won’t be cheap, or you can have fast and cheap but it won’t meet all your requirements (some features will have to be left out).

So back to the original topic. How is software development a compromise? Invariably because your client or your company wants all these things: “we want it developed in an impossibly short amount of time (get it ready for tomorrow), we want this massive list of features (and no, we’re not prepared to leave any out), and oh by the way, we only have enough money to pay for 1 developer to work for 8 hours”.

While technology can go some way to helping produce more for less (code generation etc), the reality is that software development in the real world is not a technical problem. It is a business problem of negotiating contracts and managing expectations. For the technologist, this is the continual struggle – pretty much everything you work on will be under less than ideal conditions.

Business Driven Development (BDD). Welcome to the Real World.

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Windows 10 – is it ready?

Only a day away from Windows 10 starting to rollout on July 29th, and people are wondering whether it’s really ready for release or not, or as The Register puts it, Microsoft are still playing ‘whack-a-mole’ with bugs before the actual release: “A number of nagging bugs have cropped up in the last few days that have some Windows 10 testers scratching their heads at just how an OS this raw can be considered production-ready.”

But if we’re prepared to accept’s Microsoft’s concept of ‘Windows as a Service’, this is all perfectly ok, because you’ll be getting a continual stream of Windows Updates to patch all the issues after the first release is pushed out. I’m not sure how this differs from any other Microsoft release of any prior release of Windows, but ok then, if you say so.

So your release forecast for tomorrow is: extremely buggy, with a very good chance of patches released later in the day.

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