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I used to work for a small software company where most of our sales were made through direct mail. I think our gross sales peaked at about $2 million one year while I was working there in the mid-90's.

Each direct mail piece sent to a prospect costs hard cash to send, for printing, postage, labor and mailing list rental. Yet it was our experience that a response rate of 0.5% was sufficient to yield a profit.

Once you have identified a profitable offer and a mailing list that's rich with customers who respond to direct mail, you have a license to print money. That's why you probably each of you reading this receive two or three pieces of direct mail every day.

The following two comments I posted at Kuro5hin discuss this in great detail:

• The Importance of Advertising to Business
• Direct mail is very scientifically targeted

Simply installing filters on your own machine won't help. The people who purchase sexual enhancement products over the Internet don't know from spam filters.

I think the end to spam will come only when every ISP and mail hosting service installs filters that are enabled by default. Only then will the response rate of spam be reduced to the point that it's no longer economical to send it.

I think it's likely the day will come when ISPs will be forced to install filters that cannot be disabled. Possibly this will be ordered by various national governments.

Used with care, self-modifying code is a powerful and useful tool. And yes there are caching issues - most processors have separate data and code caches, so writing into code using data instructions will put the code into the wrong cache, so you have to flush it.

We couldn't have program loaders without self-modifying code!

A number of the products I wrote for the Mac back at Working Software were self-modifying code, and they did very well.

You just have to know what you're doing, that's all.

Another use for them is dynamically relinking a running program as you edit its source code. Instead of relinking and relaunching the whole program, you can just reload the last subroutine that you edited. This is done by a number of development environments, and can greatly speed up the edit-compile-debug cycle.

That was mostly for the code. There was a text buffer that went up to a couple hundred bytes.

And since the program normally stayed running in the background all the time, I thought users might want to have their 8k back sometimes, at the expense of not getting the program's benefit, so there is a control panel option that not only pauses the program, but removes the program code from memory (handy during development, as I could update it this way without rebooting the machine).

When LR was paused, only a little stub of a trap patch remained in memory, about a dozen bytes or so.

Kids these days...

That was mostly for the code. There was a text buffer that went up to a couple hundred bytes.

And since the program normally stayed running in the background all the time, I thought users might want to have their 8k back sometimes, at the expense of not getting the program's benefit, so there is a control panel option that not only pauses the program, but removes the program code from memory (handy during development, as I could update it this way without rebooting the machine).

When LR was paused, only a little stub of a trap patch remained in memory, about a dozen bytes or so.

Kids these days...

I don't get it. What about programs like Last Resort? Are they classified now?

I know that programs like Last Resort catch every keystroke you type and put it into a file that you can check later. It's been around for years. I remember opne guy wrote a book where they caught a guy stealing company secrets using the program.

I kow that Last Resort has been doing this for a long time.

Spellswell was one of the first commercial products for the BeOS and remains a supported commercial product. I won an honorable mention in the Be Master's Awards for bringing Spellswell to the BeOS.

It wasn't the "path to riches" I was seeking - I knew that a new operating system would need a spellchecker as a standard system service just as you, and I felt that the right thing to do in combating the Microsoft Monopoly was to bring this standard system service to the BeOS because I had access to its source code and Working Software's consent to use it for this purpose.

In choosing to develop on a particular platform you are voting with your brain and the fingers you type with; I was voting for the BeOS with my efforts. I was not trying to get rich; what I didn't expect was to get lied to.

Both Spellswell for the BeOS, and Spellswell for the Mac OS, which was bundled with Eudora, use the Word Services Suite, which allows each of them to communicate with a number of word processors and email clients as if Spellswell were a built-in menu item.

Several other products support Word Services, and I have proposed to bring it to XWindows as well.

The Spellswell bundled with Eudora was not shareware either and Working Software was paid a license fee for each copy of Eudora it was bundled with. I trust you honored your license agreement and did not make unauthorized copies of this supported commercial product.

The difficulties that Working Software has had are typical of the troubles that every developer of commercial software has had as a result of their decision to support the BeOS. But these difficulties stem not from poor quality products, but from trusting folks like Jean-Louis Gassee to live up to their word.

