There is an awesome article over at seattlepi.com containing the text of an email written by Mr. Gates regarding his experience trying to download and install MovieMaker on his computer. The email really cracked me up, and I think it’s worth a read.

It’s probably also worth noting, that instead of all that rig-a-ma-roll, one could just buy a Mac (which happens to include iLife, which includes iMovie). The Surgeon General agrees that my strategy would keep your blood pressure a lot lower, and increase your life expectancy by about 10 years.

I got a good laugh yesterday at the Amazon reviews page for the Denon Ultra Premium Link Cable (aka – 1.5 meter CAT5) – selling for the MSRP of $499. That’s right, $499.

If you need something to laugh at on this rather grey-looking Tuesday, I highly recommend the amazingly insightful reviews over at Amazon, including what this gentleman had to say:

After I took delivery of my $500 Denon AKDL1 Cat-5 uber-cable, Al Gore was mysteriously drawn to my home, where he pronounced that Global Warming had been suspended in my vicinity.

Yes, I had perfect weather: no flooding, no tornadoes, the exact amount of rain necessary, and he pronounced sea levels exactly right and that they were not going to rise within five miles of my house.

Additionally, my cars began achieving 200 mpg and I didn’t even need gasoline. I was able to put three grams of cat litter into the tank and drive forever.

What’s more, the atmosphere inside my home became 93% oxygen and virtually no carbon dioxide. In fact, I now exhale oxygen.

One heck of a cable.

Didn’t notice any improvement in audio quality though.

The $800 Apple iCable is clearly superior.

Yes. More on testing, and probably nothing new or revolutionary either. As I’m attempting to write tests, fix stuff, and sort out some fun multi-byte character issues, I’ve realized again at how much better it is to be on a project once you reach the state of being proactive, instead of being reactive.

The problem with reactive bug-fixes/features/HOLYCRAPTHISNEEDSTOBEFIXEDRIGHTNOW/etc. is that if your codebase has any sort of, say, complex business logic – it’s likely that reactively doing updates in this fashion is going to come and bite you in the back side.

Being able to proactively perform these updates is a state that I think applies if you have enough unit tests, functional tests, integration tests, and maybe even regression tests in order to ascertain that the new code that you’ve written doesn’t wreck anything currently deployed, and with any luck, you’ve also written some new tests that test the new code that you’re deploying. Go figure (I told you that I didn’t have anything new or revolutionary that I wanted to say).

I spent a bit of time trying to elaborate this relationship in a pretty picture – and here it is:

Basically, the less tests you have, the more reactive you are, and the more screwed you are. The more tests you have, the more proactive you are and the less screwed you are. This is what I shall now refer to as the Triangle of Happiness (the green one).

It’s also worth noting that the # of tests (this doesn’t necessarily mean # of tests, but could be code coverage, whatever) – is decidedly NOT a linear relationship with proactivity. Writing tests definitely reaches a law of diminishing returns. As your screwed-factor (reactivity) approaches zero, and your proactivity-factor approaches infinity – the number of tests that you have to write in order to further increase your proactivity-factor is exponential (give or take).

So, tests are crucially important so you don’t get screwed, but 100% code coverage is absolutely not cost-effective and (in my opinion) not necessary (unless maybe you’re NASA, or people die when your software sends an order of Cookies to Canada instead of California).

I totally love John Gruber (albeit in a very manly, platonic sort of way). After waking up to knowing you have a 90+ page API manual from UPS to go through to integrate some simple shipping costs, his Conjectural Transcript between Apple and Universal for the upcoming negotiations for iTunes pricing gunk had me in stitches.

Also, I’ve been working on some new marketing slogans for TextDrive. I’ve been so <gag>pleased</gag> with their service of late, that I thought I could spend some time on this. Pretty sure this is a winner:

TextDrive. We Go Down. A Lot.

The server that my site is on seems to have crashed twice in the past few days, requiring a hard reboot. If that weren’t enough, it would appear that ‘at boot’ cron jobs are a mere tease and fallacy, because I can tell you that mine sure don’t run.

I’m looking forward to getting away from this steaming pile of TextDrive crap as soon as I possibly can (I wonder if my slogging is against the Terms of Service?).

Singapore is a very interesting place. Over the past year, I’ve noticed several times the latest ‘campaign’ going on throughout the city. We’ve had campaigns to get pregnant, because the population is declining, to become a nurse, to join the navy (because it will make your life a lot less ‘boring’), to donate blood, to be polite (you mean you’re supposed to let people get OFF the train before you shove your way on? Go figure?). At any rate, this is a photo I took a while back of a poster in a washroom. The “Clean Public Toilets” campaign. By “toilet” they really mean “washroom” – if you ask someone here “where is the washroom?” – they’ll often look at you funny, and then you rephrase “where is the toilet?” – and they know what you mean.

At any rate – in all it’s glory:

I got a good laugh out of this one for quite some time. In case you can’t read it because of the flash, the second guys comment is: “That’s because no one hits on target”.

...sure aren’t what they used to be.

I can’t remember exactly when it was that these photos of Bill Gates (Teen Beat magazine, circa 1983) started popping up online, I think it was early last year. They’re certainly a far cry from the latest shots of David Heinemeier Hansson in Wired magazine.

I guess in 2006, it’s chic to be geek (well, maybe it has been for the past couple years). Who’d a thunk?