Looks like one nasty little bug was in the RC 1 of OmniGraphSketcher, so this morning they released OmniGraphSketcher 1.0 RC 2, and I picked it up. Supposedly, it' had to do with a crash associated with editing text labels, but I just think it's great that they are responding to the reports of users as quickly as they are.
Then again, I'd have had it out as well, so maybe they're just good coders.
Well, the Twins are the champs of the Panther Sports Club Slow-Pitch Ponytail league (8 to 10 yrs.) again this year. That's two years in a row, and they did it (typical) nail-biting style. The game was a heart-stopping ride for all, but in the end, they pulled themselves together and started playing like the team they have been all year long.
Coming from behind 4-9 in the bottom of the sixth to score 8 runs and be on top 12-9. They then held off the Cubs, scoring only another two runs in the top of the seventh to win 12-11. The Cubs played tough, had very good pitching, but in the end, the girls came back and played up to their ability and that was the game.
Major congratulations to Angelina. She had a great game from start to finish.
This morning I decided to upgrade Firefox on my laptop to 3.5 RC 3 just to see how it goes. I don't use it as much on my laptop as I do on other machines, so it's a perfect testbed to see how it runs. I will say the icon is subtly new, and that's nice, but I'm really more interested in the JavaScript and rendering performance as that's where a lot of my work is now focused.
Well... more when I know more.
I've been working on some interesting additions to one of the projects I'm working on and for the first time I've had to work on this Java app that runs on Windows. There's no Ant build scripts for it, though I suppose I could install Ant on my box, create a build.xml and try to make a go of it, but the command line is pretty nasty and the original author of the component used Eclipse to do the development and testing. So I decided that the easiest thing was to use Eclipse and then I'd be sure that I was doing the same steps he was.
Seemed reasonable.
Because I'm no Eclipse wizard, I had him help me set up my workspace/environment so that it'd build and such, and then I could work on the changes. What I found was not terribly surprising to me, but experiencing it was still shocking. Eclipse is an advanced development environment and it saves a lot of people a lot of time, but I found that it was constantly slowing me down.
I'm far far faster developing in Vim and using Ant - on linux. But this is one little component and so I'll stick with this way of doing things as it makes sense to mirror how the other developer is writing the code, but Holy Cow! I had no idea that it was still this intrusive.
Well... I don't have to use it every day - just those days I'm adding to this little component.
I was working this afternoon and happened to catch out of the corner of my eye the founding partner I work for talking to someone (whom I didn't recognize, but had a suit so he's not "native"). He was very animated... hands up in the air, big smile on his face, looking my way.
I took out my earbuds and looked over at him with a look that said "Is there anything I need to do?" His response was a fantastic compliment: "I was just bragging about you".
Wow.
Double Wow.
I've always hoped that the things I did were noticed, and here I've been at the job a little less than 4 months and already it's something they are that happy with. That's really neat. I mean - Holy Cow! You don't have to do that stuff, and certainly not tell me about it.
Sweet. Put a big smile on my face.
Well, after a little false start, BBEdit 9.2.1 os out with a handful of bug fixes. Some of these must have been nasty for this kind of release, but maybe the BareBones guys are starting to have smaller, more frequent, bug releases. Might be nice, but their stuff is pretty solid to begin with.
No matter... had to get the update.
They have done a lot with OmniGraphSketcher to get it to 1.0 RC 1 status. I have to say that I enjoy the tweets from the development group as it makes sure I'm kept up to date of any happenings the team has to share. This update is pretty extensive with improvements in speed, import data handling and general UI issues. It's getting better and better.
Very nice to see.
In the last few weeks I've written several times about my dislike of extensive unit testing when it comes to large, complex systems. Unit tests are perfect for building blocks - simple model objects that have well-defined inputs and outputs that can be extensively tested. It's my days in the IC fab industry that makes me wary of testing. The guys at HP had amazingly hard test vectors to test every component as quickly as possible for all possible defects. It wasn't easy.
But I've been working on a system where the unit tests are large, complex, and difficult to maintain -- and don't test enough of the system. But it's assumed that these tests are complete coverage of the system. Well... today it bit me in the behind, and I have solid reasons why I now hate this philosophy.
This morning, I found that the update from last evening wasn't working exactly as it should. In fact, it wasn't working properly for a lot of cases. I was trying to see if is was the data - hard to tell, that's for sure. Maybe it was the install... nope. I was getting pretty desperate. Then someone mentioned checking the Tomcat localhost log. Bingo!
There were a bunch of exceptions that told me exactly what the problem was. Why is this not in the catalina.out log? I'm guessing it's the way this webapp is set up, but all my exceptions should go to catalina.out. Here nor there at this point, I had found the problem.
The problem was that one component was sending a record of six elements, and the other system was expecting seven. Clearly, this was the problem, and when I fixed the sender to add the missing data, it all worked fine. But it was 3 hours of a nightmare because of the impact to production.
All the unit tests would never have picked this up because it was between two components in the same system. More over, there was no testing of this specific feature in my tests, the other developer's tests, even Q/A didn't test this. While I'm not mad at anyone (other than myself), I think this highlights the folly of thinking that unit testing of large, complex systems, is anything more than a waste of time. Small, easily identifiable blocks - sure. But webapps? Please.
So now I've learned something valuable, and when the next person tries to spout the Gospel According to Unit Testing, I'll have a good story to share with them.
Camino 1.6.8 is out today with a few fixes that are certainly needed, but with the latest news of Firefox 3.5 and what's happening with the other browsers, I wonder how long Camino will stay an active project. It's already showing signs of lagging - very much like Firefox 3.0 did.
Only time will tell.
This morning, Adium told me that 1.3.5 was out and it fixes connection issues with Facebook, Yahoo, and MSN, as well as updating the version of libpurple in use. It's a nice upgrade, but I haven't really noticed any serious connection issues with these guys, but maybe I'm just lucky.
Anyway, the bet IM client on the Mac... gotta love that.