Mike

This was before widespread use of the Internet by the public (although I was using it at the time). I don't know what network his girlfriend was using, but it was some proprietary system like Compuserve or AOL.

Last Resort patched the GetNextEvent trap in the MacOS to save all your keystrokes into a file. The buffer is flushed and the volume flushed too every few keystrokes, so if you're writing the next Great American Novel and lose power, while the text may be a little garbled, you'll at least get your words back.

Unfortunately for this fellow's girlfriend, this editor was an enthusiastic Last Resort user and he discovered her steamy letters to her online lover in his keystroke files.

I was utterly horrified to find this out but the fellow came up to me at the MacWorld trade show and thanked me profusely.

Last Resort was my first shipping commercial software product (now one of many). It was a simple program that took 8 kb of ram during operation, but we were well aware of the privacy implications. It doesn't try to hide itself - it shows up in your control panels under the apple menu and it displays it's "resort logo" with a palm tree by a beach (an early attempt at art by Yours Truly) at startup.

There are numerous more invasize products meant to snoop on your lovers - or capture passwords. For example, I received some spam from someone who was selling software that would hide itself well and save its keystroke files encrypted on a disk, then make an encrypted network connection to a server to upload the keystroke files from the hapless user's machine.

This wasn't your government snooping on you, this guy was looking for a distributor to publish the program.

This MacUser editor later published a novel about the software industry in which many fictitiously named but software applications that were thinly disguised versions of real products (I guess for trademark reasons) played central roles in the plot. I'm proud to say that his thinly disguised clone for Last Resort was responsible for saving the world!

Now if I could remember his name I'd give you a URL to the book...

Mike

Yes, this is the list you can submit your name and address to indicate that you don't want to receive unsolicited commercial postal mail. And to some extent it will cut down on certain types of regular junk mail.

But my old boss at Working Software, Dave Johnson, who wrote the chapter on direct mail in The High-Tech Marketing Companion, says that the Mail Preference Service has the very highest response rate of all - for certain kinds of product offers.

(For a long period of time Working Software made most of its sales through direct mail, and Dave became quite an expert on direct mail. This was after he nearly went bankrupt listening to "channel people".)

What kind of product offers sell through this list?

Studded dog collars, burglar alarms, personal security devices, gun magazines and in general products that are aimed at people who are concerned with personal security and just want to be left alone.

Being on the DMA opt-out list doesn't actually prevent you from receiving mail. Instead, members who care to bother (usually because they don't want to waste money sending mail to people who won't respond) get the list periodically and use it to prune their in-house lists. So for lists whose owners bother to go to the trouble, you will be taken off some lists.

But studded dog-collar vendors just take the list and print up mailing labels!

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

In general, this wasn't received with enthusiasm ;-> but you'd be suprised how much support it got.

The particular thing that drove me to advocate this was that when I was Product Development Manager at Working Software, it was such a small company that at times we had no dedicated tech support, so I fielded anything that couldn't be handled by the nontechnical clerical staff, or when we were doing enough business to hire a support tech, we were also moving enough products I had to back her up because of the increased call volume.

The result was that I got immediate feedback on product quality and useabilty problems. If I shipped a product with a serious bug or that had some weird UI that the users didn't understand, about 200 people would call me up and let me know personally that I screwed up.

This did a lot for product quality, and although it was difficult to bear at times, I found it very rewarding that many customers would say "You're Michael Crawford? The guy in the about box?" and I'd say "Yeah." and they'd get all amazed.

Sometimes for kicks I'd have a user open the about box and say, "You see the guy's name there? That's me."

But when I was at Apple, I was one of perhaps 500 engineers involved in system software, and there were thousands of engineers, and our the closest customer service was in a different city, and most of it was in Texas (Apple is headquartered in Cupertino, California).

The closest that we came to contact with a real user was the occasional contact with a third party developer we had, but even that was usually handled by developer tech support.

Now I'm sure Apple felt they didn't want their expensive engineers devoting their time to customers problems - they have much cheaper staff for that, and probably better trained too. But what few people seemed to realize, until they heard my arguments on this point, was that Apple's OS Engineering staff, the whole engineering staff, needed this contact with the end user in order to be able to do their jobs well.

