Bound to get shouted down on here but use an Excel macro (assuming your users have office installed). I know it may feel abit wierd but it gives you a shed load of stuff (saving, loading, etc) for free, the users know how to use it, you have no executables to deploy - just put the file/template in a shared folder and the macro language is pretty much VB.

You can even use a VBA macro to call a batch file, so anything you can't do with VBA, can be in a batch file with a VBA front end.

Software also originates from a different branch of human endeavour; it tends to come from people with a Scientific/Engineering background. People in these fields are used to sharing ideas - publishing papers and the like, and it is small step from publishing a new algorithm in an academic journal to publishing the software that implements that algorithm.

People in these fields recognise that ideas are relatively cheap and need to be tested by peer review (in a way that’s what we are doing now on this forum) and that as well as the kudos of contributing to the greater good, improved employment prospects (and a more fun life) can come from being an expert in a field, and one way of demonstrating expertise is to publish..

As the parent says, a work of art is the end point, it is similar in that it needs to be published, but it is not a means to an end, it is the end itself.

People seem to love to dream up ever more convoluted ways for terrorists to attack. The reality is that the simpler the approach, the more likely the success. We keep being told about these bogie men with missiles and nuclear material, what we see in reality is a guy with an ass full of TNT or a mobile phone triggered bomb.

When you have people willing to die for the cause why go for anything more? I say it's vapourware and the next N terrorist attacks will be suicide bombings and hijackings. They have got the airports disrupted to a ridiculous degree, why give up on hat now?

"There is no way round doing the math"

Oh come off it. I've been building radio gear since I was 8 years old. I didn't even know "the math" existed.

Get a plan for a simple radio (I suggested a crystal set above) and just build it. Be impressed by you achivement, build something else (e.g. test gear). Start to wonder how it works, build something else, build some more, when they don't work, start to find out what the components do and fault find - that's where the real learning starts

Build a crystal set. It's simple and magic. With only a diode, inductor (coil), tuning capacitor and head phones you get real radio. You can build one with just a hammer and nails on a piece of wood (or you can be more sophisticated if you want and use screws or even do soldering, it's up to you).

If you want to build wireless equipment it is a good learing curve about what is important - i.e. capacitance, inductance and the antenna (all them transistors etc are just added extras).

Google and you will turn up loads of free on line designs for crystal sets. Remember if it doesn't work first time, keep trying. Building analogue Radio gear can require much more skill and accuracy than simple digital stuff.

For some strange definition of BIG. I am sat in a room full of programmers, like many others in the world. We will spend 8+ hours a day 5 days a week writing apps, not a robot in sight. When I get time at home I wirte some embedded stuff for fun (I hope you would include this in the definition of "robot"). So this year I have probably done several thousand lines of app code in Java and less than 100 lines in C for embedded.

Now I am far from average, because I am the only person I know of here (out of ~40 programmers) that does any embedded at all..Quite a few people here do PHP in their spare time for friends and profit.

I have several hand saws and several power saws. Just because I can saw everything with the hacksaw but the circular saw is only good for wood does not mean I should just use the hacksaw.

Yup, I agree. The best jobs I've had are where I was sat with the users doing what they asked me to do. I was much more productive and they got what they wanted. I also worked a lot harder, because I would be juggling many more demands, and it also meant that the users got to argue priorities amongst themselves.

Every time someone came over and said "can you just ..." I could refer them to the person whose thaks I was currently on, they could sort it out between themselves.

I was struck by the question is this an "analogue of a blog" or a "blog created in an analogue manner"? The former I suppose I am ok with but if the latter, I would like to point out that analogue is NOT somehow the "opposite" of digital.

15 years ago I left construction for IT, and I can tell you that IT is one hell of a lot less stressful than construction. I now work for a major engineering company (in IT) and the guys supporting the production machinery have a load more hassle than the rest of us.

So I would say don't get out of IT into Engineering environments to avoid stress, but the job satisfaction of building "real" things is higher.

I really don't get all this time travel stuff, and I would love someone to explain to me why physicists even consider it possible. It seems to me that time is just the rate of propagation of change. A photon cannot move from a source to a detector instantly, the change introduced to the system by emitting a photon can only be detected after the change has propagated to the detector.

An often quoted example of why time is a dimension is that to meet someone you need there coordinates (x,y,z) and a time, ergo time is a dimension. However another way of thinking about it is to say meet me on the 20th floor of 2nd and 5th after a certain amount of change has occurred in the universe. Our most obvious method of monitoring universal change is the movement of the earth around the sun.

On this basis there is no way you can travel back in time, because anything you do creates change, even when it undoes a previous action - erasing a pencil mark does not cause time travel back to a point before the pencil mark was made)

Is there a FORTRAN port or a COBOL port? Java is a perfectly good language but it seems that there are a group of Slashdotters that automatically dismiss anything written in Java. Generally their views seem to be based on false rumour put about when Java first got off the ground.

For the record I have been coding for the last 30 years in just about every major language (with the notable exception of COBOL) on every platform from Mainframes to embedded. I still use C/C++ when I have to but default to Java when ever possible. This is not because I am some dumb newbie, or because of what I was taught at collage; it is because I chose Java over a decade ago as the best balance of versatility and productivity for general purpose programming. I also regularly use PHP and sometimes still do FORTAN when the job requires, and I make a point of seeing what new languages have to offer (Ruby, Python, etc.) but there is no need for a C++ port because the Java one will do you fine.

On a simlar note I have often wondered about something like this for camping. If you are on a campsite and the idiots next you decide to have an all night party, from inside your tent you given them a squirt of HERF, nothing too big, just enough to make them feel a bit less like having an all-nighter

It's all about the people, a good developer (and a good architect) can use anything from a duct tape approach to a full-on methodology based life-cycle depending on the scale, complexity and critcality of the job in hand. You cannot use the same approach for building a sky scraper that you might use for building a garden shed.

Several issues cloud this mix:

• Non technical management really struggle to tell genuinely good developers from braggards and people who must be good because they are weird
• Architects and analysts want fashionable things on their CVs as much as developers do, so they push towards the newest buzz because their next job may depend on it

At the bottom of every successful development are a few people who just get on and write the code, it's where it actually happens. Ever see a hole in the road where one guy is down the hole with a shovel, and 4 others are stood around the top? I'm the guy down the hole, have been down coding holes for 20 years and pretty much every project I have started coding, I have finished and delivered, some where big methodology driven things, some where me against the world with a couple of weeks to deliver. But get keen interested and pragmatic people on the shovel and the job gets done

It's that time of year - University Clearing, all the minor universities in the UK are trying to get their names in the media so that potential students who didn't get into a major university may pick them instead of a gap year.