2003 Report

I know that my programming style has been unconventional up till now and I've been using a mangled implementation of C and C++, but I've been doing a bit of homework lately and will try to do better this coming year. For this reason and others I haven't had a lot of interest or promotion by the established programming community. The problem for people who haven't had a university education prior to becoming a programmer is that they haven't had a lot of peer to peer discussions and come over as sounding like a foreigner with little more than a phrase book when they try to discuss their work, the theory or principles they are talking about may be just as valid as the locals but lose a lot in the translation.

Those who came in through the OpenGL page will have noticed that I have released the start of a new Win32 template program. Over the next few months I will release a few updates to this program and then use it as the basis of the new OpenGL/Win32 demos as I rewrite them. So I feel the next year will be mostly dedicated to cleaning up the existing demos and then release a new version of the FreeWorld Editor later in the year. Of course, things would go a lot faster with a team, so if you would like to contribute then speak up. All help is gratefully accepted. Thanks especially to Sylvain Hellegouarch and MASkwarE for their Ports of the OpenGL demos. They have made life a lot easier for those not using Win32 and Dev-C++.

The atmosphere in the programming world has clearly changed over the past few years. During the last years of the twentieth century there was a fascination with all things computer and most programmers believed that, with a lot of hard work, there was a great job awaiting them. You could cut the optimism with a knife. These days I think most programmers, with skills that would have been headline material just a few years ago, are grateful to even get work installing Windows occasionally. There are still the occasional network admin jobs around but I don't know of anybody who is doing what they dreamed of when they began programming. The problem is that computers are best at simplifying tasks and through the implementation of RAD tools, coupled with the reuse of existing tools such as game engines, there is steadily less work available for your common garden variety programmer. About the only companies that are making a killing in today's workplace are the universities. They have formalized the programming world and now hold the key to employment, providing you are willing to pay through the nose for the privilege and accept as gospel everything they teach. I could go on to say that they are in fact tools of foreign governments and steal their students best ideas but that wouldn't be like me, would it? :)

There may be a solution though. Given that the majority of all programmers have at least one program that they may be able to sell if the price was low enough and the number of people buying it was high enough, then what we need is a way to sell our wares with little more than a point and click. One way to do this would be to password protect your program and then give the phone number of a pay-per-minute service that reveals the password after a certain time on the call. If the price was a dollar for a fully working guilt free application then I'm sure many would gladly pay the price rather than suffer the hassle of searching for the password. The password could of course be changed periodically. The international call costs would be a hindrance but would come down if the system catches on. I'm not saying that this would work for the big end of town but for your average home programmer it may be one way to earn a basic wage doing what they enjoy most, programming.

P.S. Before I go I would like to direct your attention to a very good site dedicated to a quite feasible theory as to the fate of Atlantis, the theory is very well explained and presented in lay terms. The site is most likely presented this way because, at present only lay scholars are giving the author the courtesy of an open mind and serious consideration. The scientific community has other more pressing issues such as making a living rather than entertaining new ideas which may force them to rethink all that they were taught to believe. The site is here at Atlantis in Antarctica

Have a great new year, Al.