LEGO minifigs, Mike and Wilfo discuss their recent gig at zenbananas.com.

Ah yes... 'a zenbanana a day drives the doctor away'.

It's a site created by 'TOPBanana', a comsci professor of mine in college born out of... wait let him talk about that part. I don't want to get ahead of him

I'm contributing on the 'art' part.

Previous college students of mine, who are still reading this blog... TOPBanana is the person partially responsible for influencing me to do those crazy stuff I inflicted on you during those days... : )

The class singing sessions (late student sings (yes this is a comsci class)), index card at the back info questions, how homework essay projects are scored, open book exams and a lot more of that approach... came from him.

A lot of good things can be scribbled but let's leave those for another post.

Going back to zenbananas.com... go check The Secrets of The Universe post. That is where Mike and Wilfo came in.

And here's the link for a hi-res version of the image above.

Oldie... but hey... still the same.

... and here's Part II.

When I first heard about the LHC (partly this was the reason for the lack of updates in this site for the past few months (my pet tiger and I were building an anti-singularity/anti-spaghettification floating bunker that could withstand a black hole (Yes it is possible (but no we won't be giving out the secret for now (but here's a hint)))).

Let me do that again, too many open and close parentheses already...

When I first heard about the Large Hadron Collider (wikipedia link / msnbc.techscience link / boston big picture (BIG pictures indeed (here we go again with these parentheses)) my first reaction was joy.

Joy.

Yes. Joy.

Joy... not because of the promised crispier Tv screens nor faster internet connection or other potential payoffs in the fields of telecommunications, medicine and energy.

(Though I must admit I'm not rooting for these scientists with their Grid to find 'The God Particle'. Science would be more interesting if after a year or two they'll still be singing U2's song.)

It was joy because of the promise of a possible discovery of alternate dimensions.

Of parallel universes.

For developers like you and me working on several simultaneous projects at once for different clients it is a vision of hope.

Imagine if I can just divide N tasks even to let's say distribute them into N/4 parallel universes, I can divide a month's work into just one Earth week's work of time.

Considering that merging them back together would not cost that much.

But even then if it takes one more week to merge them all together that would still result in two extra weeks.

Two extra weeks of doing the things that I really like. Code-related and non-code related. That includes a time for playing LEGO.

Pretty exciting.

It was the way to go.

These parallel universes.

The hope.

The only hope were all other hope and its derivatives will be measured.

Exciting.

Very exciting.

...

Until that morning just days ago when I met Master Foodahaha(xx).

Don't bother asking me about his name and the extra xx's. (He insisted his name transcends structure.)

But he pointed me out to something more enlightening.

More enlightening than the LHC and their Grid and the Higgs and multi-dimensions.

Something that Master Geoffrey James partially touched on and translated a decade ago but has been existing for centuries in various 'forms'.

That is... The TAO of Programming.

In the beginning was the Tao. The Tao gave birth to Space and Time. Therefore Space and Time are Yin and Yang of programming.

Programmers that do not comprehend the Tao are always running out of time and space for their programs. Programmers that comprehend the Tao always have enough time and space to accomplish their goals.

How could it be otherwise?

- Geoffrey James / The TAO of Programming

Ah... enlightenment.

Yes I know. It's been some time since I posted something in here.

But I'm always checking for spam contents.

Mee hee.

Doug Hennig: Services as Products (via Akselsoft)

A number of interesting GDIPlusX (images and charts and all) going on at this VFP IMAGING site.

...

Going back to services and products, when we started doing freelance works around 6++ years ago, we made the services part free for one year. Client only has to pay for the customized product.

Even extended it to a couple more years, since most clients were kind enough to give us new projects (or recommend us to their branches) after the first year.

It worked well... until 2007, when a new wave of client adminstrators went in... new staff without proper turnovers and a lot of outside factors as well.

Now we're spending some time ironing out things.

In this part of the world, the fair option that I see for freelancers like us would be to sell the Product as Product and the 'Services as Product' part will tackle the maintenance part.

Of course it also depends on what side of the fence are you in. Our Open Source lovin' friends mostly would go for Services all the way.

Which works for them.

On our part, we still have a lot of re-planning to do since we have been discovering, as of late, that most human users are like Francium, one of the most unstable elements in this world.

Ok... we're not going into the bloody details of that part.

Partly... the entities above are responsible for hatching this.