Monthly Archives: July 2004

Another hair brained idea

I stumbled on upon mame while shutting down for the evening today and have merged 2 of my fantasies.

When I have a non-NYC place to live, I want to create a decent fileserver/NAS for my home computers. I now also want to build my own arcade box. And why not have either the arcade machine be the fileserver or have the arcade machine look to the NAS for its ROMS?

As powerful as really cheap machines are these days, there’s no reason not to have one box fulfill both functions.

The MSI project

I’ve been working on automating all the installations for my team. I went in with high hopes, thinking that I could quickly finish the project and move on to more fun and exciting things.

How wrong I was. The difficulties are numerous:

  • I do not have any of the domain knowledge for the project – Other people know how these things work and what they do, but not I. So I have no idea what is crucial and what isn’t.
  • I did not have any idea how MSI packages work – while not crippling, it has delayed me, causing me to take a long long time to figure out how to do a simple thing.
  • I have to rely on other people to test my work – finding out if I solved a problem or not is always dependant on someone else’s schedule.

I’ve learned from this to make sure that I identify and collaborate with those who have domain knowledge early in the project. Request specific expectations of the project and the timeline. Prepare myself better for deployment by requesting a way to test my own success.

On the upside, I’ve written my first app that will actually get used by anyone here. It sets up files to get deployed and logs it.

I’m so excited!