A due dilligence report? Whatever could they mean? How come I'm suppose to submit reports that I didnt know I had to prepare in the first place? Do they not realize I'm in the middle of their flagship project? What kind of nuthouse is this anyways? The inmates are running wild.

Funny how they requested me to write the report. The acting COO is the one who should come up with this. Not that he didnt offer to write it. Just that they dont want it from him, they want my input. And they shall not get it. I have better things to tend to. This report is irrelevant to the current project and my timeline is rather tight. If they really want one, I'll submit one as early as December.

It doesnt take a genius to figure out where this is heading. A DD report from me would expose too much of my future plans for the system. They dont have the rights to know about that. Not until I see some papers signed at least. Nope, I wont fall for this brain prying and I have a birthdate that shows I wasnt born yesterday. Good thing the Chairman is backing me up on this. He said 'You dont have to tell them nothing.'. Orders taken and my lips are sealed.

Here are some cool utilities for Windows XP. I have them on every XP system I work on. Maybe you'll find them useful too.

Startup Control Panel

This is a utility to manage the programs that launch during startup. Handy when you suspect something fishy going on behind your back, that starts when Windows loads.

http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

Sendto Powertoy

This is an enhancement to the standard issue 'Send To...' menu item that appears on the Windows right-click context menu. With this baby, you'll get extra options when executing a Sendto command. You can even choose whether to use a Copy or Move methods.

http://www.gabrieleponti.com/downloads/sendtotoys.exe

Looks like everything's cool at the moment. System upload was fine, except for that 'slash' incident. Would you believe that an engineer of 8 years experience can get confused between a forward slash and a back slash? It happened right before my eyes. :o Pretty disturbing. No wonder they didnt do much progress when they had the codebase for the first five years. Human resource division must really suck down at HTP. Well, they didnt hire me on the two chances that they had back in 2000 & 2001 and look calling the shots now. Losers.

So now I'm like doing the documentation for the whole damn project. Timeline estimate is conceivable, at least we wont overshoot it by more than a month (I hope). All these management stuff is tying me down. But then if I dont do it, it'll never get done. Although, frankly, I'm eager to manhandle the Java client (and the middle tier and the DB layer). Maybe patience is a good idea right now.

I've never given much thought about all these lightweight methodologies. Not until when I realized that requirements mismanagement could take a load of the development timeline. So, I have been reading about this Extreme Programming idealogy from Kent Beck. Sounds reasonable with a lot to promise. Requirements is almost non-existant. Well, they do exist, but in different form and we dont have engineer and manage them like we would on a traditional software development project. The unit testing and iterations idea are pretty rad too. I think I shall be looking seriously into this. More books to read. :-S