I’m not test infected yet. I’m almost there. I want to be there. But I’m not there yet.
I just spent an hour and a half fixing a couple of bugs in the online game system I’m writing. It took longer than it should have. Some areas need refactoring a little due to requirements evolution. The main problem, however, was getting to the point where I could test each change that i made took too much time; run server, run clients, do some stuff, watch it fail.
During some simple refactoring today, a phase of ‘restricting access to data members’, I discovered an interesting little design ‘descision’. In the spirit of completely mixing up the business logic and the display logic we have a data member that represents a colour that an object uses as its background colour when it is displayed in a grid. The colour is set depending on the state of the object; error, ok, new, complete, etc.
Finally got around to seeing Matrix Reloaded on Sunday night. Then picked up the Animatrix yesterday. Before I read any reviews or blogs on the subject I thought I’d spout off on my own…
(Contains spoilers and future plot speculation…)
Initial reaction at the end of Matrix Reloaded was one of disapointment. The effects were good, but I’d found the pace somewhat sluggish in places, the main story was a little thin and I didn’t like the downbeat ending.
Skated in Victoria Park, lunch at The Crown, Matrix Reloaded and a pizza at Strada. Top day ;)
We skated in Victoria Park this morning. It was pretty good. Lots of wide, quiet, paths with reasonable tarmac and nowhere near as busy as Hyde Park. Practising crossover turns, skating fast, balancing on one foot and looking for kerbs to jump off of…
Stopped for lunch at The Crown. Food was good, if a little pricey.
I used to have pretty severe problems with my shoulders and right arm. Mostly mouse related; I think. When it was really bad I had a lot of shiatsu, which worked well and helped remove the residual tension in my shoulder. Now I seem to be able to keep it all at bay by drinking lots of water…
I don’t actually think it’s the drinking itself that helps. It’s all the movement that goes with it.
Ok, the blog looks crap in IE 5.x I’ve seen the stuff about hacking around the css bugs in IE but I’m not clever enough to hack the css sheet that I have to do that.
If anyone knows what I need to do to fix it so that it looks nicer in IE 5.x, please let me know.
Just watched “28 Days Later” on dvd. Very cool. Very British - very non-Hollywood. Scary film.
The best bit?
Seeing the London streets so empty. If you live or work anywhere near London you’d know how impossible those empty street scenes were :)
Today -1 Week: Them: So, here’s what we need by 9th June. Us: Ok, we can just about do that…
Today: Them: Oh, add all of these things and put most of the things we asked for last week way down the list. Can you still do it by the 9th?
Perhaps.
Right now we don’t know if we can still hit the 9th. The new requirements have added a vast element of uncertainty.
Another week another release. Well, almost. The plan was to release today. The plan ignored the fact that most of the team are at a wedding this weekend and nobody was around today and nobody’s around on Monday…
The latest release included some new functionality and a lot of refactoring. Given the amount of code that had been ’touched’ I recommended a longer test phase than we usually planned, i.e. more than 1 day.
As promised this week’s lesson had us doing crossover turns and the start of skating backwards.
Crossover turns aren’t actually that hard. Once you get used the the idea of doing it. Just lift the outside leg up during the turn, move your weight in a bit, wait until you start to fall over and then step across yourself onto the other foot. Note this is just what it feels like, it’s probably completely wrong ;) It all felt far easier if I rolled my turning skate onto the inside edge.