That's one of the reasons small companies are often able to come in and steal the market away from larger, well-established companies with deep pockets - a real awareness of user needs and user reactions to the product. (Also smaller companies have the ability to adapt more quickly to changing market conditions)

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

It ran in only 8 kb of memory and we specifically advertised that it would capture:

• Text that was backspaced over
• Text that was typed and then highlighted and deleted
• Text that was typed and never saved
• Text that was saved but lost due to file corruption or accidental file deletion

Last Resort Programmer's edition will save menu key equivalents to aid testing and debugging and tech support. It helps you reconstruct the sequence of events before a crash.

And yes it would capture passwords but we had the option to pause it or disable it entirely.

I wrote the Mac version but it's available also for DOS and Windows (written by other guys).

Although we tried to make it very obvious when Last Resort was installed on a machine, we get occasional email from people asking how they can make it invisible. We don't tell them, but really if you want to make a hidden keystroke recorder it's pretty trivial.

Don't just worry about the FBI doing this to you - worry about your employer or loved ones. Not long after I shipped Last Resort, one of the editors of MacUser Magazine thanked me personally for it because he'd caught his girlfriend having an online affair - her hot and heavy emails were in his keystroke file.

He later wrote a novel that talked about a lot of software products with fictional names but that were obviously taken from real products. I'm proud to say that the faux-Last Resort saved the world in his novel.

Also I get occassional spam from companies selling keystroke recorders that aren't just invisible, but they encrypt the keystroke files and upload them to a location of your choice. They say this is meant for employee monitoring...

Such monitoring, by the way, has been held to be legal by the courts.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

The result is that it is very difficult for the developer to bring the product out on a competing platform, and it discourages users from moving to a different OS when they feel the vendor isn't serving their needs (because they can't get the solutions to their problems).

If the developer doesn't want to deal with the OS vendor anymore, he's really got a problem - either suffer under the vendor's thumb, or make a great deal of personal sacrifice to move to a different operating system.

I was sick of Apple so I wrote I'm worried about my future. That's why I'm a Be developer.

And in fact I shipped (and still do support) on of the first commercial applications for the BeOS, Spellswell from Working Software.

Nothing Be ever did made any sense, and while there are individuals at the company that I regard highly, on the whole I felt the company to be uniquely unresponsive and incompetent.

And just when they were showing some promise of shipping enough BeOS installations that I had some hope of making more than the measly couple hundred bucks I'd earned in royalties in the three years I'd been working on Spellswell, they announced a "change in focus" and said they weren't going to support the desktop anymore, except for the extent necessary to use it as a development platform for their new Strategy Du Jour, Internet Appliances.

After I posted on BeDevTalk that Some of Us Work for a Living, the moderator told me he was fed up with a developer who was trying to discuss business issues of concern to Be's third-party developers on Be's third-party developer mailing list. That was my last message to bedevtalk - he unsubscribed me.

I've been working on a really challenging C++ application for a few months, and after reading C++ Answers with Bjarne Stoustrup I got excited about really digging into the basics of programming - but from the perspective of a developer with 13 years of work experience and a lot of shipping products.

I bought a few books, mostly on C++ and also hit some websites and newsgroups, and I became a much better programmer as a result. And I really felt that I did better to spend my time on core architectural and language issues rather than dealing with OS-specific nits or tool issues. And so I wrote Study Fundamentals, Not APIs, Tools or OSes.

So this brings me back to being used by operating systems vendors to serve their material needs at my expense and the cost of much personal pain. If you become a better programmer by learning the basics better, to can fluidly go from OS to OS without much of a learning curve.

But there's the problem that you have to use some API to code your application to, and while Java claims to be "platform-independent" it is really a proprietary platform in itself - just try making use of platform-specific code in a Java application, yes you can do it with the Java Native Interface but it is difficult and an assault on the Java developer's senses to write a dll in C or C++ to load into the runtime.

So what you really need is a cross-platform application framework that you can write in with a language such as C++, that comes preconfigured with easy-to-use preprocessor symbols so you can drop into OS-specific code at your whim, and will compile from a single sourcebase to native machine code for multiple operating systems.

