Flutterby™! : Development issues

Big sigh of contentment. Yesterday I got back to working on our embedded system some more. The motors now have web page control, as I'm just going to talk to this machine via HTTP. Today I do some drawings so that we can go to the machine shop on Monday and have a bunch of these puppies built. Learning all sorts of cool things about clutches and belts and stuff.

It is so nice to get away from VisualStudio and back to Linux, where I'm working in a real development environment again. And it's so cool to be working under an API developed by people who've really taken the time to develop commonalities between elements, so that unit testing doesn't require lots of test harness code.

Aside from lame-ass environments and bad APIs, I'mn frustrated with the legal challenge that programming is becoming. /. alerted me to a ruling that when Microsoft licensed key SQL Server technologies from Timeline they didn't get the license for developers to use those technologies from a program. So, apparently, you can use the Data Transformation Services in SQL Server directly, but you can't build a program to use those services to transform data for your customers without paying royalties to Timeline. The Register on Timeline vs Microsoft, News.com.com... on the same.

I really want to go back to the days when programming was about thinking, not about puzzling out someone else's ideas of the hoops that I have to jump through and keeping current on a gazillion bad patents and legal issues.