FINALLY! Sharehouser on Windows

Okay so now finally I have configured RMagick so that it runs on Windows!

What an odyssey that was! The thing was I think I had different versions of the libraries

and perhaps they didn't play together. So I uninstalled EVERYTHING and then followed

these instructions

Now it works!

Now I can do parallel work - at the desk - or on the lounge in the morning.

Awesome!

Now with the crop effect that I can apply to the "multi-receipt" scans selecting out the individual receipts for further cropping to select the important parts of the receipt (title, date, item list - with price per time). How do we handle multiple items - currently they display that

in an interesting way - that may need to be further investigated!

OKay! now time to crop my first bill in windows! YEAH!

swendawg

The biggest mistake a big company can make

The thing is - in a large company - there is a lot of software.

That software replaced people.

Humans who made mistakes.

Then the software sometimes makes a mistake (well a bug that existed in the software

actually causes an "unwanted effect") .. and eventually the bug that caused the mistake

is found and fixed.

In humans the error is never fixed.

It just gets fired and hired somewhere else....

hmm that's a weird way to think of things..

Anyway so the biggest mistake?

If you have a LARGE software base - and then your developers often have to clean

and rebuild this base - then they need FAST computers.

The price you pay for your developers having slow computers

is FAAAAR higher than the price that you pay for the super fast computers.

If you let them get bored and distracted by forcing them to wait a LONG TIME

to do something... (open a file, search a directory, run a test..) then they will go

off on tangents, start up discussions... or go

and disturb other workers... who might be in the PRIME of their working

time...

That's wasting simultaneously BOTH of their times....

It's interesting to calculate the "COST" of a meeting...

maybe we could calculate the cost of the meeting using

Length of the meeting - we could time that easily...

multiplied by the amount of people in the meeting's salaries...

Assuming an average of $60,000 per year.

60,000 / 250 days (working days per year)/ 7.5 working hours per day = 32 euros per hour.

So with 8 people present sitting around waiting for other people to be present.

We are wasting 8 people * 32 euros = 304 euros per hour

5 Euros per minute? Is my calculation wrong?

I'm not factoring in the loss of productivity caused by interrupting a programmer who is

working deep in the bowels of intricately interwoven spaghetti code.

LOTS of companies don't realise this or seem to even care about this.

I don't know why - I think most people like to keep things the way that they are

and fear change.

That's strange - because every change I've made in my life has ended up being positive.

Swendawg

Why did I make sharehouser?

I was thinking about this recently.

I've been working a lot more on it and it's been a LOT of fun!

It's amazing how working with Ruby and Rails can be such a great experience!

It's really rewarding.

So the reason I made it?

Well I remember living in a sharehouser - I had a HUGE house - it had 4 bedrooms.

So I always had three flatmates which was such an interesting dynamic

and an interesting experience.

But it was also troublesome to sort and file and add up bills

and we were a little constricted...

One idea:

what if you could put a special mark next to each item of the bill

a cross or a dash - and it could also check that element and make sure

that it auto assigns them to that person...

A symbol for each flatmate - a cross and a plus sign? a dash?

That would be a nice feature and pretty easy to implement - using a HTM...

or some sort of technology that can deal with slightly different styles of writing.

So I thought if I could write an application where I could easily enter in the data

and then drag and drop (I remember watching the scriptaculous drag and drop demo => so

awesome) each of the bills in the list - to each of the flatmates.

I could also have repeating bills - that automatically copy themselves forward into the next

month - as I set the status of the bills for that month as "paid".

I wanted to make it FUN - so that I would WANT to do the bills and I wanted it to not

use up very much time. Then I could use my time for other more fun things

like writing web applications and designing user interfaces.....