Funny that, since December '99 I've been writing a multithreaded special-purpose graphics editor that is also an HTTP client with just such a cross-platform application framework. I can develop on Mac or Windows as the need suits me and switch back and forth at a moments notice (especially now that I've got filesharing between my machines). My client only asked for Mac and Windows versions but I could port to BeOS or Linux in a few days. The framework is called ZooLib.

It was written by my friend Andrew Green of The Electric Magic Company, originally to insulate himself from Apple's API nonsense. (Do you remember when all progress on developer tools at Apple and Symantec stopped while they went off into the sunset to develop Bedrock, itself a cross-platform application framework and an immense investment of time and money - and then abandoned it? If it hadn't been for then-tiny Metrowerks Apple would have gone out of business after shipping the first PowerPC Macs, because there would have been no native PPC compilers.)

He felt that if he could code to his own layer and Apple changed their API, he'd just have to reimplement the OS-specific layer and he'd be working again. But then a little more work and he'd be cross-platform...

If you click that link today you'll just get a placeholder page. But just wait a few days...

(For practical reasons the source itself, mailing lists and so on will be provided at http://zoolib.sourceforge.net/ once it's released.)

While ZooLib is to be newly released to the public it is not new code. It has been in use in commercial products for about five years - and in development in my own since last December. Part of why Andy gave me the code and I've been working with it is to give him meaningful architectural feedback and detailed bug reports so he can prepare it for public release.

I've been urging Andy to release the source as-is for a couple of years but his standards are incredibly high for a programmer. Andy's code doesn't just work, it is correct.

Andy spares no effort or time to fix the smallest problems (this is especially important in multithreaded code - think about reference counted smart pointers that are operated on by different threads, as you can do with Zoolib), and part of why he's been delaying the release is to improve the overall architecture.

For more details, including relevant quotes from Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's Findings of Fact and Final Judgement discussing why Microsoft felt it was more important than anything to suppress cross-platform API's, such as Netscape plug-ins, Java, Intel Native Signal Processing, Lotus Notes, Apple Quicktime (runs on Windows too!) and RealNetworks' multimedia technology, please read my early draft of:

The Cross-Platform Manifesto

Thank you for your attention.

Regards,

A number of people are actively trying to organize such things, but the results so far haven't been promising and the consensus on the reason way is that programmers are just a bunch of pussies too concerned with bringing home the immediate bacon rather than lift a finger to look after their future.

Yeah, that's right - you. Pussies. You may have the balls to post anonymously on Slashdot, but when was the last time you not only voted, but gave money to a political campaign whose position you supported, and did volunteer work for it.

Last time for me was '92, I'm afraid, when the president of Working Software and I organized the Jerry Brown for President campaign in Santa Cruz, California in the company offices.

I donated the maximum Jerry would accept during that campaign - $100.

I don't think she would have understood if I told her I'd been featured on Slashdot and had to take breaks from her to go post...

I did read through some of the comments here earlier this evening and I must say that this has been an excellent discussion. The sheer number of comments posted shows I must have struck a chord with the community - and my experience with other programmers shows that this is a common problem with others.

I'll post tomorrow what the folks on comp.lang.c++ and comp.sys.mac.programmer.misc had to say but they were in general along the same lines as what was posted here:

• Take a break
• Get a life
• Do something fun that doesn't involve computers
• Engage in vigorous physical exercise
• associate with the attractive sex
• Step back from low-level coding and do other software-oriented things like design, discussions with a coworker or documentation

I did in particular step back to think about software from a different level than coding, but I didn't actually do design work. Instead, I just cracked open some good programming texts. If you haven't read much lately there's probably a lot of good stuff that will stimulate you and improve the effectiveness of your work - check the book reviews online at The Association of C and C++ Users (and consider joining it - I did, a couple months ago).

One thing I consider important in the reading I did was that I wasn't looking for solutions to the problem at hand. Rather, I was trying to get back to something I'd been missing for a long time and wanted to indulge in - the sheer joy of learning for its own sake.

It was the case that the books I was reading were pertinent to my work but I wasn't searching them for solutions. I was just reading and flipping through them as my curiousity led me. And when solutions to my problem would occur to me, I'd put them out of my mind until the time I'd decided ahead of time would be my time to resume work.

