Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day everybody. I hope you got presents from someone, because unfortunately you won't be getting a present from me. I had really hoped to get the first version to my beta testers today, but alas the planets were not in alignment.

I had a couple of items on my TODO list which I did not take into account that actually I had no experience in creating or deploying such things. Specifically, the webservice that Thinking Stuff uses. And also Thinking Stuff needs to be obfuscated before release, otherwise someone is going to come along and reverse-engineer my code in about 2 seconds.

Sure, reverse-engineering is theft, just the same as if they had broken into my house and stolen my computer. But hackers don't care. They don't care that some guy in Australia that spent more than a year developing some software on his own is going to miss out on a few dollars. They just care that they can do it.

So, I have to spend a minimum of US$400 to buy a licence for an obfuscator. Add that to the US$700 I paid for the commercial version of the charting module, and you'll see that I need about 6 paying subscribers just to break even. Oh, and then the US$50,000 or so that used to be my salary, and then you'll see that I need more than 250 paying subscribers to break even. Lucky I made this software for my own use first, and then decided to make it a commercial venture second :-)

Anyway, I had no experience in either of those 2 things I was talking about, but yet treated them just like the other items on the TODO list. So I struck some hurdles and wasn't able to overcome them by the due date I had given myself.

Soooooo, now the excuses are done, here's what's left:

• Buy obfuscator, and obfuscate.


• Deploy webservice to server.


• Go through and fix all the tiny things that would take longer to explain than to fix.


• Make webpage detailing all other known bugs.


• Create exe to set up the database Thinking Stuff uses.

What does this mean for the release date? Well, beta testers can expect something in a couple of days (and I'm using the vagueness of "a couple of days" on purpose). And then a week after the beta testers get something, if nothing's majorly wrong, I'll release the beta version, as in pre-release version, as in bugs-still-there version, to the public that wants to get started as soon as possible.

But, because I'm not clear yet on the specifics of the MySQL commercial licence, I won't be accepting any money for anything. So, downloading data will be free, and will continue to be free. Auto-trading will be free, to get a lot of people using it to hammer out any bugs. Backtesting will not be available. It's just the corner I painted myself into by coding everything with MySQL first, and them wanting US$500 per copy sold commercially.

If I was reading this as a customer, I don't think I would fully understand what was going on, so please feel free to ask questions through comments or email.