macrobug

In Excel, suppose you want to produce a table like this:

Obviously you want to use the SUM formula to add up the total number of beasties. That means you can’t literally type “2 oxen” into the cell – you’ll have to just type “2″ but make up a number format to present it as you wish.

That’s easy for singular quantities: the number format would be 0 "sheep".

But for plurals you have to go a bit further. It turns out you can put multiple formats in the box, separate them with semicolons, and add conditions. So the desired format is this: [=1]0 "ox";0 "oxen".

This adds all sorts of potential. What about [=0]"None";[<4]"A few";"Lots"? Or [=2]"Company";[>2]"A crowd"?

Useful for test plans, etc.

Insert a field each time you want a number produced, with the formula “Seq XYZ”, where XYZ is any arbitrary label you want. (It won’t appear; it just gives a name to the sequence and ensures that each item with that name gets a unique number).

More advanced tips here.

I think I’ve found a bug in the health and safety rules.

These rules always say that you should adjust your working environment so that the top of your monitor is level with your eyes. Which I’d been doing – but I’d also been getting back pains.

What I hadn’t done is ensure that the top of the monitor is level with my eyes when my back is straight. So, my adjustments had involved altering the level of my monitor, but only to the level of my eyes when I was slumped in a presumably-unhealthy posture.

Arguably, since I wanted to believe that my monitor was at the correct level, I’d been slumping in order to comply with the rules. Only at a subconscious level though!

I have now put my monitor about 10 inches higher, which is definitely too far up, but I’ll see what effects it has and hopefully find a happy medium. I’m certainly finding my back is straighter – I am having to look up very high to see anything at all!

Appears to be spelled that way, even in British English. Ah well.

This may not be a very structured post, because I am thinking out loud into the blog. Sorry about that in advance.

Back in January I was pondering what sort of software licence to use. I linked to an article by Dan Bricklin which reflected most of my views about the licence choices available to small independent software vendors like Macrobug.

I keep a fairly close eye on developments with software licences. Yet I still haven’t made up my mind about what to use for Macrobug products!

The options are:

1. Fully closed proprietary licence. The user has no access to source code, and no rights to distribute binaries. There are probably two licences; one for a time-limited evaluation version and one for the paid-for version.
2. Shareware-type licence. The user can distribute the binaries, but must pay me if they use them for more than, say, 30 days. The user gets no access to source code.
3. Dan Bricklin-type licence. The user gets source code and binaries, can distribute and modify them, but any recipient of any version has to pay Macrobug as if they had received the software directly from us.
4. Fully open-source licence. The user gets the source code, and is free to do what they want with it. Macrobug gets an income from supporting the code and being the best in the marketplace at working with that code, customising it etc.

Obviously there’s a spectrum here between restrictive and open licences. Open licences, which give the users more rights, will be more popular with those users. But they also present more risk for Macrobug.

I am fairly certain that option 4 is a no-go at the moment. My personal view (and therefore that of Macrobug!) is that open source is usually the right business decision for commodity products: things which will be used by many, many people. In that case, the economically correct course of action is to share efforts by contributing to a common codebase rather than spending lots of money creating/paying for competing products. But there’s no role in that model for anyone to make a living providing such software; the whole point is that the users of the software co-operate to create it. And for more specialised products, where there aren’t enough users to co-operate to produce the software, having a single commercial software provider remains the sensible model. I feel Macrobug’s debugging tools fit into that category… which is fortunate because, as I say, I don’t see a role for anyone to make a living producing open source software. I almost believe I could make a living out of supporting/customising/developing the software if it were open source, but not quite. I’d like to move to this model in the future, though, if I start to believe it could work.

Concerning options 1 and 2, are there really many differences these days? I’ll be making a time-limited evaluation version freely downloadable from the Macrobug website (of that much I am certain). So, does the user gain anything by being able to distribute the binaries as opposed to get them from the Macrobug website? Probably not. The advantages of option 1 are that I have marginally more visibility over who gets the software, and maybe I stand a better chance of being able easily to lock down the evaluation version to the time limit. And I suspect people are less likely to feel they should pay for something with the word or concept ’shareware’ attached. So, I’d argue that options 1 and 2 are basically the same, and I’d be best off treating it as option 1 rather than a shareware product I want people to distribute themselves.

I really like option 3. The main problem here is the complexity/expense/risk involved in creating such a licence. All the other types are available for download. I could try to throw together such a licence myself (= mistakes, risk) or pay a lawyer to do it for me (= enormous expense). I’m also not sure it’ll be that appealing to customers: even though they should be happy about receiving the source code, the fact that it’s an unusual approach would in itself put them off. So I think I am going to rule out option 3.

So where does that leave me? As far as I can tell, it leaves me – for now – releasing under a proprietary commercial licence. Bummer!

I must admit I haven’t entirely convinced myself of that decision. I was hoping that by the end of this blog post I’d have properly made up my mind. Ah well, it seems – sadly – to be the logical thing to do, for now at least.

PS In addition, when talking about software licencing we almost always read and see American licences, e.g. the GPL. So much so, that I almost always type ‘license’ not ‘licence’ and keep having to correct myself to British English…

We’re still vapourware. Still negotiating with Symbian to get the relevant access to bits of Symbian OS required. It’s a bit of a rollercoaster…

It’s all so Web 2.0 and fashionable. I have been trying to resist it for months now.

However, it does have a nice photo exporter from iPhoto and appears to accept an unlimited number of photos, so I’m going to use it to store my photos. Sorry for any suckers that therefore get sucked into Facebook because they want to look at them.

Business relevance? None really, but I’m going to pretend it does by mentioning that this tiny simple iPhoto exporter has made me want to use the whole Facebook ecosystem. Perhaps a tiny simple Symbian OS debugging tool will make lots of phone makers use Symbian OS in more of their phones?!!

Bah, why do I always sleep OK in Japan – until the third or fourth night when I just can’t sleep at all? And why does that always correspond to the night before an important customer meeting?

Sigh. Special thanks to those who’ve phoned or text messaged me at 5.30AM Japan time every day of this trip so far – Claire, Henrietta, Jelte and anyone else I’ve forgotten. And extra-special thanks to Vodafone for selling me my dire M600i which is now so hopelessly broken that I can’t access the icons on the top half of the screen, thus preventing me from getting into flight mode to avoid such things (given that I want to use the phone as an alarm clock).

Grumble grumble. 

Oh, and you may have noticed – I’m blogging again and working on code again. For now. I’m approaching the end of my current contract, and everything’s comfortably ahead of schedule, so I’m only working part-time. I could just finish the contract early, except I’m off to Japan next week to wrap it all up.

I have just two more weeks of this contract. After that, I’m off to Somerset to spend a couple of weeks looking after my Mum after a minor operation. I plan to spend this time working on my annual accounts (at the end of July I’ll have been going for a whole year!) and readjusting my software based on the experience I gained during my last contract at a major phone manufacturer.

After that… it depends. I may actually be in a position to try to sell some software… or otherwise I’ll find another contract. I have at least two tools-related contract leads.

Oh, and I need to spend some time trying to persuade my current contract to pay up. Hmmm.