Last year was the worst Christmas in a generation. This year we've got an economic recovery, so they say. Now I'm in trouble. Sales are half of last year. Can't remember the last band instrument I sold. Think it was early October. Sold one or two sub-hundred-dollar guitars a week ago. As for the first week of the Christmas sales season, I've yet to have a day that pays even the heating bill. The only instrument I sold in the last week was a 59 dollar kid's guitar. Even if things pick up now, I don't see how I can pull things through the lean months ahead. The marketplace has voted. They don't want me here. Or more correctly they just don't need or want my stuff. Looks like this may be the beginning of the end of this road. Can't tell anybody. Can't talk about it. I already performed that experiment. You tell people you're in financial straights and they listen intently and promise to tell their friends to stop by, but they don't buy anything. So I just have to smile and tell people that everything's hunky-dory when it's so absolutely not.

Tom Ridge is coming to town tomorrow to talk about computer security. One of the ideas they're floating is to license software writers, much like general contractor licenses. I'm glad I left that profession. Licenses won't stop hackers from getting into your computer. Bug-free software will. And there's no such thing - at least the way the industry works today. Developers don't get bonus points for writing software correctly the first time. They get bonus points for writing it quickly. Then they spend months or years fixing the bugs. Your productivity is measured first of all by how much code you can write, and then secondly by how many bugs you fix. Writing it correctly the first time takes too much time and products would never get released. I know. I used to try hard to write it correctly the first time. That worked in the university where there weren't any product deadlines. It didn't work in the commercial software biz where we released new products in eight languages and six different software platforms in under six months. It takes a month just to make it work on one platform. There's simply no time to get it right and still get it out the door.

And still with all my efforts, yes, I had some bugs (and a few really nasty ones). Most weren't even in my code, but in somebody else's code that I needed to make my stuff work. Software is now too complex to be bug free because no one person can keep track of every little thing that could go wrong; and you can only claim that your own stuff might be bug free. You can't make any such claims of somebody else's stuff unless you scrutinize every letter and punctuation symbol which makes it up. So that's the second key to bug-free software. You have to publish the code so others can scrutinize it. Think the industry will provide full source code disclosure in the interests of national security? Yah, right. So instead they'll license the developers, and of course nothing will change except that there's a licensed professional to be the scapegoat when things go wrong.