Well, firstly, I'd like to thank all those of you that have been chatting with me this week. As you may know, I have had a bout of chicken pox courtesy of my daughter, which has meant me not doing a lot. At one point in the week, Cath, my wife had to type for me as the blisters on my fingers were just too painful. The chat was most welcome! The good news is that I'm on the mend now.

This has surely been a record week as far as orders go! Luckily with Lightsoft being more than a one man operation, we have kept on top of all the orders (when I say we, I really mean poor old Rob who actually does them these days). Every time I go on line there's a new order waiting - it's great :-) Thank you to all of you. We are hitting a turn round time of 24-48 hours.

Our PC based "server" has arrived, along with necessary software, so we hope to have that up and running soonish - you won't believe this, but the current hold up is an rj45 cable - we simply can't get one - having said that, it's not as if I can go hunting at the moment anyway! See general chat for more on the "server".

Just before I fell ill, I got hold of a CD600e - what a great piece of kit! The joy of true plug and play! I must say that Apples CD Audio Player is probably one of the best pieces of software on the planet - it's just so elegant - well done to Edgar Lee, David H. Nelson and the rest of the team - superb job! Strange thing is, I could've got another makers CD player for about 40 pounds less, but chose Apples, simply because of the brand - I do believe it is worth paying more for Apple.

Another example of this: we are about to buy another PowerPC based computer - we have a choice of a Powercomputing box, or an Apple box. Now whilst the Power box may well offer "more" for the same price, we will be buying Apple, simply because you can't beat the quality. We are still using Elsie (LCII) which is yonks old, and slow, but it works. By buying Apple, are we wasting money? I don't think so. We work to a "life" of three years for our equipment - we know Apple will do it.

As an aside, I was watching a program on television the other night about music and the human brain - they suggested that music whilst working can add on up to 7 I.Q. points - does this mean we'll get less bugs now I have a CD? :-)

What do I listen too?
Old Marillion(Script, Garden Party, Market Square heroes) , Asia (Aqua - brill album), Deep Purple, Pink Floyd and Sky.

One last thing, I now work for Lightsoft full time, so from now on I have to be nice to the company :-)

It's busy. Currently I'm working on:
PF 4.04, fixing the bugs - no problem as it comes from the 402 source which was "frozen" on release as we didn't believe it would be 100% bug free (no software ever is, is it?). Luckily we stated that 4.03 was not an official release, so we don't need to worry about version problems, as the changes for 4.03 are really 4.10 stuff anyway.

Eddie for PowerFant v1.2 - again no probs as it comes from the 1.1 source, which came from the 1.00b66 source.

Preproc V0.1 - this is not the release preprocessor, but merely a quick (ha!) hack so we can get the compiler testing. This preprocessor was designed in late '93 so is woefully slow. I was actually getting a lot done in this area before falling ill, and was enjoying it! Having said that, the new preprocessor for the actual release version will be about my 15th parser - I mean a break from parsers would be nice sometime this century :-)

What does come home from all this is the enourmous amount of HD space this all takes up, as we must freeze the complete project on a release, and back up three ways, one of which is remote, so we never loose anything. It looks as if we'll be going for a gig on the server, which when mirrored actually needs 2 gigs. Hence a PCI scuzzy i/f with two 1 gig drives. A year ago, if I had been told we would expand this quickly I'd have laughed at you! The way Lightsoft has grown over the last two years has been frightening. The money we've spent on hardware is scary. We've always ploughed it all back in, which is how it should be. Just goes to show that the Mac is very viable as a business opportunity, so long as you are not afraid to make a go of it. I don't think it would work if we were not 100% commited to the company. There is a difference between weekend work, and full time, 14 hours a day. Having said that, we also get a lot of help from people outside the company - the server these pages are running on for example.

WARNING for those of you that like PeeCee's - skip this section!

Well, I guess I can talk about Macs and PC's here - in an unbiassed way, having played with this PC for over a week. Ok, so what good can I say about it? Um, well, lets see, ah, errrm, hang on, well, it wasn't the keyboard which feels like dead frogs skin, it wasn't the floppy drive that doesn't even know when you put a disk in it...it wasn't the mega speedy 19k2 serial ports....it wasn't the sound thats for sure...it wasn't the fact that I had to get the electric drill out to open the case of this expandable wonder...what was it?... Oh yes, it was cheap! I knew there had to be something :-)

Seriously, if we could run Novell on a Mac we would. Luckily, netware doesn't need DOS. I mean, how can people really like these slow, cranky machines? Is a DX2/66 supposed to be slow? I mean it has a 1MB PCI video card - should this scroll at half the rate Elsie can? Ah but hang on, maybe the hardware is ok, and it's the software thats slow? Lets install the server software - ah thats better! So it's windows thats slow then? Ok, so, if I'm correct it's faster to drop into DOS to move files about is it? Thought so. Goodbye.

