So, what's a Dogwatch?

Dogwatch:


1. Nautical. either of two two-hour watches, the first from 4 to 6 p.m., the latter from 6 to 8 p.m.

2. The complete failure of a developer to come up with a company name, thus having to revert to his Navy days for something - anything at all. (This definition obviously mine)

Yep. A while ago I was thinking about publishing some shareware, so I needed a company name for such individual projects, as opposed to the stuff I do with Mark 9 Systems, LLC (Targetware).

So in a fit of desperation, I came up with Dogwatch Software. Why? Well, I was in the Navy, the dogwatch is a Navy watch in the evening and I do most of my work at night. And with that massive effort and reasoning, I had a company name, and then decided not to finish the software products.

I've never been tremendously happy with the name, so I'm always open to suggestions. The best names are short and easily remembered. Bungie, Panic, Blizzard, Pangea, etc. But I haven't come up with any of those and I'm now several years into Dogwatch, so I'll stick with it until I think up something better.

So there you go, the very unremarkable history of the name.

The purpose for the blog is to catalog my independent projects, which at this point, primarily consists of XSquawkBox (http://www.xsquawkbox.net), the VATSIM client (http://vatsim.net) for X-plane.

Often I'll talk about the motivations for working on one feature versus another, particular difficulties I'm facing, or just other random facts and trivia.