Life’s suddenly become extremely hectic – I’m doing my normal work, working on an ASP project that I’m doing as part of a sub-contract in my spare time and also providing support for the CSV reader component that I also did as part of a sub-contracting project. In the meantime, several bug reports sent in by Blog users, the release of BlogMan and another project that I promised to do for Edward go languishing since I don’t have the time to devote to them. This is basically why, I’ve not taken up extra work (unless I liked doing it and it was fun – which is the case with my freeware) in my spare time till now – I don’t think the hassles are worth it. My parents seem to believe that you should make money and continue to make money but I believe that as long as you have enough for your needs, that is enough. Yes, I know I can make more but what’s the point? I’ve seen people kill themselves day in and day out trying to make money but did it bring them any happiness? I don’t think so …
Be as it may be, I’m in the middle of another project right now. Since yesterday was a holiday (it was Sri Lanka’s Independence Day) I spent most of my time working on the new project, which was to provide a web-based frontend to an MSDE database using ASP/VBScript. Of course the catch is that the application supports multiple languages and so all the interface labels have to be fetched from the database based on the user’s language preference. I spent most of the day just getting the labels into place and setting up the UI which also includes a sub-screen with tabs, which again was fun to set up :p
In the meantime, I’ve been getting support requests from the person for whom I did the CSV reader component. Now I don’t mind providing support, especially if I made a mistake with the code and it’s my fault but when somebody asks you questions that they can answer themselves if they’d just take the trouble to look, what do you do? When I completed that job, I also wrote a demo application so that the end user would have a concrete example of how to use the component and sent the source to him but what’s the first question I get from him after using the demo? “How do I use the component in code?” It really pisses me off when people do that! Why can’t they take the time to look at the source – which is provided – instead of turning around and asking you? That was a rhetorical question, I know why they do that – so don’t bother to answer :p Ah well … after a lot of questions like that (way too many <g>) I think he might actually have found a bug in the code but I’m unable to test it because I can’t seem to run web applications using the .NET framework on my machine at home – might have something to do with the fact that I installed Visual Studio .NET after I’d installed Windows XP SP1. I’ll have to check into that sometime and figure out what the problem is – in the meantime, I’ll have to check on the CSV component at work today …