Testing - the pain, the power, the money

"The first big dirty secret of coding is that to do it well, you need to spend as much time coding around your core code as you spend, coding the core code itself." -- Testing - the pain, the power, the money

Feed the need

Bloglines is down this a.m. and boy do I feel...incomplete. I start the day with coffee and a read of my feeds. I'm only half the geek I normally am... Is there a 12 step recovery program for RSS/Atom addiction?

IronPython in Action

I have been reading IronPython in Action over the last few days and enjoying it, even though I'm not much of a .NET developer at the moment. Its main strength is the down-in-the-details treatment of building real .NET apps. It covers the basics well but does not shy away from more advanced stuff, both at a language level - like meta-programming - and at a .NET level, like DLR/Silverlight.

I don't know what my next big Windows app will be but I'm pretty sure it will be developed in IronPython with this book open beside me. Recommended.

Firefox+OpenOffice on Linux verus Firefox+OpenOffice on Windows

Today I ambled around an interesting difference between Linux and Windows w.r.t. Firefox+OpenOffice. Methinks I'm missing something but here is what I'm seeing:

- On Windows, I can enable Mozilla Plug-in in OpenOffice 3 and get OO docs to open read-only in a Firefox browser window. I can then click to open a full frame window in edit mode.

- On Linux, I can do the same but with mozplugger installed I can go a step further. I.e. I can open OO docs read/write in an embedded browser window. No need to click to enable editing, no need for an external window.

Is this an example of Firefox+OO being a more powerful combo on Linux than it is on Windows or am I missing a trick?

Name games

"Wordy names are hard. Good wordy names are really hard. Good, short, sort-friendly wordy names are fiendishly hard." --Name games

Would the real, authentic copy of the document please stand up?

"In your hand you have a 40 page document. On your computer screen you have an electronic document open in a word processor. You have been told they they are "the same document". How can you tell? What does it even mean to say that they are the "same"? Does it matter if there is no sure-fire way to prove it?" -- Would the real, authentic copy of the document please stand up?

Fractal Friday - Computer Science is broken

Joe Gregorio says that computer Science, at a deep and fundamental level, is broken. Nothing significant has happened for may years to move the state of the "science" forward.

I tend to agree. A lecturer of mine in college, in, oh what was it...1984 or so, used to say "nothing significant has happened since 1968". That was the year of Algol 68. I think he could make the same statement today.

Now I am more of an information-guy than an algorithmics-guy but I would be inclined to say that nothing significant has happened since the invention of the word processor.

Joe asks "where are the fractals"? I think they are in the documents. Headings and sub-headings to any depth with anything you like in between the headings, in any order. Self similar. Arbitrarily deep and fiendishly difficult to process automatically. That is the real world. A messy world of "unstructured" stuff that we call "content" lest we sully the word "data".

The un-real world is the so-much-simpler concept of tables and fields and scalar values...That is what is broken IMO. The science of computer science knows a lot about the theory of computation - it is a branch of math. But data...content...documents...well, I think we are still in diapers on that subject.