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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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What real users are saying about Windows 10

The Control Panel. Yes, the Control Panel. How is it possible for a final, shipped product (8, 8.1, and now 10) to have multiple versions of a single app (the Control Panel) where some options are in one version and other options are in the other? And the UIs of each are completely different.

At least the Control Panel vs Change PC Settings options are now no longer shown together in the same pop open Charms menu as they were in 8.x. I suppose at least in 8.x they put one at the top of the menu and the other at the bottom of the menu, like there was some discussion to keep them far apart because, oh I don’t know, because having two different links to two different Control Panels in the same menu might be confusing to users.

Anyway, so the bizarre charms menu is gone. The Metro Change PC Settings app from 8.1 is replaced with a new app in 10 with some snazzy looking icons. But wait.. the Windows 7 style Control Panel is still in Windows 10? With the the previous Windows 7 UI style? Wait, what? So there’s still 2 different Control Panels in 10? Microsoft please, get your design teams in the same room!

More other bizarre observations and pet peevs in this post over at The Register.

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