The past few days have been a royal pain in the rectum. The rain has not let up, and I've had to dry out the floor pan twice in that time. I got frustrated enough to rip off the useless car cover and invested in some builders plastic sheeting. That sorted the wet pan out. But I still had to deal with all the parts I had lying around.

My workshop is my "garage", and due to my lack of discipline (and severe shortage of space) I had parts lying all over the place. Yesterday then, amongst dealing with sudden support requirements from work, I cleaned up the garage.

Down here, in my corner of the world, it's rainy season. This does not bode well for any attempts at restoring just about anything. But even more so for Christn. I'm not exactly flush with the green that makes the world go round. So I have to make do and be inventive when dealing with problems.

Yesterday I started stripping Christn's interior. As expected there was quite a bit of rust. But I got sorely ticked when I realized that somewhere in her past, someone glued down a horrible mix of hard-board and tar to her floor pan. This of course, served no purpose, other than to make sure that water got trapped between the pan and the boards.

Those that know me, know that I'm rather a bit of an old VW nut. Yes, old VW as in pre-seventies old.
If you've read my previous posts, you'll know that I purchased a 1968 VW Beetle last year (2008). She's doing great and making my life easy.

BUT! My dream has always been to own a Type 3 VW. If you don't know what that is, head over to wikipedia. There is quite a bit of information regarding these cars there.

Yes, there hasn't been a new article from me in quite some time. Even though I have been busy writing, I simply haven't been able to complete the articles I've been busy with. Individually they had merit, but the subjects were so inter-twined, that they were in fact a single article. So here it is, collectively reworked and condensed into one article.

How to get IT horribly wrong.
In my experience, there are three very easy ways to get IT wrong.

1. Politics

In part one of this article, my last question was:

“Ask yourself, what do you use your car for?”

Let's face it, the vast majority of us use our cars to travel from home to work and back again. We drop our kids off at school and we pick them up later in the day. We do the monthly grocery shopping and occasionally visit friends.

Yes there are those of you, that do far more than that with your cars, but take a look around you. How many people do you know, that do more?

I have recently had the misfortune of having the first and only car I ever bought new from a dealer, end up as a pile of worthless scrap. Remarkably, all that happened was a bearing through the block of the engine. As far as the rest of the car was concerned, it was in pristine condition. Well looked after and loved.

Have you ever met a developer that is? Are you one of them?

These are the guys and girls who hate it when others work on their code. They get very emotional about the fact, and treat the maintainer like the cause of a relationship gone sour. The new boy- or girlfriend of an ex-lover.

Those that know me, can hardly think of me without hearing me make some sort of comment about the superiority of Open Source products. This invariably leads to some debate, especially with those who also play in the IT industry.

So why do I support Open Source products, how do they improve my life to the point were I get very vocal about having to use proprietary products.

To answer this, I'll have to take you back a few years, when I first started to use Linux at home.

After more than a decade in the IT Industry, I have found, that few junior programmers make a success of their careers. Below I list what I consider the 10 commandments of a programmer should be. I'm convinced that any programmer that practice these will make a success of their career.

1. Know more than you “need” to know.
Knowing a programming language and being able to program in it is not enough. In today's IT industry it is hardly enough to qualify you for doing a few loose projects at home.