The project suffered some almost terminal news the other day when the client, that was more of a guinea pig that it new, pulled out. The official reason, and it was described to us as if it was something negligble if not cosmetic, was that they had no confidence that we could deliver the product.

Now the client had put a lot of time and resources into the project, had been instrumental in helping the company with customisations that they wanted and had put forward a significant number of people to perform user acceptance testing. And they’ve walked away, and that’s a big deal. Of course some of our arrogant lot laughed it off and made out that it wasn’t significant and that we have several other possible customers, all in the same industry. But what about the word of mouth thing. Do they think that the client is going to sing our companies praises in developing software. Don’t think so.

What’s even worse is that the client wasn’t even paying for the software. By acting as guinea pigs and helping out with the development process they were going to get the final release version for free and they didn’t even want it for that price. Fat chance of them actually wanting to pay for it.

The client did get a bit trigger happy in the last few weeks when they took a new build and decided to reopen over 100 of the 140 fixed defects in a final effort at throttling the project which obviously worked. When I had a look at these reopened defects which I had been responsible for they were working correctly but in our projects continual desire to muddy the waters and generate yet more confusion I was not allowed to actually close them but instead they were alloted to some hapless developer to yet again fix the defect. Go figue.

I’ve been using Synctoy, version 1.4 I think, for the last year to backup my iTunesmusic folder, on one external USB drive to another external drive and its always worked OK till a few days ago when it suddenly displayed a message that it couldn’t copy about 5,000 files. When running Synctoy I have been just hitting the Run control which immediately synchronises the 2 drives, but you can also do a preview first which will analyse the 2 drives and let you know how many actions are needed to synchronise the 2 drives. After the failure I ran Synctoy in preview mode and eventually it displayed a message that there were too many files to compare and that it was best just to run the synchronisation, or words to that effect. I OK’d that and straight away it crashed. Retested in both modes several times with the same result each time. Odd, as Synctoy has been working fine for about a year then suddenly it doesn’t work at all.

I downloaded the beta v2 of Synctoy and ran that and it worked OK.

I got a Western Digital 250gig Passport drive the other day to replace my old 250gig USB drive which broke when it crashed to the ground from atop the PC.

The Passport drive doesn’t even have a power connector as it gets its juice from the USB socket, so there went yet another reliable powered USB socket. I’ve got a feeling my USB wireless adapters problems are all about powered USB sockets. The Passport is obviously made for laptops but are very convenient for desktops, so much so I may get yet another one, but that does mean losing yet another powered USB socket. What I need to get is a powered USB hub.

The Passport came with some synicing software which worked very well and very quick and much faster than Microsoft’s Synctoy. Though when I went to use the Passport syncing software again the other day, could I find it. Could I hell. I eventually found it on the Passport drive itself though it hadn’t created any shortcuts to itself anywhere nor had it registered itself with the registry, so XP knew squat about it. Created a shortcut for it on the desktop.

Noel Coward’s Letters

I got this book at Christmas and very good it is to. I love reading books on the theatre, or the old theatre. There is one letter he wrote to his Mother where he explained how, after one of his plays had just finished whilst on Broadway, a spotlight was shone on Noel Coward and how he was described as the greatest living playwrite. The sense of euphoria that he described he felt was truly exhilarating. I’m up to his letters in the 1930’s so far and have slowed down reading it as I really don’t want it to end.

I also got Michael Billington’s (theatre critic) ‘State of the Nation’, which is about British Theatre since 1945. Also good but very political and very left when describing the 1970’s.

Lastly I got a biography of Cecil B DeMille which I haven’t started yet. I will like this as I love reading about Hollywood, whether old or new. Something tells me I should have been an actor.