Supersizerama

Tonight I flipped through the channels to see if anything good was on and noticed that the movie Supersize Me was playing on Movie Central. Having never watched this much publicized movie, we decided to see what all the hubbub was about. If you are unfamiliar with the show, the basic story line is a guy decides to eat all his meals at McDonald's for a full month.

Now, you should know that Emma and I eat pretty healthy, lots of home cooked meals or eating out at good restaurants. We probably eat fast food only a half dozen times a year, so watching somebody eat McDonald's morning, noon and night for a full month was rather disgusting.

What was even worse was the transformation the poor guy went through during that month. You could literally see the color of his skin change and he gained like 17 pounds in 12 days! Half way through the show I was actually feeling ill. Looking at the processing that goes into most fast food and the chemicals that are added, it is no wonder I feel rather ill when I do eat fast food.

Well, I'm outta here.

TDD experiences

Since early January some of us in my office have been exploring the use of Test Driven Development and it's potential benefits in our development process. I first became aware of TDD several years ago when the idea was just breaking onto the scene of software development. At that time there was very little information and virtually no proof that it brought any benefits to the software development table.

These days the picture is quite different, a simple search in your favorite search engine will turn up many references to TDD, including books, how to's, blog entries, etc. Although it takes some time to get used to TDD, the benefits do begin to show themselves, I had one of these moments recently. Although I've been working with some legacy code which makes using TDD much harder, I've still be able to put in a variety of unit tests. These tests are quite useful as you work with the code because you know very quickly if some existing piece of functionality has been broken. This idea is a staple of TDD, however my experience recently helped enstill this idea.

I was working on an alternate implementation of a class that had a fairly rich set of unit tests associated with it. The changes being made were rather central to the class, so I just went ahead and coded the new implementation. Now, with traditional software development techniques, you would then create some developer tests or run the code through some known conditions to make sure it behaves as expected. This works, but in reality does not provide you with very good code coverage, also, these tests are often thrown away once the initial developer testing is performed, not exactly and ideal situation.

My situation was a little different since there was a rich set of unit tests to measure the state of the code. Once the code was complete, I ran the tests (only took about a second to run them) and voila, immediate feedback on what worked and what didn't. Go back and fix the broken tests, etc. It is quite interesting how positive you feel about your changes when there are a rich set of tests that verify your code. Obviously these tests are not very useful if they take alot of time to run, in TDD, you are encouraged to produce small well defined tests that execute quickly. As mentioned previously, the few hundred tests running against this particular module all run in less than a couple of seconds!

If you are interesting in checking out TDD, check out www.testdriven.com or pick up Dave Astels book, Test Driven Development: A Practical Guide. This book is an excellent start for those looking at TDD and want to know more about it and how it works.

The birthday bash.

A bunch of us got together to celebrate my 34th birthday by doing a little bowling at The Zone, and a dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory. We had a great time and would just like to extend a special thank you to all our friends who made the occassion a blast.

That little gal has a birds eye view of the bowling mayhem. Great smile Janet!

Smile! You're on candid camera.

Four ladies and a very cute kid, compliments of Kevin and Masako.

It's going....it's going.......turn left......arg....

No, Steve isn't having any fun bowling.....no not at all....while Helen, Kevin and Masako watch the activities. The kids are in their own little world.

I'm ready for my closeup! :-)

Everybody is so intent on getting the perfect score.

Of course they are smiling, they had some great scores!

A photo op for the Howard family, however they seem rather focussed on the bowling.

Finally a strike! Time to 'strike' a pose. Way to go MarleneX.

Here I am, the birthday boy, all smiles after getting a strike!

Here is Lori, Alex and Kira, but hmm, where is the missing Pat?

Going for a walk.

Spring Skiing

Today we took our friends Terry and Jared, who are from South Africa, up for a day of skiing at Whistler mountain. It proved to be a bright sunny day and the conditions at the top of the mountain were very good.

The girls flopped in the snow!

Here we are in the village just getting ourselves organized.

Here is Terry and Jared near the entrance to the Harmony bowl.

Lots of smiles at the end of a great day of skiing. These two look like sisters with the matching tops.