BEEEES!

• 6th February 2006 at 10:05

I've just discovered the New Scientist Podcasts, and am currently burning them to CD ready for the next 5-6 hour drive back to Kent.

I've been working on this second Flash CD for far too long now, and I'm desperate to get it finished. The problem is that it's just so damned time-consuming. The first CD took me two months of 10am-5am days, but this CD is far more complicated than the first. And I'm only working during the day.

The activities on the first CD were all quite similar, most of them being based upon the same objects and library code - as a result, the code files for some activities were only 10-20 lines with about 400 lines of library. The average code size for the activities on the second CD is currently around 950 lines per activity, using 8 classes and three libraries which currently total 2200 lines. Obviously with Flash it's not all down to line count, and it's what the lines say that matters, but it still gives you an idea of how the two CDs compare.

I think my mistake was that I waited until the first CD was finished. My rationale was that if something in the first CD needed changing we should find out before we start the second CD, then we can get it right from the beginning. I thought that would be a couple of weeks, a month at most - I ended up sitting around pretty much from February until July while we waited for the slow cogs of bureaucracy to turn - 5 months where I could have pretty much finished the second CD.

Since then I've been working on it full time, apart from for a couple of months around September while I was moving house and had to deal with things related to all that. Over that time I have probably spent a couple of weeks working on the websites I maintain to keep that side ticking over, and there was that week over Christmas when I went home, but apart from that it's been ActionScript all the way baby. At times it's been hard to stay motivated with no pressure from above and no deadlines, and I'm sure some of my days could have been more productive, but I'm sure I'm no worse than the majority of the UK workforce.

So I'm going full speed, but I'm worried that they're expecting it soon, and dragging my first major project out over a year is hardly a successful start to being self-employed. I did 3-4 months of the year to dealing with family stuff, but really that's of no consequence to a company - it will just put them off having anything to do with me in the future, even if it is all settled now.

Hmm. I think what I'm saying is that I should probably stop writing this entry and get working :)

One last thing before I go - the comment spammers got in. How they did it I don't know, but I'm guessing they have some way of automatically noticing when their comments aren't getting through, then they investigate by hand and add some kind of template parser to their spamming bots. Either that or they perfected AI, and their next step is unleashing their death robot armies. I will investigate more when time permits.

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