12 Oct 2003 shlomif   » (Master)

Movie

I went to see "Finding Nemo" the other day along with my father. The movie was nice, albeit not quite as much as "Monsters Inc.". At the end of the movie there was a very long list of credits, and my father joked that it would have taken less time to draw the movie pixel by pixel. In any case, the Graphics was great.

Reading

I finished reading "The House of Arden", which had a rather disappointing end. I also read Joel on Software's Unicode article. Not too much I did not know, but it was still a very amusing read.

Finally, I started reading "Ender's Game", and read two or three chapters. It's a bit strange so far.

Backup

I decided to backup my Linux system. Due to the fact I have an IDE CD Writer, I had to install ide-scsi. So I followed the instructions in the "Installing your ATAPI CDRW Drive in Linux" tutorial, which involved rebooting the computer (gasp! I thought in Linux we were never supposed to do that). Eventually, after the reboot and setting a parameter in loadlin, it worked on the first try, and I have a burned CD with some backups.

Hacktivity

I worked on Quad-Pres the past two days. At first I added an option to set the encoding and language, on a per-presentation level and a per-page level. To make sure it works correctly, I wrote a test script for it. Eventually, I ended up with more lines of test code, than lines of added code, and the code worked at the first try my test suite had no bugs in it. The test suite involves a bash script that calls two Perl scripts. (%-) - it was the easiest way to do it).

Then when I fixed a bug (that the rendering process did not stop on the first WML error), I added a test for this as well.

Finally, I added a module to channel Getopt::Long and make sure it can use an array besides @ARGV. (a kludge, if you ask me, but that's life). And I added a unit test for this as well. After I got the test to work, I found out I had a bug in my code (!) because of it.

I'm quite happy with this "write tests as you write code" scheme. So far, it slowed me down a bit, but in the long run it gives way for more robust code.

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