Blue Sky On Mars

Recently, it was reported that Coca-Cola’s Dasani brand of bottled water is purified tap water in the UK (and most other countries). Now comes news of a recall of Dasani water in the UK

The Coca-Cola Co said on Friday it had recalled its entire Dasani range of bottled water from the British market after levels of bromate, a potentially harmful chemical, were found to exceed legal standards.

Oops. Many people buy bottled water with the thought that it is healthier than their tap water. This is not always the case…

With all of that talk about test driven development, I thought I would enumerate why TDD is completely misguided.

1. I never have enough time to write the tests, once I’ve finished the
   main functionality.
2. Testing isn’t my job, because it’s QA’s job to make sure I do quality work.
3. Unit tests don’t help me, because my code works perfectly the first time.
4. Unit tests don’t help me, because my code always works perfectly when I add new features.
5. There’s no need to test drive my code, because the design handed to me by the architect covers every possibility
6. Running the tests is a pain, because it takes too long to scan through
   all of the output to see if everything was fine
7. Running the tests takes too long, because reloading the database
   and restarting the app server between tests takes forever
8. I can’t do TDD, because they don’t make JUnit for Z80 assembly
   language
9. I don’t like TDD, because I enjoy the hours I spend in my
   debugger
10. TDD is just a fad, and it’s completely unnecessary anyhow since projects always succeeded before
11. (BONUS) TDD sucks because I agree with all of the points here, and I don’t understand sarcasm.

A British citizen captured in Afghanistan talks about his hell in Camp X-Ray. This is in stark contrast to the report from a couple of boys that came earlier in the week. It seems somewhat suspicious that the Britisher, Jamal al-Harith, “accidentally” ended up in Afghanistan while he was visiting Pakistan. That aside, this account is quite horrible. If this is accurate, it seems like war crimes charges would be warranted, does it not?

Not surprisingly, no one won the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 150-mile automated robot driving race. Two robots managed to make it 7 miles, which is actually not bad. That’s a tough challenge, and it will be quite a milestone when someone does end up winning the prize.

Ever since Napster, it was clear that the distribution of music was starting to change. Some recent articles show that there is more change brewing. Huge ’80s success George Michael, who had quite the row with his record label, has announced that he’s only going to release music for free online henceforth.

“I’ve been very well remunerated for my talents over the years so I really don’t need the public’s money.”

Neat attitude. He’s going to accept donations from folks downloading his music, and will give the proceeds to charity.
Reuters has a story about indie labels seeing opportunity in the music industry turmoil

“We’ve seen major opportunities for signing acts who have a base and (enabling us) to make money and keep overhead under control,” said [Bob] Frank, [president of Koch Records], noting that Koch generated record sales and profit in 2003.

Though distribution on the Net provides huge opportunities for someone to gain huge worldwide mindshare, it also provides chances for a much wider base of artists to reach some fans. The lower production and promotion cost style of the indies will help them in the dirt cheap distribution world.

And, finally, rock band Korn has a new video, “Y’all Want a Single? Fuck That” which, unsurprisingly, their label didn’t want them to release. More distribution opportunities also means more creative freedom for artists. Musicians like Korn and George Michael (who no one would have ever expected to be mentioned in the same sentence) have earned themselves enough financial freedom to completely buck the current music industry and help see what the new industry might just be like.

Amazing. At first, I thought the tale of the $1 million bill that leads to arrest was one of overzealous enforcement. Everyone’s seen $1 million bills in joke shops, right? But look at the article and see that:

Pike [the acused] then tried to use two gift cards worth only $2.32 to buy the merchandise, but when that did not work she again asked to cash the $1 million bill, Cotton said. The store then called police.

Err. This woman seriously tried to buy more than $1600 worth of stuff using a $1M bill. Wow. I wonder if there’s something like the Darwin Award for criminals?

Sunday was a fairly talkative day for Crysania, and I guess over the course of the day she figured some stuff out because on Monday she suddenly kicked in to what I’d call “articulate babble”. She’s now making more sounds than before and using different inflections as she’s talking. We can carry on whole conversations now! I just hope I haven’t already promised her a car for her 16th birthday without realizing it!

Via Ted Neward, here is JSDT:

Enterprise developers can use the JSDT software to create network-centric applications, such as shared whiteboards or chat environments. It can also be used for remote presentations, shared simulations, and to easily distribute data for enhanced group workflow.

I’m working on a Swing application right now that will quite possibly benefit from this library being available. (It’s LGPL, by the way.)

I’m adding John Buckman’s blog to my blogroll. He’s the founder of Magnatune, the “We are not evil” record label. His talk of why there’s no African music shows how not-evil they are. It’s also great to see that they’ve signed up distribution deals with EMusic, iTunes and Napster. Let’s hear it for the alternative music industry!

“Cuba? It was great, say boys freed from US prison camp” gives the account of three boys who were captured in Afghanstan and recently released. They certainly paint a rosy picture of Guantanamo for the people worried about the treatment of the prisoners there. I was never really concerned about the prisoners there being tortured or mistreated. My thought has been that they have been detained for years without representation.