Marcus' Macro Scheduler Blog

Interesting video interview on Channel 9 with Bill Gates. Find out what he thinks about the Web and what the future holds for software. Microsoft have really become much more transparent lately. Channel 9 is a great way to get an insight into what goes on at Microsoft and meet some of the key people. Watch the interview.

I’ve resurrected an old thread in the forums called “Tell us how Macro Scheduler helps you, what you use it for”. It’s now a sticky so that it won’t get buried away again. We’re always interested to hear how Macro Scheduler is being used and how it benefits people. It’s helpful for other people to read examples of how Macro Scheduler is used in the real world and how it benefits businesses. So please dive in and write a few lines to explain what Macro Scheduler does for you.

What would you like to see in the next version of Macro Scheduler? As always, we’d like your input. You can post suggestions for new features and functions in the Enhancement Suggestions forum.

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 went public today. Finally IE has tabs! Download it here. ZDNet have a review here. This beta version is likely to have bugs and may not display some sites properly. Microsoft want site designers to test it out fully before it is shipped later this year with Vista. I’ve tested WebRecorder with IE7 and am pleased to note that there are no issues and web activity is recorded and played back correctly.

Recently I wrote about why it’s good to automate and how automation can help you learn software and improve its design. There are other good reasons for automating beyond the obvious benefits of saving time and money.

Documentation: Automation scripts are the ultimate way to document a process. A script that automates a process describes how to carry it out properly. Businesses need to document all their manual processes so that other people can carry out the task. By scripting the process it is being described at the same time. As well as saving time by automating it, it is also now easy for someone else to see how the process is carried out.

Contingency: Contingency goes hand in hand with documentation. If only one person in the organisation knows how to carry out a task there will be problems if and when that person is sick, on vacation, or leaves the company. Not all absences are planned. By documenting a process the business is ensuring that someone else can carry it out should the usual task owner be unavailable. Automation takes that one stage further. If the process is scripted and automated it is easy for someone else to take on ownership of the task in the future. The task will continue to run and the script itself describes how the task works.

Nothing much to do with Macro Scheduler this except that it finds me sitting in an office in Geneva today. 100 meters beneath me, under the ground, is a circular tunnel 35m wide, 55m tall and 27 km long. It goes right underneath houses and offices in the city of Geneva and surrounding areas. Sandwiched between Lake Geneva and the mountains is the largest particle accelerator in the world, run by CERN, where Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web. Next year they will accelerate protons around this tunnel and smash them together to create conditions similar to those that existed just after the Big Bang. They’re looking to prove the existence of a particle called the Higgs Boson, which is believed to provide matter its mass.

If you think you’ve created long scripts in Macro Scheduler you should see the software they’re creating at CERN to configure and measure the results from the particle accelerator. A friend of mine is debugging this C++ code right now and he says it takes 30-40 minutes to compile! That’s a lot of code. Think about that next time you’re debugging a script! 🙂

I was interviewed yesterday for Channel9’s New MicroISV Show. It will be aired in 5-6 weeks.

MicroISV is a new term to describe small software companies like MJT Net Ltd. ISV stands for Independent Software Vendor. The show is aimed at developers and small software companies and will give an insight into the benefits and challenges faced by small companies developing for the Windows platform.