09.20.05
Monkey and pirates: two great tastes that go great together
eclectech : your pants pirate message
The Flying Spaghetti Monster must be pleased.
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09.18.05
iSight and H.323
I really wish iChat would talk H.323. I don’t honestly care about NetMeeting, but I want things to “just work” when chatting with people who have hardware videophones. I got things working reasonably well with ohphoneX and my brand-spanking-new iSight.
Except it was a pain in the ass. I would mysteriously get no incoming video. It was choppy. I couldn’t do anything but a full-screen chat, which meant I didn’t get the low-battery warning that I luckily caught in time.
That isn’t to say I don’t appreciate the free software, I really am glad it exists. I mean, how else would I justify getting an iSight? 
I’m just willing to pay for something that just worked.
09.16.05
No nano for me.
The Apple store near me is out of everything but the 2GB white model. The white wouldn’t bother me. I really want the 4GB model, so I’ll wait a while yet.
09.15.05
That’s not a unit test!
“A test is not a unit test if:
- It talks to the database
- It communicates across the network
- It touches the file system
- It can’t run at the same time as any of your other unit tests
- You have to do special things to your environment (such as editing config files) to run it.”
This really rings true for what I’ve seen lately. Partly it’s a matter of syncing up definitions. I’ve worked at jobs where “unit testing” meant “go test the webapp on all the different browsers.” I call method-level (or object-level) tests unit tests. Lately a lot of people have been calling tests that require a full database, populated with lots of data in a very specific setup unit tests. It just makes me want to scream, “That’s not a unit test!”
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write tests that require a network, or a database, or anything in that list, for that matter… I just call those integration tests. They’re no less good, they’re just for a different purpose. In “nirvana land” those are used to ensure that the QA environment is good, that all your code compiled together is good, there are no configuration issues or there are no unintended side-effects, that sort of stuff.
The tricky part is explaining that to people. I get it, I mean, if you haven’t seen “nirvana land” it’s hard to grok it. It’s where you don’t notice the code doesn’t have any comments. It’s where you don’t have to think so hard about every change because you trust your tests to catch it. I miss “nirvana land”.
I have a plan, though.
- Send link to all the developers you know.
- …
- Profit!
Stupid underpants gnomes and their half-baked plans. I need a step 2.
As an odd side-note, you don’t need automated unit tests to be there. My first experience with perfectly readable code was the gtk+ code for one of the early releases of the Gimp post-motif. It’s just that automated unit tests happen to make it a lot easier, therefore it takes less smarts (i.e., drunk programming), less time and just plain less effort.
I was wrong.
Rumor-mongering is still fun, even when you’re totally off.
They did announce the “iTunes phone.” Just no over-the-air iTunes Music Store purchases. Maybe they can do it, they just didn’t want to.
iTunes 5. Normally I wouldn’t be excited, except it has one feature I’ve been wanting for the longest time. Playlist folders. No more having to scroll through a huge list of playlists. Why do I need a restart to install iTunes? It makes no sense. Update: it turns out it was probably the iTunes Phone driver that required the reboot.
After the reboot, it just got worse. As soon as I started it up, it told me it was converting my old library and gave me a progress bar. The bar didn’t move. Ever. It just spun. The only indication anything was going on was the fact that iTunes was at nearly 100% CPU utilization. When it finally finished, it told me it failed and was backing up my old library. Things seemed mostly intact, fortunately.
Except, my podcasts were gone. *sigh* It turns out that I wasn’t the only one with the podcast problem. All that was left was a ‘Podcasts’ playlist which had all the files I had already downloaded. I spent entirely too long re-subscribing to every podcast in the playlist. I wish I had realized sooner all I had to do was select everything in that playlist and drag it to the Podcast source. *sigh*, again.
Almost more annoying than everything else, iTunes reset the added date for everything in my library. This is just plain annoying and never should happen. I figure I would suffer, the only playlist I have that depends on it is “Recently Added” and I would keep bumping it out a couple days at a time until I got back up to the 30 days.
Of course, iTunes had different plans. I’m not sure what caused it, but I had to go through the entire process a second time. It happened right after I got a Quicktime update, so maybe that was it. iTunes seems to let me quit and start it again without trouble now. Hopefully it won’t happen again.
Now that I’ve had iTunes for a few days, I have to say it’s growing on me. Fortunately, not everything is bad about it. It’s just the really horrible first impression sucked. I like the new look, though I hated it at first. The new shuffle features rock. I end up much a much better mix in the Party Shuffle. Again folders rock. Though, they’re not spring-loaded like the finder. I’m sure they’ll iron that out later.
Smart playlists now can select tracks based on whether it’s a podcast. That’s nifty. I really want a playlist of all the least recent, unlistened podcast in my library. Smart playlists won’t do the trick, but maybe I can whip up an applescript.
It’s strange that video podcasts don’t seem to get that podcast flag set.
And the one more thing of the day… the iPod Nano. I so want one. I did the math, I think I could fit all the music I know I like and then some on the 4 gig. I think I want the black one. I think I’m actually going to get it, too.
The scariest bit of all: the Harry Potter iPod. Someone hold me.
“Building a Smarter To-Do List”
Merlin Mann explains how to break up a to-do list way better than I ever could.
43 Folders | Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part I
09.14.05
Posters
I’ve wanted some posters for the workout room for a while now. Maybe I should just go ahead and make my own.
Large Format Printing with iPhoto:
“I just got back the 20″x30″ print of the panorama I shot at the top of Diamondhead (a series of photos stitched together automagically with Autostitch).It looks absofriggin’ AWESOME. I mean, wow. Completely blown away at the quality of the print. Looks like a professional poster.”
Or maybe something for the office.
09.12.05
Amusing Google Results
Go to Google, type in “failure” and click “I’m Feeling Lucky”. The results are priceless.
09.07.05
Workout 2005-09-06
I’ve been slack. No excuses, really, just been slack, five days without a workout. This was last night…
Muscle Workout B
—————-
Close-grip Incline Barbell Press 6t10t 4-6×4 170#x5/170#x5/170#x3/170#x1
Underhand-grip bent-over row (barbell) 4-6×4 150#x4/150#x4/150#x4/150#x4
Wide-grip Bench Press 3b6b 4-6×4 175#x5/175#x5/175#x5/175#x2
Odly, I backslid on close-grip incline bench. I’m not sure why. Wide-grip was essentially one extra rep total, even though I only put it up twice on the last set.
09.04.05
Charlie Foxtrot
CNN.com - Chertoff: Katrina scenario did not exist - Sep 3, 2005
Now they claim it was impossible to predict a category 5 hurricane in the Gulf and the levy in New Orleans breaking at the same time. Say what?!?!
Bullshit, plain and simple. I hope everyone recognizes the bald-faced lie this time around.
At least we can’t re-elect Bush this time. Maybe we can even get a non-Repbulican.