Cool!

9:08:33 PM    comments ()  trackback []  

Here's the best out of my first attempts to shoot Jupiter.

It turned out worse than my first attempts to shoot the moon. I need to counterbalance the scope -- the camera and the eyepiece put the scope out of balance, which makes it slowly drift up in elevation. Didn't get a good focus, either.

Looks fuzzy even small.

Keep digging.

9:02:06 PM    comments ()  trackback []  

Stuff like that bugs me. I like my programs to have no trace of me, other than perhaps that it worked well. I want them to work so well that you take them for granted. You see a typo, you start wondering what else could be wrong.

As a developer, it easy to get hung up on trying to be perfect. But eventually you have to ship. Code really doesn't seem to exist until it ships, and then it rapidly becomes something much larger than it used to be. Suddenly your code has Customers. Dave has a really good essay about that sort of thing. Customers are scary, but you gotta have customers to be a successful tool builder. Anyone can build tools that are good enough for themselves -- the challenge is to build something that someone else is interested in using. I've heard the phrase "scratching your own itch" used when describing the origins of various Open Source projects. MailEdit started off as scratching my own itch. But what I really want is to see if I can make it good enough for others.

7:31:46 PM    comments ()  trackback []  

I love it.

It's also really nice to see very few "I can't make it work" sorts of comments. That means I did the initial job right.

Let's just hope it continues that way.

2:50:27 PM    comments ()  trackback []