I used to work in the corporate world. I had my place: analysis - specs - development. Outside my world, server guys provisioned servers. Network guys kept the network humming. Sys Admins administered systems (know unix? sure! lt gives me a directory doesn’t it!!!). Desktop guys rolled out new desktops. I never appreciated how much their presence kept my wheels turning … until now.

I bought my server, installed SLES10, found a data centre and hosted it. It took me WAY TOO LONG. I learned my sys admin and dealt with linux, apache, tomcat, ssl, webdav, jboss, mysql and all the quirks along the way. And that also took WAY TOO LONG. I’m not the uber-hacker who eats this stuff for breakfast. Its been a long hard push. And then there’s the J2EE stack: spring/hibernate/acegi/axis, modelling with UML and androMDA code gen, and then a hefty browser JS stack.

Its the config that kills me! Every component needs its own config, its own tweaks. And back in the day, there was an expert on hand who could (as Ben Stiller would say) ‘just do it’. Not in this startup! I gotta do all that, and on top of it still develop a product. Gotta know the market, watch the competition, create a business that’s more than the underlying tech.

Yet every little hiccup pushes out the development time. Loose sessionId’s with apache proxying to tomcat? Drove me nuts, lost a day. A day here, half there, 2 days the following week … it pushes and pushes out. Want a reason not do a startup? The workload will close to break you, pure and simple.

Ok - I’m havin’ a bitch! Its been one of those days … it ain’t all bad!

Quickflix are partnering with Woolies to cross promote their service to Woolies’ shoppers. But John Karantzis, MD of Reeltime.tv (video download service) thinks Quickflix is chasing ‘an anachronistic model’ .. ‘I think mail’s dead’.

Is JK sounding a bit edgy there? Dead is a big call! Quickflix with a ‘dead’ model service 18,000 customers. I’m sure he thinks the local store is equally old school, equally dead. But Video Ezy service in the vicinity of 1.5 million customers. So what’s the uptake for Reeltime.tv or Bigpond Movies Download? Hmmm … nobody’s saying. But with Reeltime admitting to their lack of content and now bailed out by Sony (with a new focus on the games market) … I’d be careful about throwing stones in glass houses!

I’m pretty defensive with my coding. But, time is short, lots to do. Susan’s over putting in a bunch of custom collections, and stops. She gets an alert saying ‘fail’. wtf? Ok - she triggered some really weird error condition, but alert(”fail”)? No message saying what to do, how to recover, will she loose data @#!@$!

But hey - I was sure that condition wouldn’t come up! Anyway, it’s fixed now (the message that is) …