I just got a call from Becky who was doing some shopping at the I-35/Parmer Target.  They are opening a new Freebirds in that shopping center!  Location is no longer an issue in the great Freebirds vs. Chipotle debate.  This one is about the same drive time from our house as the nearest Chipotle.

The website says it's opening on June 7th! whoo hoo!  Of course, it will be mobbed for the first month.

I got my installation kit for voice over IP for my home phone last night.  It's pretty awesome.  My home phone number doesn't get switched over until Friday, so I can only make out-going calls.  All incoming calls still go through the old system.

The hardware they sent is just a D-Link 1120M that's specialized for the service.  It's basically a single-port NAT firewall that you put between your cable/DSL-modem and the rest of your LAN infrastructure.  If you're serving external service like a web site (like this one) then you have to delve into the configuration (which sucks compared to my Linksys router) to allow incoming traffic to successfully traverse the “double-NAT”.  If the D-link had a DMZ option, it would be perfect, but it doesn't, so you have to forward ports on both routers. I plugged in an old phone and made a couple of calls last night, and there was absolutely no perceivable difference in operation between it and a regular phone line.  Not thinking, I rebooted the router while I was talking to my dad, which of course ended our conversation.  That was pretty funny.  It just completely slipped my mind that I was not on a regular phone line.

The service lets you do awesome stuff like:

• Unlimited long-distance
• Have your voice mail sent to you in an email, or check it via the web, or send alert emails to let you know you have voice mail
• Forward your calls to multiple locations and have them ring all at once, or in sequence
• Schedule “do not disturb time“ when your phone will not ring (with an exception process for emergencies)
• plus lots more I can't think of

And it costs much less than we've been paying for our home phone service.  This is starting to sound like a commercial, but I'm just excited about it.  If you're paying more than $40 for your home phone service, let me know and I'll send you a referral so we can both reap the rewards.

I just got an email from Adobe touting the new features of Premiere Pro 1.5.  One of the features I'm really excited about is native support for my Panasonic DVX100's 24p and 24pa modes.  If done correctly, it would really reduce the number of steps in my 24p editing pipeline.  It's got a pretty compelling upgrade price of $99.  I haven't decided to get it.  I'd like to line up a specific project to use it on before I spring for it.

I haven't had the opportunity to try out Vegas Video, but one of the selling points there was the 24p support.  This may turn the tide a bit.

That sounds like a good band name.

After several people asked about the size of the turtle in a previous post, I realized that the small lens of my camera phone tends to exaggerate the perspective of things.  The turtle picture almost makes it look like a Galapagos tortoise in scale.  If you're interested in getting the actual size of the turtle, Jen's got a picture of Becky holding it in one of her posts, so you can see the size.  Her picture was taken with a “real” camera and has some nice detail.  She also does some interesting post-processing on her pictures that give them a very cool look.

Dave made his Barnes Family patented homemade pizza for us this evening.  It was delicious.  I have captured the process to share with you, but I've left out some key steps so you can't reproduce it.  Kind of like MacGuyver.

Delicious!  If you notice from the pictures, Dave has a pizza stone, which makes the crust come out extra perfect.

We went with Jen and Dave to see Shrek II this afternoon, and now we're hanging out waitin for dave to make some of his excellent pizza.  Shrek II was very enjoyable.  Antonio Banderas is absolutely hilarious. 

On the way to the theater, we saw a turtle on the sidewalk, so we moved it to a less dangerous location.

Stay tuned for pizza pictures!!!

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.