Archive for December, 2003
Back at work after a food laden x-mas break. With practically no-one else here, I’ve got a chance to sweep out some old pending tasks. I finally finished the training documentation I’ve been working on for the past three months. It is about 170 pages long now. It looks great but man it’s a strain to write tutorials and examples. But now it’s done. Oh joy! Free, free at last!
I actually finished most of it while I was in Copenhagen (during one very long evening) but I had to freshen up a couple of screenshots and actually implement the examples I was talking about. So much nitpickety detail. Now it’s off for review and more nitpicking. Gah.
Hrm. This sounds like an excuse to pick up Metal Arms or Prince of Persia for the PS2.
December 30th, 2003
I’ve started work on a unit testing framework for COM components that uses the ActiveScripting engine to load test scripts dynamically. It’s also a chance for me to play with ATL and WTL.
The existing utilities don’t do COM and don’t use scripting, which makes it tough to automate running them. I want to let several people write test scripts, and just have the testing system load them one after another. I want to run the tests as part of an automated build, with error logging going to a file, as well as having the familiar green bar UI.
December 27th, 2003
I’ve started work on a unit testing framework for COM components that uses the ActiveScripting engine to load test scripts dynamically. It’s also a chance for me to play with ATL and WTL.
The existing utilities don’t do COM and don’t use scripting, which makes it tough to automate running them. I want to let several people write test scripts, and just have the testing system load them one after another. I want to run the tests as part of an automated build, with error logging going to a file, as well as having the familiar green bar UI.
December 27th, 2003
Throat infections are fun. Fever and Penicillin. Tea and Honey for a whole week. I’ve lost 10 pounds - so if the bacteria clear out by christmas, I can have double helpings - guilt free!
December 19th, 2003
Ah - wonderful Copenhagen. Four days of Microsoft briefings on their new dotNet business framework. What they’ve got planned looks really nice, as long as you only have microsoft stuff in your infrastructure. Oracle or DB2 were not very welcome (no matter how many times people pointed out their existence). What’s interesting is how much more Microsoft is going to provide than the typical Model-Driven-Architecture tools. Having full control over the compiler, editor and the environment does give MS some nice synergies. It’s nice to see them take advantage of it.
The other nice thing was that I found some great christmas presents.
December 14th, 2003
Dare Obasanjo points out that using localhost ports is a silly idea, and Greg Reinacker wishes for a feed: element.
The idea of a feed file has been mentioned a couple of times, but no-one seems to have picked up on the obvious benefits of using a file with the rss details in it. Think of how a playlist (PLS) file works. The file can contain one or more song filenames, or a shoutcast broadcast url. The advantage is that the playlist file remains static, while the stuff it is pointing to changes.
Think of a .feed file — you’d need to register the Mime type on the server, but this is always the way of things, and it is much easier to fix than to fix all the clients out there. Once upon a time htm files were not served correctly, because they did not match the default extension mappings. PNG files also need the mime type added, and the universe hasn’t rejected them because of the mime type issues. A feed file would be an XML file containing the locations of one or more RSS feeds, along with a suggested action.
For example:
<feed>
<add>http://www.xt1.org/rss.xml</add>
<remove>http://www.xt1.com/rss.xml</remove>
</feed>
Of course, the helper app that handles .feed files should ask the user before removing or adding any feeds from the file, but the user now has to answer yes/no instead of knowing where to copy the URL from.
This solution has the advantage of being roughly as simple as the RSS feed itself, and fairly easy to understand. It’s a file you create once and then forget about.
December 8th, 2003
Spent much of today waiting for the compiler to finish, so used my new Office 2003 beta tester freebie notepad to make a shopping list. Yow. So many nephews all of a sudden! What to get them all? Are legos still cool?
December 5th, 2003