thinking-out-loud

A brief love afair

As I mentioned earlier, I was flirting with Windows Vista on my AMD 64 machine at home.  Here are some brief impressions and issues:

1. The user interface is really nice.  I like the new style that I saw on my laptop.  But the biggest thing you'll notice on a well-equipped machine is the collection of effects in the GUI.  Windows fade in at a slant that makes them look like they're coming from another dimension.  And they fade out in a similar style when closed.  Nice.
2. The Start menu doesn't unfold like in XP.  Instead, you drill into the menu and it expands in-place.  It's much easier to navigate and sub-menus don't disappear like I always have happen in XP.
3. Games are now 3-d with special effects.  However, even my AMD 2400+ with a 128MB ATI Radeon Pro AGP isn't fast enough to render some of the games full-screen at 1920x1200.  Bogus!  But maybe the performance will be better with the final release.  I certainly hope my machine isn't already obsolete. ;(
4. Every time an application crashes it posts the error back to MS.  I was pleased to see that once the response was, "The error you encountered has already been fixed in a subsequent version of Windows".  Gotta love that.
5. My Promise SATA RAID controller isn't supported out of the box, but I found x64 drivers for it on PlanetAMD64.  The September CTP of Vista would load the drivers at install but still couldn't find the RAID volume.  I ended up installing to a non-RAID volume and then installing the drivers later to mount the RAID volume, at least that was workable.  Worse, though, the October CTP wouldn't work with the RAID volume at all, even when the drivers were loaded later.  That's a non-starter for me.
6. I tried installing Visual Studio 2005 RC1.  It properly recognized that it was running on a 64bit OS.  But installation errored out.  I'm guessing there was a version mismatch between libraries in the OS vs. the dev tool.  Thwarted again!
7. In the October CTP, I tried posting feedback using the error reporting tool.  Frustratingly, it errored out every time I tried to upload the information.  I guess it's a little early to be playing with an OS when the feedback tool has bugs. :)
8. I probably would have reverted to the Septmber CTP if my HP 4710 All-in-one had x64 drivers.  They really need to make a thunking wrapper for 32bit printer drivers in 64 bit mode.  It's a shame that all the well-supported hardware out there becomes incompatible when you move to 64 bits.

So, like most love affairs (I presume) it was an exciting little distraction that in the end was too time-consuming and troublesome to continue.  I still have my newly purchased 300GB non-RAID drive, unplugged and waiting for the next beta, but until then, I'm back to good ole' 32bit XP.  It's a shame, too, 'cause she was beautiful!

VS 2005: Get yer bits!

Missed this one yesterday. Start your hacking!

Ward Cunningham

Big loss for MS, huge win for Eclipse.

MMM: RSS + OPML + TV

Clemen's projects are always so cool. Do you take Visa?

It is interesting that he is going POX/REST-ish, especially given a previous missive, but it is the perfect choice. 

Enthiosys Customer Appreciation Day

Oh, almost forgot: Make sure to read about Enthiosys' ECAD -- Enthiosys Customer Appreciation Day. Luke is passionate about companies actively engaging their customers, and one of the ways Enthiosys puts its money where its mouth is is with a Customer Appreciation Day. There are some really cool videos buried in the presentation given by SRI's recently retired VP, Don Nielson.

I was really affected by the video on slide 9, where Doug Engelbart demos copy and paste in a basic word processor using a mouse and keyboard.

In 1968.

There is something very artful about the filmography, the angles, the overlays, and so on. Even though those actions are saturated into our being today, I was struck with a sense of the impact of what he was doing at the time, and at the same time, I think I was more struck by the film in and of itself.

Got a brand new blog: Luke Hohmann

Luke Hohmann has a blog. (Finally!!!!) Luke is a very good, very thoughtful guy. If you are doing product management, you owe it to yourself to give him a call and ask about the Innovation Games or the Profit Engine. You ought to if you are doing anything related to software or product development. Don't let the beard scare you away. (heh)

If you do contact him, tell him Jef sent you, and ask him about how his last daughter was born :).

(parenthetically -- note the parentheses -- I am thankful that I met Luke back in '95, because he introduced me to ObjectSpace, where I met my business partner Todd and a ton of other really amazing people (shout outs deserve their own blog altogether), my old bandmates, Dave and Pete, and my good friend, Chris Wensel.

I owe meeting Luke to Russ McClelland, a really good friend who, among other things, gave me a ride to college an incalcuable number of times, played in my first band, opended the door to my first software job, and let me live in his house for a bunch of months while I was getting off the ground. Thanks, Russ. Thanks, Luke. Group hug.)

Top Ten Reasons to use Mock Objects in your Unit Tests

Top 10 reasons

1. Complete Unit Test Isolation
2. Top Down Development
3. (Almost) Automatic Dependency Inversion
4. Makes 100% code coverage approachable
5. They make your unit tests run really freakin fast.
6. They make your unit tests run really freakin fast.
7. They make your unit tests run really freakin fast.
8. They make your unit tests run really freakin fast.
9. They make your unit tests run really freakin fast.
10. They make your unit tests run really freakin fast.

That last one is huge. In my experience, a slow test suite is seldom run manually. A fast test suite is run much more often. Running the suite more often means you introduce less errors. If you haven't tried using mockobjects in your unit testing, you need to give it a good go-round. And by good go-round, I don't mean spending an hour or a day trying them out. You need to spend at least a couple of weeks working with them before you can start to grok it. Fowler chats about them a bit here, and as usual, it's well worth the read. As Fowler points out, the big downer is the implementation coupling. You are designing a unit to work in isolation, though, and white box testing is a vaild approach. You just need to understand the tradeoffs. Fowler highlights most of the top 10 list in his discussion, but fails to talk about the psychological impact of a truly fast test suite.

These days, I tend to break my tests into pure unit tests using mock objects when it makes sense, functional tests that are, in fowler's terminology, basically state-based and end-to-end, and integration endpoint tests that test [my system's abstraction of] interfaces to external systems. I run the unit and integration tests frequently, and the functional less so, e.g. before check-in. If I have been a good boy and implemented continuous integration, then everything is, of course, run in the context of that.

Then of course, there are acceptance tests, but that is a different story and a different day.

Virtual CDs from ISOs

I've been using Virtual PC a lot lately. Since I've been installing and configuring Visual Studio 2005 and Team Foundation Server beta 3, I've needed an isolated environment because those installs/uninstalls aren't really stable.  Virtual PCs and a couple of GB of RAM are the only way to go.  They are especially cool because of their ability to attach to an ISO file as a virtual CD drive. That allows you to install directly from CD/DVD images downloaded from MSDN.

I had some time to myself today and thought I'd try out Windows Vista(tm) Beta 2 and see how it works.  Immediately I ran into a problem with Virtual PC not attaching to ISO images larger than 2.2GB (Virtual Server doesn't have this limitation).  At the same time, while looking for 64bit drivers for my desktop machine, I found mention of a utility to create a virtual CD drive from ISOs in your host OS, just like Virtual PC does.  PlanetAMD64 (you have to register and sign-on to find anything) had a link to a Virtual CD utility under Win64.  Very cool.

So, I Googled for a virtual CD utility and found this unsupported "Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP" from Microsoft, which attaches an ISO as a CD under Windows XP x86.  It works fine and Virtual PC has no problem attaching to the new "physical" CD drive virtualized by the host OS.  Windows Vista installation is now under way.  So, it's time to go work out while it does its thing.

Fun with Post-It Notes

This looks like a fun project. Long live the King!