What actually got me going again was that I had such a flood of ideas and they had crystallized so clearly I was able to sit down and implement my solution in a day and it worked just fine - still does.

Something else that helped stimulate me was the website on Extreme Programming.

A lot of the approaches there really appeal to me. Particularly I like the ideas they have that could be generally expressed as "design by coding" and are mentioned I think by Stroustrup in the intro to More C++ Gems as "expressing designs in the code".

That is, rather than doing a bunch of up-front modeling using diagrams like OMT or UML or what have you, you just write code - but you are designing in the code, so they emphasize in extreme programming that you constantly rewrite the code as designs gel.

One thing that saddnes me though is that Extreme Programming also suggests programming in pairs. This is something I used to do with Dave Johnson when we were at Working Software together. We'd help each other through hard spots and just rap about politics and stuff and go have coffee or a beer and get a lot of work done.

Now I live at the End of the Internet and I'm working for myself as a one-man consultant shop. It has its advantages (I can work at home and set my own hours) but one big disadvantage is that I work very much alone and there's no one around to bounce ideas off of.

I have other programmer friends and I do call them up but they all have their own gigs - it's not the same.

On another important note, several people both here, privately via email and in the newsgroups raised the possibility of this being clinical depression.

Well that is something I was well aware of and had been considering. Depression is something I have been dealing with all my life, as you will see in another slashdot article I posted:

Manic Depressive Geeks

I didn't used to be (woefully so) but now I'm very introspective about my mental and emotional state. I have to be. I didn't used to be but now I just won't tolerate the depths of misery that I just thought were part of the normal human condition.

But I don't think that what was happening to me was the sort of depression that I usually consider. There are "endogenous" and "reactive" depressions. Endogenous depression just happens to you and is usually caused by chemical imbalances in the brain (shortages of serotonin or norepinephrine) and is what's usually experienced with Manic Depression, while reactive depression is (naturally) a reaction to external events, like a personal tragedy.

Life has been really hectic for me for a long time, with the turbulence of my consulting business, falling in love with a woman from another country, planning a wedding, moving to Canada, and just trying to keep it all together. Maybe if all that hadn't been going on, I wouldn't have gotten stuck. But basically, I just got stuck.

Robert Pirsig talks about stuckness and ways to overcome it extensively in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I recommend highly (and probably ought to reread). And I really was suffering the kind of stuckness he described, the stuckness that occurs when you just want to get your bike fixed and you break the head off a crucial screw...

(Robert Pirsig went nuts while a grad student in philosophy at the University of Chicago. He had shock treatment back when it wasn't very carefully administered and lost nearly all his memories. The book is about his motorcycle trip across to some of the places he used to live to visit old friends he hardly remembered, along with an amazingly enlightening discussion of what he'd been so obsessed about that it drove him crazy - what is Quality?)

Someone mentioned meditation in the discussion. I had found reading about Zen and doing meditation on my own was of profound help in overcoming my mental illness back in the really dark days. But as things got better and my career got in shape and I stopped seeking so much and concentrated on learning to program and making a place in the world for myself I drifted away from that, something that I think is really wrong.

During my time off my then-fiance lent me her copy of Chogram Trungpa's The Path is the Goal, A basic handbook of buddhist meditation. It is published by Shambhala Publications

I'm afraid I read a little bit of it then when my time off came to an end I set it aside and started thinking again.

One of the little traps our mind has for us is thinking. I like to think, and I'm particularly well-developed at it. But my wife tell me that we are not our thoughts, and actually our thoughts can lead us astray. And when I was getting so stuck on my programming problem I was thinking really hard and trying to solve my problem by thinking harder.

One thing you do in meditation is to stop thinking. Hardened programmers might find that a frightening concept. And you can't really try to stop thinking - you just sit, and look, but not too hard, and experience

You cannot experience your world as it really is and be thinking.

One thing that Pirsig discusses in his book is how to bring the wisdom attained at the rarified mountain peaks of meditation down to practical value in everyday experience. He uses fixing a motorcycle as an illustrative example but when I read the book I found that I was able to program better because I could "become one with the machine".

