Dev::Blog

Stolen shamelessly from some newsgroup archive:

[TestFixtureSetUp]
public void Setup()
{
    Trace.Listeners.Add(new TextWriterTraceListener(Console.Out));
}

NUnit is the new “make a quick test GUI app with one button to check stuff,” and Trace is the new printf. Life is good.

“He was drunk on the wood, of course, and would have paid much more had the realtor noticed this, but Alan had spent his whole life drunk on trivial things from others’ lives that no one else noticed and he’d developed the alcoholic’s knack of disguising his intoxication.”

So it is written in Cory’s new book, available in stores and online. It looks pretty good, at least after the first few dozen paragraphs, anyway. Mostly, I’m a sucker for stories set in Toronto.

The thing of it is, why can’t all e-books be set in Toronto? A proper set of regular expressions could localize the story to just about anywhere, and I don’t think publishing a “localizer” would even violate the CC (no derivative works) license of the text if the reader applied the filter - kind of like how the old-school computers that attached to your TV bypassed FCC regulations by making you buy a separate RF modulator.

Cooler still would be a generic localizer application that would work with any text - after all, a set of regexps would have to be tuned to the words in a particular ebook, but some smart translation software would probably be able to derive just enough context to make the right decisions without ending up like how I seem to recall Neil Gaiman described an early “Americanization” of his book Neverwhere, which had “flat” and “apartment” replaced a little too ambitiously, although I’m sure the conversion ran in no time apartment.

So that’s the wish list for today: a system that can move a story from one location to another. It’d still probably be a bit of a stretch for something like the abysmal Angels and Demons to move from Rome to Toronto (I’m sure we have a pope-like figure here that would do for what passes as a plot), but it would inevitably make it more appealing to me, and that’s what technology’s all about, right?

I love when online publishers inadvertently do this: the ad says the computer is “designed for future thought,” the copy says the system pictured is at End Of Life.

I have horrible luck with big-ticket purchases. Every time I buy something, the price drops dramatically a day or so later, or in the case of hardware, the Next Big Thing comes out. The solution that’s not a solution is, of course, to continue doing nothing, and that’s kind of been my approach over the past few months. To be fair, I haven’t had time to enjoy any purchases more complicated than a (thin) magazine lately, so it’s not a big deal.

Anyway, I’ve been debating over a new Mac for a while, and again, no time to install it, let alone develop software on it, so not really urgent, but now I’ve got the added complexity of the Apple Intel announcement to deal with.

After some analysis, it looks like the only thing that this news changes is the potential life cycle of the new purchase. I was going on a plan wherein every $1000 spent would last a year, so a $4K dual G4 with monitor would have to stick around for 4 years (which isn’t unreasonable for Macs). With the Intel lineup, I’ve got to wonder how long the box would be supported. Sure, Apple keeps their stuff around, but you’ll notice that every OS upgrade drops a generation of hardware - Panther required built-in USB, and Tiger wants machines with built-in Firewire. Since Apple’s planning on full conversion by 2007, and odds are good that the old stuff will stick around for 5 years, this isn’t a huge issue, but I’m curious what this’ll do to the used hardware market. Probably nothing.

Then again, there’s always the transition kit, which doesn’t have a lot of information on Apple’s site (I did like the “use of a system” blurb, which probably just means NDA and not-for-resale stuff), but for $999, I don’t imagine the beta hardware will be a significant bargain. Still, worth watching over the next few days (and since I’m not an ADC member, not a pressing concern).

For now, I’m stuck behind a mountain of deadlines that sexy hardware won’t fix. In a month, we’ll see.

By the way, I still haven’t even cracked open XCode 2.x yet, which is probably on the path to actually developing Mac software, but I was happy to see unit testing support built-in and this ADC article on building a Tiger-based app - I’ve had “make a to-do list app” on my to-do list for some time now.