It’s Amazing Any Software Ever Works

The Rocket Scientist and I just had our first martini in days. Actually, one of us (cough * me * cough) is not a big drinker, but still … Alcohol is against tribal law and I do believe in respecting the customs anywhere I am visiting. If I can’t respect your customs, I won’t go there.

After being up until the not-so-wee hours of the morning fixing every last bug we could find and adding every last feature we could think of, we did our live demo for the teachers at Tate Topa Tribal School today (thank you!!!) and headed the 25 mile round trip into the nearest town where we could buy a drink to celebrate.

Now it is nearly 2 a.m. and I am catching up on everything else I put off to get this done. All I can say is that it is amazing that any complex piece of software works ever. We needed to get the PHP to work with the Javascript integrated with HTML 5 which, of course, does not work on browsers earlier than Internet Explorer 9 which does not work on Windows XP which is all that runs in the school computer labs!

Then there is the fact that different browsers recognize different video formats making it necessary to upload three different versions of each video clip.

Every time we got something fixed, we just got further along in the game until it quit working. This is called progress.

After we met with two of our cultural experts (thank you to Dr. Erich Longie and Lorraine Greybear !!) we made a bunch of changes. Then, we took down pages of suggestions from the teachers today that will take up the next two months.

Different colors to make the path stand out. Different background to make instructions easier to read. Better graphics when the students get answers right. More, new and different music. More sounds.

Better everything.

I am tired just thinking about it. We will put up a link to some samples in a week or two once we have made some more progress.

Hurray for us. We got it working. And it didn’t suck.