Faith, Freedom and Frags

Trying out FireFox, like it so far!

I'm a good Microsoft employee, really! But I just discovered the "Find as you type link" shortcut in FireFox, and I'm hooked! Microsoft IE team, implement this or die!
Here's how it works: When you are on a website, you type the ' key, then some unique text in a link you want to follow. Then hit enter. Bam! You follow that link. This means it is EASY to browse the web without touching your mouse. For those of you with RSI or carpal tunnel problems, or those who want to avoid them in the future, this is dynamite.

Onfolio 2.0 released

Onfolio is a program that helps collect and organize everything from web links to Outlook emails to whatever is on your hard drive. I've been looking for a unified way to sort and flag these things, but 1.0 just didn't cut it. 2.0 was just released a few weeks ago and I'm giving it a spin. It includes RSS feeds (did you know you can get an RSS Feed of my blog?) and other search features that make it quite powerful. I'll post here when I've had a chance to try and use it for a while.

Adobe to buy Macromedia

Check this out.

I worked at Adobe for 3 years, and this is pretty major news. The markets aren't very happy about it, though. Macromedia makes Flash, and Adobe makes just about everything else. This might help Adobe compete with Microsoft (my current employer) long term, but it sure adds a lot of risk elements. I've been holding on to some of my Adobe stock for years, and they've executed real well the last few years. This complicates things, and I'm just not sure the two companies will mesh well.

Test Driven Development

I mention in several places that I am an advocate of "Test Driven Development". For those interested, here is a basic overview of just what that is (and isn't):

The key thing to remember is that it is a form of development, not a form of testing. It is something that a software developer does while he is first writing his code, not later. It centers around writing small tests (called unit tests) that excersize a method or functionality of a class the developer is working on. Various tools exist to help writing and running these tests for many different languages. The basic sequence is:

1. Write a unit test for the class feature you are adding. This often will not even compile, since there is no step 0 that says "write the code". Thus you could be refering to a method you haven't even put in yet.
2. Write the smallest amount of code you can to get the code to compile (but NOT pass).
3. Run the test and make sure if fails! (since you haven't put in the code to make it work yet)
4. Write the smallest amound of code to make sure the test (and all the other ones you've written) passes.
5. Refactor (aka, improve and simplify) the code
6. Run the tests again, making sure they all pass.

That's the gist of it. The goal is to make sure that every byte of code you write is associated with a test, so that if you've done it wrong (or you've messed up something you already did) you will know immediately.

This method has improved both the quality, design and simplicity of my code more than any other idea, method or tool I have seen in 10 years of programming. Take a look here for more information, or search google.