Things have been very busy recently as Fall/Autumn usually is. October is the month of Birthdays, Halloween, visiting relatives and plenty of leaf clearing. November was the same except it had Thanksgiving and a bad cold and a trip to the Emergency Room thrown in for good measure. Also, I’ve been trying to complete my piece comparing the Seam and Spring Web Flow (SWF) frameworks, as well as finalizing my JTexture procedural texture library, and writing a Depthcharge clone in Java, all while trying to read the books I got for my birthday in October. Hopefully, the fruits of my labor will materialize here over the next few weeks or so.

My Seam vs. Spring Web Flow article has been almost complete for a while pending one or two final readings. It’s currently at 70+ pages in the PDF version and I’m down to a final read through before I put them out there. I’m hoping to put them out over the next week or so as time permits. I’ve also been getting some experience with docBook which,
while it is a neat tool, it can difficult to wrangle with.

I’ve also been reading Effective Java (2nd Edition) by Joshua Bloch which is a cracking good read. Sometimes it’s easy to skip over the basics of a language, so it’s good to go back and really look at them with a professional eye and learn some really good tips that can have an effect throughout your code. For example, my procedural texture mapping framework will be undergoing some changes based on ideas I have read about in Effective Java, particularly Item 2, using a builder class instead of a complex constructor. Some of the texture classes have many parameters so I’ll switch over to something more manageable than 8 parameter constructors.

As Christmas is nearly upon us, I have shifted into my retro computing mode, where I start reminiscing about the days of computing long gone so I decided to write a quick game. I’m nearly finished writing a Depthcharge clone, and decided to make it a learning exercise. Rather than plan every detail out beforehand, I thought I would play it all by ear and see how easy it would be to refactor at a later date when I discovered my design mistakes. At some point I’ll document my findings.

Anyway, I’ll hopefully be getting a few posts up between now and the end of the year. I have some more projects I want to start looking at once I complete my current ones.

Like most people I enjoy Pizza, especially when I order in rather than making my own, and like most people I consult the stack of coupons that arrive in the mail daily. Personally, I live in an area where there are no really good pizza places to capture my loyalty, so price becomes the deciding factor.

One trend I have noticed recently is the tendency to offer deals which are either buy one get one free, or offering value meals with a pizza, wings, salad and 2 liter for $20 or so, or offering a pizza with 1 topping for a low price. Here’s the problems with that.

It’s great for people with large families, or when your kids are having a party or you invite friends over to watch a game or something. However, it does leave a certain demographic out of options. My wife is not a big fan of pizza, so usually I’m the only one eating it (she will steal a slice or two later in the evening though). I usually prefer to have some left over (lunch the next day) and I like a number of toppings on my pizza. If pizza shops are offering to feed a family of 4 for 20 bucks, surely I can get a decent sized pizza with multiple toppings for about $10?

See, if I buy a 12 inch with two toppings for $10, and they have a buy one get one free, I end up with 2 crusts, 4 toppings and 2 cheese toppings. How about you just keep the other crust and throw the extra cheese and toppings on the other pizza? I end up with 4 toppings and extra cheese for $10 and you’ve saved the hassle of making, cooking and boxing a pizzas. Incidentally, Gina’s Pizza in Strongsville does exactly this, I can get a large (16 inch) with 3 toppings for $10 with a coupon. They are also very good.

Also, when you offer a cheap and cheerful pizza at a discount at least make it as good as your standard pizzas. Some pizza shops here have pizzas already cooked and waiting for walk-in customers to stop by and pick one up. Trouble is that there is very little cheese and pepperoni on them, and there is about 2 inches between the start of the cheese and the edge of the crust. Ok, it is a cheap pizza, but at the same time, it’s not great advertising for how well you make pizzas. If you are going to run a loss leader, at least make it something that is going to reflect and advertise your business effectively. Businesses often offer inferior products at a discount, but when doing so, they brand them under a different name, not as a ‘lite’ version. With pizza, it’s a little more difficult to do, but the pizza shops do try and brand them as discount pizzas to distinguish. However, that distinction is not always clear.

How can this translate into something more interesting than Pizza? Well, it’s worth remembering this when you are designing marketing and sales strategies. If you are going to offer discounts, make sure it is something that can apply to smaller businesses as well as bigger ones. If you offer 3 for 2 on training courses, that’s not going to do the smaller company, with only 2 developers, much good. You are giving them a free training course that they are going to throw away, or pay to send someone else who perhaps doesn’t need the training, but they may as well use the free space.

If you are going to offer a home or personal version of software (as opposed to professional), make sure it still does everything the user needs to a degree. You don’t need to include every bell and whistle, but make sure it is usable and doesn’t reflect badly on you and therefore dissuade them from upgrading to the professional version. Also make sure the two versions are clearly marked and the user is aware that there is a professional version that comes with additional functions. Otherwise they might just think that this is the product and the one offered by your competitor for a little more cost has more features.