So that was the extent of my playing. I would not like to have to work on one, let alone have to program on it. IDE drives are a joke right? Luckily by the time we're finished with it, it'll be a bit more useful - things like wiping windows off the HD for a start will help (please don't start me on Win95 -I couln't help wondering why, on my last netware course, the instructor referred to Win95 as a virus?), Installing a real scuzzy interface and serial card will also help - I thought the 16554 was supposed to be fast?

I was also under the impression that PC's were far more expandable than Macs - ok so lets look at the procedures - I want to install a network card right?
Mac - push two plastic buttons, remove case, lift up chassis, plug in card, lower chassis, plop case back on. Install driver from floppy by double clicking installer. In reality I don't have to do this as all modern Macs come with Ethernet built in :-)

PC - Find wonderful tool for removing torx screws (or alternatively drill the bastards out), unscrew three other philips screws. Prise case apart. Find empty ISA slot and untangle wiring from area. Plug in card, having first checked jumpers, dip switches and all kinds of paraphernalia. Find right driver on floppy, install it, reboot, repeat 16 times until correct IRQ and base address found (possibly/possibly not) - call tech support n times at credit card rates, finally get it working, then somehow figure out how to re-secure case. What a load of Bxllocks!

Anyway, you get the drift - I don't like them. No sane person would! However, we need it for the server, so here's the config we're using:
It's a dx2/66 with 8 meg of RAM. We're running two scuzzy drives, a Gig a piece as a single 1 gig volume - that way if one dies we loose nothing. We're throwing a 28k modem onto it for remote access and will be running Basic MHS on it, which will give us LAN mail and a bulliten board area. It'll be on it's own phone line, and hopefully we'll be able to open it to the public as we get it bedded down. It is directly connected to a 1 1/2 gig 7200 and Elsie via ethernet.

Hopefully this will happen in the next few weeks - obviously I'll keep you in touch with how it's going, cause it sure is funny!

We're starting to get a lot of orders from people who say "I've been watching your company for the last couple of months/years, and now feel confident enough to place an order.".

This we can sympathise with, we ourselves have seen companies come and go. They normally go due to two reasons - either they burn themselves out, or they get ripped off (The third reason of course, is that their software is "not good"). We have been approached by many "marketing" types, and have turned them all down pretty flatly - call it policy, but it works. Our aim is slow gradual growth, which it has always been, coupled with strong customer loyalty and repeat purchases/upgrades. We do realise that expanding too quickly can be crippling. The bank loans we have turned down is frightening, but we are proud of our standing - we owe nobody nothing (sic).

The world of high technology is frought with dangers, fashions and whims - you catch the fashion, you're laughing, you miss it, and you're dead in the water!
The current frenzy of Internet activity is a classic example - I mean, how many net browsers do we need? Which will win? Who cares? Do I want to download QT movies over a slow modem link? I don't think so. When I go "surfing" it is generally for information - I want it as quickly as possible. I don't want movies, 3d cubes, sound clips or any other WOW items.
Maybe what people are missing is that the underlying infrastructure of the net is designed for 7 bit A.S.C.I.I. text and not more fluid/dynamic forms of media. Until the architecture is changed, you can compress all you like, and are still stuck with 7 bit code, which is at least 1 bit short of where we need to be?
I think we'll see a lot of good, small developers, dying over this one...

Heck, I hate to end on a "downer", so I won't!
Having checked out the WWDC information on Copland and the MicroKernal, you have to hand it to Apple. Talk about having "big balls" - that is one major change. The MicroKernal is a classic MT OS, complete with the respective semaphores, queues and messaging architecture. We get protected spaces for "server" applications, and shared spaces for non-server apps. It's bloody marvellous - I just hope Apple pull it off, cause if they do, we'll blow WinTel away in one swoop (and our clocks will still be running at 00:00:01 on 1st January 2000 :-) ).