My wife doesn't really believe this is possible but I think it is, that one can meditate while carrying out an intellectual activity like computer programming. That's something that I seem to have lost long ago, that I had years ago when I was not nearly so knowledgeable but I did have the ability to really lose myself in the machine all day long without distraction - and without getting tired or worn out.

Don't forget:

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

I am one of the few developers to actually ship a commercial application, Spellswell from Working Software. I've kept Spellswell actively maintained over a couple of years, it is now at version 1.0.5.

So I didn't appreciate it when Be announced it was dropping active support for the desktop and "refocusing" on Internet Appliances.

Now promoting the system for Internet appliances is fine, but Be had spent years promoting its system as a platform for multimedia content creation, and in my view it is the best platform for desktop software. Check out, for instance, Gobe Software's Gobe Productive, one of the best integrated applications available.

While Be still has a desktop operating system and gives it away for free, it has made it clear that there will be no further desktop-specific development for the operating system; if a feature or bug-fix makes it into the system it will be because it is needed for Internet Appliances, and not because it is needed for the desktop.

I repeatedly tried to bring this failure to live up to its commitments on bedevtalk and beusertalk and while other professional developers supported my position, I was constantly shot down by the hobbyists and Be's own employees.

Finally I tried to point out the error of their ways in some detail by posting this to bedevtalk:

Some of Use Work For a Living

in which I pointed out that the appropriate response to criticism from developers like me would be for Be employees who subscribe to the list to communicate our concerns to senior management.

How did Be respond?

Tom Maddox, listmaster@be.com, unsubscribed me and asked the list if they'd prefer to have the entire list moderated.

Before you decide to devote time and energy to developing BeOS software, I ask you to consider whether you wish to take the risk to invest your time and money in a system that is only available from a company that has not only proved it cannot keep its commitments, it has stated repeatedly it does not want its dishonesty pointed out to it and will actively work to censor those who would work to correct its behaviour.

One of the reasons I am working to reorient my consulting business to take primarily Linux work is that I feel it is a mistake for any third party software developer to depend on any API, particularly an operating system, that they do not have the source code to.

If you feel you must support a closed-source operating system or API, I urge you to require the API vendor to sign a contract guaranteeing they will support the API forever - both in terms of maintainence and marketing - or else they will reimburse you for your lost revenue and opportunity cost if they fail to live up to their commitments.

I had much the same experience with Apple Computer which is why I became a BeOS developer.

BTW - My fiance told me that being unsubscribed from bedevtalk is like being kicked off the design committee for the Edsel. It's a beautiful OS and the engineering quality is excellent, but the sales prevention team there, uh, I mean the management, is determined to do everything they can to prevent the business from succeeding.

Perhaps Internet Appliances are a good idea, but after the galling lack of marketing cluefulness shown when they were on the desktop I seriously doubt they can get it together to succeed in the Internet Appliance arena either.

If you are an Internet Appliance manufacturer, think about whether you want to make your livelihood dependent on a company with a proven track record of failing to live up to its commitments. Consider that in many was QNX is a better OS for appliance and you can get a developer kit for free.

I don't think Linux is a very good platform either for the desktop or Internet Appliances but because it is free software that problem is capable of being addressed.

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Apple had always promoted the use of its new "Apple Event" technology by giving spellcheckers as an example; instead of propriety OEM spellcheckers that are different for every application, the user could have a single speller that is shared among all their applications. Since Working Software published Spellswell we felt we should take the lead in this.

It works really well and in fact can be used for any text operation, such as grammar checkers, address books, HTML verification and the like. Text encryption would work fine and I was working on a text encryptor but never finished it. I since led the binding of it to the BeOS (where is uses BMessages instead of Apple events) which you can read about here and I'd like to make an XWindows version, perhaps using the Corba API's provided by Gnome.

Recently I was contacted by someone who was searching for prior art. It seems someone patented interapplication spellchecking protocols and he has the hope that Word Services was developed early enough to invalidate that patent. I don't know the patent in question or who holds the patent.

What I especially have a gripe about is that I only started working on this method because the idea of it had been promoted for several years by Apple as an obvious application of a new technology they were promoting.

Mike