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• Philosophy
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Welcome To The LonePenguin Software Project

The LonePenguin Software Project is the fruit realized from countless hours of development effort. My name is Erik Johnson and I have been developing software professionally for 20 years. The products that I create are made available at this site. This is your starting point to gain more information, download evaluation copies, purchase and download registered copies, and get support for the products that I produce.

Products

• LockMaster

  The easy to use, portable, encryption and decryption program. The latest version 3 represents a full makeover and redesign that retains the best of the version 2 favorite, while adding more capabilities that users have been wanting.

  Learn more and get it by visiting the LockMaster site: click here
• ProCon

  The decision aid that makes constructing Pro and Con lists easy and helpful. ProCon has a simple and intuitive user interface and produces a decisive result. Whether you are at home or in a professional environment, ProCon will be your question resolution tool of choice.

  Learn more and get it by visiting the ProCon site: click here

Product Design Philosophy

When a software developer decides to develop a product, whether a large corporation or single individual, they contribute a design philosophy to the final product. This design philosophy can influence the product in many different ways. Several factors, such as budget, schedule, and development staff familiarity with various platform technologies all play their part in how the design philosophy is shaped.

Each software developer's design philosophy is different and emphasizes different design construction methodologies. Here are the elements of design approach that I find important and value as each product I create is developed:

• Zero Technology Stack (ZTS) Architecture

How many times have you come across a software product that looks like it meets all or most of your functional requirements ... the Web Page for the product outlines the product's capabilities in the most enticing way, complete with screenshots of the product in action ... your curiosity is peeked. The product even comes with a trial version. It's time to download it and give it a try.

Now comes the let down, there's a requirements list ... what's this?

1. I need to have ABC Database Server installed? If memory serves, isn't that Database Server kind of pricey?
2. Does my Operating System have 123.45 enhancement patch applied to it? I'm not sure, how can I find out?
3. It says that I need to have device driver DD0987 installed. I'm not sure if I have that one installed either. Come to think of it, why would I need to have any device driver installed to make this product work? The only devices that I would use to interface with it are a keyboard, mouse, and monitor (it wouldn't even need to be one of those cool high resolution types for my intended purpose).
4. It says that it needs version 6 update 21 (or higher) of the Java JRE to be installed. Hmm, I already tried to update to that version last month and my other absolutely mission critical applications suddenly started generating stop you dead in your tracks errors when it's installed. I went back to version 5 update 10 of the Java JRE and won't even consider upgrading to version 6 until my other needed installed applications work correctly with it.
5. Why would this product need to have a minimum of 4 gigabytes of memory installed to work? If I do decide to install this application in my organization, the workstations would only have 2 gigabytes of memory in them. Hmm, I wonder if I should think about upgrading the RAM in my organization's workstations?
6. The requirement that my system's CPU clock be 3.5 GHz or faster (or equivalent) seems kind of weird. The application isn't doing anything all THAT special to make it realistic to need that much CPU horsepower ... does it?
7. The product needs to have the latest Adobe® Flash Player installed. I seem to remember that my virus scanner doesn't like having the full standalone Flash Player installed for some reason. I can keep the Web Brower plug-in installed (my virus scanner doesn't mind that), however I don't really have the time to figure out why it didn't like having the full standalone version installed, man, what a pain! Also, why a Flash Player would be needed for this product to do its thing is not at all clear.

There's a reason why the manufacturer of the product you're looking at would place all these requirements on you, the user. They're leveraging the capabilities of these other products to save development time and resources for themselves. At your expense!

Call me old-fashioned (and I'm trying not to date myself here), however I remember a time when software could be downloaded or copied from a disk, and executed/run without a complicated prerequisite installation and configuration procedure. No mess, no fuss. You just run the program.

The ZTS architecture design concept is one where the user does not need to have an endless list of 3rd party products, undue amount of Operating System upgrade patches, and other excessively pricey hardware owned in order to use it. This means that only reasonably contemporary Operation System elements are necessitated for a products use. The type of Operating System elements would be basic stuff like having a supported Operating System installed on your computer. If networking is a fundamental functional element of the product capabilities, only standard equipment and software device adapters (free of special Operating System patches) should be required. If a Web Browser is utilized, the ZTS product will not require the absolute latest Web Browser of only a specific product vendor be installed, rather any Web Browser of virtually any version be installed. The ZTS designed product will operate with reasonable efficiency and throughput when the Operating System minimum CPU, RAM memory, and disk requirements are available.

A premium is placed on the ZTS architecture design concept in every LonePenguin Software Project product.

• Multiple Operating System (Platform) Support

One common limitation of many software applications is that they are available on only one Operating System (O/S) platform. In order to prevent this happening to LonePenguin Software Project applications, I've developed a logic library common to all my applications that is specifically designed to be utilized in multiple O/S environments. It has been named: MaPeL (for [M]ulti-[P]latform [L]ibrary). This means that all LonePenguin Software Project applications developed gain the benefit of being available in the O/S platforms that the MaPeL library is compatible for.

Currently for all LonePenguin Software Project applications, the following Operating System environments are available:

1. MS-Windows (2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7)
2. Cygwin (supported MS-Windows Platform)
3. Linux (x86)
4. SUN/Solaris 10 and later (x86)

There are intermediate plans to add support for the following Operating System platforms:

1. Mac OS X (PowerPC)
2. SUN/Solaris 10 and later (Sparc)

Don't hesitate to provide feedback indicating that you'd like to see increased priority planning of the above additional O/S platforms. At the moment, it's something planned, however direct user feedback indicating that these platforms are desired sooner rather than later helps me prioritize whether I should place this migration/porting work higher relative to other development tasks.

Product Support/Contact Information

Whether you'd like to ask a question about a product or would just like to give feedback, there are two methods to do so. You can ...

1. Send an email to:
2. Submit a feedback message at this site. To do so, just click here

All LonePenguin Software Project products are supported through the Internet ONLY (via E-Mail and Web Site submitted messages).

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