“Green buttons?” you say? Eh? I was working on my own product, Distant Suns for Windows, and thought it would be cool to have some green, retro-type of buttons instead of the usual ugly Windows controls. So I spent about a day crafting some little green buttons only to realize that in the time spent making one window slightly cooler, I could have spent adding a real new feature or squash some real bugs. In other words: I wasted time doing...

I think about George at least once a week. George was a teacher. My advanced FORTRAN instructor from about <redacted> years ago to be precise. The reason why I think about this bearded, bespectacled aerospace engineer moonlighting as a community college instructor is that he taught me one of the most important lessons I ever learned in the process of becoming a full fledged software engineer. I had realized that my hopeful career in...

One of most fond memories of my dad were on my inauguration into teen-hood, my 13th birthday, in February 1969.  I don’t recall any of my gifts save for one. I opened up a card from dad, and it was a “ticket” to go out to Florida and see an Apollo launch. I had to choose one of two. The first was the May Apollo 10 mission, when dad was going back to Florida on business. He was planning on stopping by at the Cape and seeing the Apollo 10...

Were the space shuttle to have flown in 1939, it would have still been flying when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Think about it. The phrase “the end of an era” is tossed about like a beach ball at a Giants game. But in this case it is quite true. You can almost say that it is the end of the space-program as we know it. Or at least the remnants of NASA’s “glory days”. First conceived in the minds of science fiction writers...

Like many in the valley last week, I was saddened to hear of the loss of Steve Jobs. Someone who proved that good-enough wasn’t always good-enough. Considering that his home is only a few minutes away I had to go and see the tributes left for him. No doubt you may have seen similar shots on the news, but FWIW here are some of mine. There were three kinds of memorials people left: Apples (the fruit) with a note penned on the side (some apples...

…Or I have an awesome app! But now what?? Two years ago last month, I uploaded my first app to Apple for review. About 20 hours later I received that magical email saying “Your application has been approved for sale.” And the latest version of my once-Amiga/Mac/PC application was now available to millions of potential customers. And then I got my first sales, 8 downloads that day. Wow! So what is the actual process of finishing up your...