Stephen Witherden’s Website :: Software Development

I downloaded a nifty open-source tool the other day. It’s called FMA or Float’s Mobile Agent. It’s a lovely little tool which connects to your mobile phone through a bluetooth COM port and sucks all the data from your phone onto your computer. It’s great, I especially like the fact that it can tell the temperature of your phone!

Anyway, so it grabs all your meetings, contacts etc and then you want to synchronise with Outlook. I tried it, and it failed. Damnit! Damn stupid open source software I cursed fluidly. (more…)

Many of you know that I worked at a place called Cecil for quite some time. The source of a great deal of joy and a great deal of stress for me for quite a few years.

Leaving a position like that, in a job like that, part of you (the vindictive mean-spirited part of you) kind of hopes the whole place will fall apart without you. That somehow, without your incredible insight/skill/talent/charisma, the whole operation will grind to a screaming halt.

Of course, that didn’t happen, they soldiered on and seemed to go from strength to strength, I was almost offended when (in my absence) they started breaking all the “rules” I’d ever assumed about software development… (more…)

Ok, I have just recently discovered the inherent coolness that is the WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation). I whipped up this example to show some of the random stuff you can retrieve with it (be sure to “allow” the activeX to run, you trust me don’t you?).

Here be the sample

Isn’t that cool? Imagine what a hacker could get up to if they could just execute whatever old ActiveX they wanted on your local machine, hmmm?

Anyway, I hope to write a few more interesting examples in the near future. Hmmm, Imagine being able to turn on / off services or kill processes using nothing but scripts in a web page?

Update:

Ok, I couldn’t help myself, I whipped up this web based service manager (requires admin access of course): Service Manager.

You know how it is. As software developers we all know how dodgy software can be. There’s always the registry setting containing the admin password (yes, I’ve see this, but not at Beca), the hard-coded string required to get a particular component to work (seen that too), the thing that Allen does every morning to keep the web servers going (he used to run a batch file, bless his heart). I discovered another one of these today when diagnosing a problem in one of our vital systems.
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I have seen a number of different drivers for development endeavours:. Data driven, model driven and user interface driven. I believe that for the purposes of end user development, the interface driven development method is most appropriate. In fact, I think it is the most appropriate not only for end users but for the average application programmer as well.
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This is a common analogy to building software, I thought I would use it to draw a distinction between programmers, software architects, user interface designers and graphic designers.

These four groups of people represent four distinct skill sets. Let’s see how they do building a house.
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