The other day, I griped about phone numbers and suggested a DNS-mapping for phone numbers. Looks like this is underway on several fronts.  Here's a slashdot story that points to several of these projects.

I've had my laptop for several months now, and in that time I thought I had exhausted the features and full explorered their possibilities.  I was wrong.  In an article I was reading (I can't remember why I was reading an article about a laptop I already own), someone mentioned that it had a SPDIF/out jack (optical digital audio output).

I knew this had to be a mistake, I don't have one of those...or do I.  I gave it another close inspection and realized that the headphone jack had two labels, one with a little picture resembling headphones, the other was a smal circle with a lightning bolt through it. So, either this was where The Flash plugged in, or it was trying to tell me something.  I removed the speaker cable and inserted an optical cable adapter. (that I just happened to have lying around)  Voila!  Beautiful, red laser light came streaming forth.

You can see it in the picture (taken with my phone).  It's the bright spot coming out of the leftmost of the three jacks on the front.  The middle is occupied by the mic, the far right is an S-Video jack disguised as an 1/8“ stereo jack.

I finally took some time today to explore NMock with a collegue.  We wanted to unit test a .NET component that was consuming some COM interfaces.  This is difficult, since the instances we are dealing with are created by another process, and they are not createable outside that environment. “Mocking” allows us to create an object that looks and behaves like the desired component for a specific condition, as well as provide an indication if the object under test behaved in the expected way.

NMock provides a full framework for mocking, and works well with NUnit, a top-notch unit testing framework.  While seeing a great potential for usefulness and making unit testing less painful, I was sad to see that there are some issues that kept it from working in our case:

1. Practically zero documentation - No official documentation, some ambiguous samples here and there.  You can use the jMock documentation to learn concepts, but NMock is hardly a transparent port to the CLR.
2. Some issues with mocking interfaces - It doesn't seem to recognize inherited members.
3. Some issues with COMInterop - This was what made #2 a show stopper.  It was trying to instantiate a COM object when all we wanted was to mock it.

We'll screw with it some more in the next week or so before giving up.  There seems to be much more recent code in SourceForge than is released.  Maybe some of the issues are fixed.

I've been re-reading more of Martin Fowler's content. Tonight was “The New Methodology”, kind of an overview of the Agile Development movement.  Some of the quotes that really hit home:

There's a refrain I've heard on every problem project I've run into. The developers come to me and say "the problem with this project is that the requirements are always changing". The thing I find surprising about this situation is that anyone is surprised by it. In building business software requirements changes are the norm, the question is what we do about it.

I'm always complaining about moving requirements.  I guess what I should be complaining about is that I am not empowered to deal with them.

(On people as replaceable parts of the development cycle):

This creates a strong positive feedback effect. If you expect all your developers to be plug compatible programming units, you don't try to treat them as individuals. This lowers morale (and productivity). The good people look for a better place to be, and you end up with what you desire: plug compatible programming units.

I see this every day.

I've just had 2 experiences with telephone-related upgrades/moves and I have decided telephone numbers suck. First, I will relate to you the circumstances of my experiences, and then rant about the numbers.

First, Becky and I switched from Nextel to ATTWireless for our mobile phones.  Working for Motorola (now Freescale) finally paid off and I got a substantial discount on a V600, by far the best, and most full-featured phone I had seen come out of Motorola ever.  Everything just works.  Nothing is stupid.  I used to be pretty skeptical of Bluetooth, but I'm a believer now.  I've got a wireless Bluetooth headset, and it just works.  You open it up, and the phone goes into “headset mode” relaying all noises to the headset and receiving all input from the headset mic.  I can write J2ME programs and just transfer them over Bluetooth to the phone.  I'm currently making my own implementation of an Ambient Orb using the event light of the phone.  I just can't figure out how to handle SMS messages from my own code.  Anyway, this paragraph is already too long, so I'll stop.

I got Becky a T721, it's way better than my top of the line Nextel phone, which I gave to Andrew. (which was a cool success story in itself.  I just swapped the SIM cards and it worked)  To make a long story short, we're getting a much better deal with ATTWireless.

I also just signed up for a VoIP (Voice over IP) solution for our home phone, which I will blog about later when I have it set up and can reap the benefits of refering friends and getting paid for it.

In both situations, I was transferring my phone number to another service provider.  After thinking about it, that is just stupid.  Why am I, a person who can move all over the world,  tied to a number that is tied to a certain location?  Most people have trouble remembering numbers.  Let's take a prominent example... You're hungry for some pizza (and who isn't).  You like Dominos, and you're a web savvy guy or girl and want to order online.  Do you grab the “internet book“ and look up the IP address for dominos? Have you ordered online so often that you know the ip address by memory? NO! You type www.dominos.com?  We (Al Gore and I) built the “internet book” into the internet when we invented it.

Why don't we have a solution for phone numbers?  You might argue that that's what the phone book in your phone is for, or speed dial, or the operator, but those are either not universal, or not fast enough.  I suppose the #1 reason is that phones have numbers on them.  We've had to invent ingenious text entry mechanisms like T9 and iTAP (which my V600 has and is awesome!  much better than T9, which my i90c had) to be able to enter text.

Why don't we extend the DNS namespace with a .phone suffix and have them resolve to phone numbers through some system?  DNS servers could resolve them to VoIP gateways. Now, I agree I haven't thought through this all the way, and there's bound to be some kinks, and I'm not so naive to think I'm the first to propose this, but come on, let's get started! I call marklio.phone!

