I’m thoroughly impressed with the team at Omega Vortex, the past few weeks. After a lot of development and testing, we finally decided to set a release date firmer than “Q3 2008″ internally. We had two specific products that we wanted to make a release on at the beginning of September (today), NextShout and ComicShout.

At the beginning of last week, one of our clients launched a fascinating exhibit. We’ve been supporting them through the opening of that exhibit and they identified some problems that they needed taken care of by this upcoming Tuesday. Even with the pressure surrounding these issues for Tuesday, our team has executed brilliantly. We brought our own goals to fruition and took care of our client’s problems, as well. We didn’t allow one to suffer for the benefit of the other, we did both.

NextShout and ComicShout were both released on-time, today. Go check them out.

Great job and many thanks to the team at Omega Vortex. You guys are all awesome.

We’re getting really close to releasing some stuff over at Omega Vortex. One of the products that’s coming out soon is Steven’s NextShout. NextShout is a shoutbox add-on to vBulletin that’s been designed to be extremely fast and bandwidth efficient. Where similar shoutbox add-ons are not only more expensive, but end up requiring you to pay more in bandwidth costs to use, NextShout is a cost-effective alternative that will actually save you money, in the long run.

NextShout is now available for pre-order at $15 USD. Purchase it today to get it cheaper than the release price.

Stay tuned for more release information.

While I was a little strapped for cash this year, I took on a job as a Sales Representative for Planet Celluar, an Authorized Retailer for AT&T Products and Services. It was an okay job, about as glamorous as retail sales can be. Due to some expansion at Omega Vortex and the fact that I didn’t really need the job anymore, I decided it was best that we parted ways. A recent e-mail that was circulated among the people I used to work with makes me glad that I did.

So, here’s my attempt to tear apart an e-mail from a retarded business executive. Some people’s names, product names, and location names have been changed to protect the guilty … or the mentally retarded.

(more…)

As classes and consulting work at Omega Vortex keep pushing me more and more into .NET development, I thought it would be a good time as any to try to start learning new things and try to keep my mind working on this stuff. I decided to start looking for an Open Source project that I could contribute to.

After noticing someone on Twitter mention a LINQ to WMI project, it seemed like the perfect fit. LINQ (Language-Integrated Query) is something I’m not too familiar with and want to learn. While I’m somewhat familiar with WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), it’s huge. There’s still plenty left to be learned about it.

I’ve become a developer on the LinqToWMI project at Microsoft’s CodePlex and I’ve already made two major updates for those who are interested. One of which is the ability to generate “Commonly Used” WMI classes instead of just generating the ones you need one at a time. The next is a major speed enhancing change on the ClassGenerator.

It came to my attention while testing the project that it would crash with a NullReferenceException if there were no instances available of the class you wanted to generate. (Example: It would crash when trying to generate a Win32_FloppyDrive class. My laptop has no floppy drive.) In re-working the generator to not use an instance to generate code from, we gained a pretty huge speed boost from not having to search for an instance. Before, it took about 4 or 5 seconds to generate around 15 classes. Now it takes a fraction of a second.

If you’re needing to use the WMI on a project and want an easy way to query it, give this project a shot. If you think it’s good, help us out by contributing patches or bug reports so we can make the project even better.

Adam Kinder of E29 Incorporated put up a blog entry on the internet’s phenomenon of producing fake companies not too long ago (I just recently noticed it, thanks to Twitter). Omega Vortex got an Honorable Mention on his list of companies that get it right:

A runner up that I’m going to give a nod to is Omega Vortex. Jeremy Privett knows what he’s doing when it comes to setting up a good, fluid development shop. The only reason I can’t 100% vouch for their work is that they haven’t released anything yet, and I’ve not worked with their custom shop. Good group to keep an eye on though.

Admittedly, Omega Vortex fell into the “fake” category not too many years ago before I was swept off to Colorado to go work at Completely Unique and Peak8. I filed papers on GU² Services, Inc. before it was acquired and wanted to file papers on Omega Vortex but never really got around to it until after the Peak8 era.

We do have papers, though! They’re currently in the wrong state, but Alabama’s business laws are incredibly annoying compared to Colorado’s so I may try to put off legally moving the company out of Colorado until I move to NY sometime within the next year. Unless there’s some legal reason to do otherwise which I’m not aware of. We don’t currently have any type of office space, as all of our employees work remotely, so our physical address is pretty much non-existent.

We’re working on fixing that unreleased products issue in the coming months and I’ve been working on ramping up our software division for more progress, now that we’re getting to the point where we can look at it again. Since we have some new people on our team, consulting work should no longer completely bog us down so that no work gets done in our software. We’ll have to see how it goes from here.

Even vague ones … and I mean really vague.

Quite a while ago, Omega Vortex adopted a policy that we would refrain from announcing specific release dates. We won’t even narrow it down to a month for you. There’s quite a few reasons that we do this.

We’re a startup that’s bootstrapping from consulting work. At any given time, said consulting work currently takes priority over all other things, because we have to make money in order to pay bills and keep developers paid. That’s all fine and dandy, but while we’re having to focus so much on consulting, software isn’t being written. This is eating us like the plague. We’re presently amazingly profitable, but not in the way that we want to be. No matter how good our scheduling is, it doesn’t make a difference because we’re constantly having to drop everything to invest time in a new consulting project.

On the plus side, we’re about to simultaneously release a new product that hasn’t been announced yet along with updates to two other products that you may already be familiar with. No matter how close we get to that day, we’re not going to tell you when that day will be, in advance. All of our releases are marked by quarters. Any one year is divided up into three month quarters. Q1 is January - March, Q2 is April - June, Q3 is July - September, and Q4 is October - December. That means that when we mark a release as Q3 of 2008, we could potentially release that product at any point within those three months. If we’re expecting to release in September, we’ll actually really say Q4 so that we have three extra months worth of time buffer to use in the even that something goes wrong. If we happen to meet our goal of September, we just managed to release an entire month early.

Three months of buffer is a pretty decent amount of time. Sadly, because of time constraints with our consulting work, we’re still having trouble meeting those release dates. OmegaVerge has suffered considerably because of this and it has allowed competitors to get a jump on us. (Speaking of OmegaVerge, I’d like to give a shoutout to Ben Babcock who actually managed to help me with a SimpleXML issue by letting me help him with a SimpleXML issue. We now have type-safety/inference of IP.Converge methods in OmegaVerge since we solved that issue, instead of having to pass around SimpleXMLElement objects. Thanks, Ben.)

If you’re a software development shop and, like us, you can’t dedicate 100% of your time to software development, don’t announce release dates. Even vague ones. Surprise people. People get incredibly antsy / angry when you don’t meet release dates.

Oh, and if you have a historic trend of lack of ability to execute, don’t try to say things like “this summer” or “next month” … I’m guilty of this too, but this is a practice that really needs to stop. I’ve seen so many projects say “next month” and it take so much longer than that. Two in particular have me facepalming, right now …

Most of your [code] comments are unnecessary.

Don’t ever tell a developer that. Especially, one that is learning. Code commenting is one of biggest components of code maintainability and there are simply not enough developers that do it enough. The thought that someone really would instill the thought that comments are unnecessary really peeves me. I’ve had so many problems over the years that could’ve been solved if the programmer before me had just commented his stuff properly.

Don’t be this idiot.