And Again..

Here I am back again, I've just had a cold, and didn't really feel like doing much at all. summer colds are the worst aren't they?  Back to my rant:  I haven’t been to see if the HM has done another blog yet, but I’m willing to bet money that he hasn’t.  I must tell you about the saga of the management software though.

The outgoing HM (remember, the big Jock?) had asked me if it would be possible to write it, and after a lot of to and froing, which included me giving up a couple of paying contracts, the school decided to go with some software that was written by two teachers from another school (talk about the old boys network).  This has got add ons (that you have to pay extra for), like on-line reports, a bundled in web page, a single linked in database and quite a lot more.  These are things that a professional developer (like me) would have done as a matter of course.  Not to mention that mine was about half the price. 

To top it all off, I find out it’s been written in one of those pseudo languages that make it very hard to do anything else with, like output useable data and have user defined views of the data, without going through a very expensive re-write by the developers.  On top of all that, if the Big OS in the Sky (you know the one) decides that the pseudo language is taking too much away from their own languages, then nasty things will happen to it.  Remember Netscape?  Oh, and BTW, I hope they don’t even think of upgrading to a 64 bit OS.  Then they’ll learn all about the phrase, ‘paying through the eyes and nose’ means. See you next week.