OK, it's been a while since I had a good nerd post.  Here goes.

I subscribe to Martin Fowler's updates RSS, meaning I get notified when he adds or updates new content.  He doesn't do it often, but when he does, it's always interesting reading to me?  He thinks like I want to think...about software anyway.

His latest update is to a relatively old paper looking at the way software design is evolving and how thinks like Extreme Programming (or XP, not to be confused with Windows XP), refactoring, and Design Patterns have driven that change.  He asks the question, “Is Software Design Dead?”  Of course he answers it as well...No it's not.  As I looked at the updated sections, I couldn't recall the rest of the article, so I read it again.

It's an excellent read for any interested in the realm of software design.  I've found it to be particularly true for me in the past few months.  I can bang out code with what seems to be very little “design”, when in reality I'm just moving design inline with the coding.  The code designs itself as it evolves. Anyway, I know one or two of my readers that may find it enlightening.

Evidently, some UT student is under terrorism investigation after requesting blueprints to the rumored UT underground tunnel system.  Ordinarily, this would not be a big deal to me.  The reason it IS of interest is that his name is Mark Miller.  Not just Mark Miller, but Mark A. Miller (that's also my name for those of you keeping score at home)! Check out his blog.  I like my online identity MUCH better than what he came up with.

Needless to say, I've gotten several concerned calls, emails, and face-to-face conversations with people wondering what I'm up to.  It's not me folks!  I keep my activities much more secret than him ...OR DO I? ...what?

Also, you guys who think I'm a nerd should check out this guy.  He makes me look like a rock star.

I'm in the lobby outside of Bates recital hall at UT, waiting for Becky's Wind Ensemble concert to begin.  Jen and Dave just messaged me with some links to some crazy images from this presumably Japanese guy.  Check them out!

http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/saishin-e.html

http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/saishin2e.html

I really appreciate UT's wireless network.  Very easy to use.  I also wish I had a camera phone.  There are always such interesting people here.

I didn't want to directly rip off Peter's post, but he did remind me of something I've been meaning to write about for a while.  A few months ago, when I filmed the Three Nails Short CD release party, they did a cover of a Switchfoot song, “Dare you to Move”.  At that point, I hadn't heard of Switchfoot. (and I couldn't figure out all the words and was forced to fill in my own about brands of condensed milk and my pet dog)

Anyway, I then had one of those experiences where you've never heard of something one day, and the next you see or hear about it all the time.  I finally got their latest CD, and I really like it.

I've been using GMail for almost a week now.  Enough time to use most of the features.  I don't have quite enough messages in it yet to need the search features, but I have played with them.

The Good:

• Very slick and easy to use. the interface is very simple and VERY responsive.
• The whole thing is driven with javascript.  In fact, if you attempt to view the source, you pretty much get nothing except javascript.  Very impressive.
• They appear to be using a webservices type architecture to download data in the background as needed.  Very rarely do you get a full refresh.
• The way it shows your messages as conversation threads really helps you see the conversation.  It shows your own replies as part of the conversation.
• If anyone is worries about it being more limited than something like Outlook because it's web-based, don't be.  the Outlook developers could learn a thing or two here.
• The keyboard shortcuts are very impressive.  I haven't seen a web interface make such good use of shortcuts.  I'm not sure how they've implemented it.  You can do all kinds of crap with them.  pretty much everything.
• The ads do not get in the way at all.  In fact, if you're looking for them, you'll have a hard time finding them.
• I find the concept of “labeling“ instead of filing to be very natural.  Items can have more than 1 label.  They're alot like categories.

The Bad:

• No signature support.  I don't really ever use them, but this sure seems like it's missing considering the thought they've put into other aspects.
• No HTML support in message composing.  I've got a very rich interface for formatting and styling for my blog entries, why not for creating gmail?
• Poor HTML mail rendering.  I've received a couple of messages that didn't render correctly.
• What am I supposed to do offline?  Of course you could argue this is a different model, but I'll have to continue pulling my mail in Outlook to have offline content.  I'm just not used to the model yet.
• When you create filters to “label“ messages (there aren't folders), you can't execute them on items currently in your inbox.  You can “test“ the filter by allowing it to show you what items match your criteria, but you can't seem to apply them.
• The view cannot be sorted.  It's stuck on newest to oldest.  I suppose the argument is that the searching and labeling removes the need for this.
• The search doesn't work on partial words.  Maybe I don't know what I'm doing, but if I search for wood, it will not match woods.  This seems pretty limiting.

Maybe I'll think of some more later.  If you have some, or have suggestions on working around the bad, leave a comment.

Back in February, I blogged about the snow we had on Valentine's Day.  In that post, I misspelled the word ugly.  About a week later, I started getting search engine traffic for the phrase “ungly people”.  I fixed my spelling, but search engines are lazy and I still get alot of traffic for people looking for “ungly people”.  Not that I mind getting more traffic, as is evident by my prolific use of the word “ungly” in this post.  I'm hoping someone can tell me if there is some meaning for that word that I am unaware of.  None of my dictionary resources show it as a word.  Are other people simply making the same spelling mistake I did?  And if so, why are they so interested in seeing ugly people?  Are they themselves not attractive, and they seek to boost their self esteem by viewing others who are less attractive?  Believe me, you will not find them here!

Can anyone shed some light on this? Or give me your theories of what's going on?