There’s an aphorism out there (amongst people fond of aphorisms) claiming that “me-ware” is the most common kind of new software in the small-business software industry.

The best source control systems are written by people who, themselves, need source control.

The best photo-editing software is written by people with a passion for photography.

You get the idea.

And I tend to agree. Me-ware is probably the most prevalent model for the development of new software by small (read: tiny) software companies.

As for myself (among numerous other things), I have a passion for poker.

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Hey, sorry for the last few days of silence.

I don’t know if you could tell from my most recent posts, but I’ve been on vacation for the last week and a half. During most of that time, I did a reasonable job about hanging out with family during the day, and then posting to the blog in the wee hours of the night.

Over the last few days, I was just too overwhelmingly busy (and tired) to make it happen.

But I’m getting back home tonight. So we’ll return to your regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

In some of the comments to my AI-Coder idea, people said they’d rather have the game engine implemented in .Net than in Java. And they’ve made a good point.

Even though I think Java’s a great language, the CLR is a pretty compelling platform as well. There are dozens of different languages that compile to the CLR, and only a handful of languages that compile to the JVM.

But what if “Java bytecode” could be treated as a language that could be compiled for the CLR? And what if CLR assemblies could be compiled for the JVM?

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If you’ve ever shopped at Amazon.com, you’re probably familiar with the many up-selling and cross-selling features of the Obidos ecommerce platform. Amazon frequently lets you know:

• Which similar products were actually purchased, instead of the current item.
• Which other products were commonly purchased, in addition to the current item.
• Which products were highly rated by other users who purchased products which you have rated highly.

If the Amazon recommendations system (read this paper if you’re interested in the clever mechanics of it) fails to find any products that interest you, then you probably have very esoteric tastes in books, movies, music, and kitchen appliances.

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Do you ever get frustrated working on CRUD applications all the time?

Have you been mired in mind-numbing HTML/CSS/JavaScript work for too long?

What ever happened to the interesting “science-y” aspects of computer science?

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Okay, now that my brother’s wedding is over, and my family members have redistributed themselves around the country, I can get back to the task at hand. I’ve get twenty-six more business ideas to write about over the next three weeks.

To get back in the groove of things I’ll start off with an easy one.

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My mom and dad arrived in Salt Lake City tonight in anticipation of this weekend’s nuptials (my little brother is tieing the knot), so I spent the evening hanging out with them rather then writing the fifth entry in my series of 30 business ideas.

(No worries: I’ve promised to meet my deadline.)

I thought you’d find this little nuggest entertaining, though:

Yesterday Peter Thomas published a ridiculous J2EE call-stack diagram from an enterprise application he’s been working on. If your head doesn’t instantly explode in a cloud of incredulity after looking at that image (and reading the comments from the readers of Peter’s blog), then perhaps I can interest you in purchasing a General-Purpose Tool-Building Factory Factory Factory.

If you download the PDF version of the stack-trace picture, and zoom waaaaaay in close, you can see that the “Business Logic” portion of this monstrosity is actually a storeItem() method call.

That’s right: more than eighty frames in the call-stack, just to insert a record into a database.

30 Days.

30 Ideas.

Was I out of my mind?

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There’s a small civil engineering firm in southern California that hires me occasionally to do some freelance software development. Their core business is the production of a really specialized kind of 3D visualization for large construction projects.

Before they can get started on one of their projects, they request a set of files from their clients: CAD drawings, survey data, seismic readings, etc. The client provides those resources, along with notes and annotations describing the contents of each file. In addition, they submit requests for special kinds of output files: paving plans, cut/fill contour maps, photo-realistic renderings.

You get the idea.

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A few years ago, I abandoned the simple folksy comfort of shared virtual web hosting in favor of VPS technology. A Virtual Private Server affords all of the luxuries of having one’s own linux box, with (nearly) the same low low cost of shared hosting. You get full root access, with the ability to compile and install whatever software you like, and you usually only pay thirty or forty bucks a month for it.

Ingenious.

When I signed up for my VPS account, I happily installed the latest versions of Apache, PHP, MySQL, Subversion, Perl, Python, Java, and so on. I’m a seasoned techie, and the whole thing was as smooth as butta. I was loving it.

Until the time came to set up my email.

And then I was sad. Very sad.

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