Blue Sky On Mars

McSweeney’s PROS AND CONS OF JOHN KERRY’S TOP TWENTY VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES (their capitalization, not mine) is hilarious. It starts off realistically enough and then heads into some really ffun weeds.

According to Time Magazine, he did.

The e-mail says Feith approved arrangements for the contract “contingent on informing WH [White House] tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP’s [Vice President's] office.” Three days later, the Army Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton the contract, without seeking other bids. TIME located the e-mail among documents provided by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group.

This is the trouble that a secretive government will run into. If this was the kind of government that promptly answered FOIA requests and acted generally trustworthy, rather than trying to block energy policy information in court, people might give them the benefit of doubt. There’s really nothing to make us trust Cheney on this, though.

Via Erik’s always helpful Linkblog, jMock - A Lightweight Mock Object Library for Java. This started as a fork of the mockobjects.com DynaMock package (which I was using earlier today, in fact). I’ll give this one points on readability, which is certainly important in tests. I have to subtract points, though, because you need to extend their base class (or at least that’s all they show in the examples I’ve seen thus far), which is not always an option. Also, the readbility does come at the cost of verbosity, and I’m not completely sure about that.

Something that might be interesting would be to create a mockobjects package in Groovy. Since Groovy is dynamically typed, you don’t have quite the same pain in dealing with all of Java’s primitive types. That was one of the complaints the jMock authors had about the DynaMock way.

Bill Venners wrote a good article comparing different ways to test private methods in your Java classes. In there, he points to JUnit-addons v1.4, which I don’t remember coming across previously. This package provides a bunch of useful new asserts, plus a class that helps you run your private methods via reflection. (There’s a bunch more in there, too… check it out!)

Thank goodness that the Net still has free speech. The FCC Song is a little ditty written by Eric Idle. I don’t know if he was actually fined by the FCC or is just making a commentary, but it’s quite a commentary. Don’t listen at work. Direct link to the song: The FCC Song

O’Reilly Network: Speed up Safari serves up a great, simple trick for getting pages to appear quicker in Safari. With slower pages, you might notice things “bounce around” as stuff renders… but who cares? You see your page quicker.

Let the endgame begin! Eclipse 3.0 M9 News

There are some great new features, and these are the last ones we can really expect for 3.0, now that the endgame has started. The CVS improvements are huge. “Commit Sets” let you group commits together by comment or time, which is almost as good as atomic commits. (Not quite, though… I still want Subversion at some point.) You can also update to a different tag without rechecking out, and check out based on date.

Code folding, a bunch of new quick assists, an overrides marker and more really make this look like a slick release. Next week will be fun trying this out!

I’m sure many have already seen this on Slashdot, but I wanted to save a link to it: IT Manager’s Journal | Seven open source business strategies for competitive advantage. This article provides a great run down of seven successful strategies for applying open source software in a big way in your business. Sure the traditional “give the software away and make money on services” line is there, but there are many other strategies that can succeed (and are!)

I’ve been a longtime fan of Rotten Tomatoes, and I still am! I find that the Tomatometer is a pretty good indicator of whether a movie is decent or a stinker. Sure, there are times when I’ll disagree with the critics… but more often than not, I’ll agree with the consensus of the critics, if not the opinions of a single critic. I went looking for a site that would do the same for music, and I found metacritic: Film Reviews, Game Reviews, Music Reviews, DVD Reviews. Yep, everything all in one place. Pretty spiffy looking. Now to start figuring out if I agree with the opinions that appear there.

Music is a particularly dicey thing when it comes to reviews, because everyone has their own tastes. Right now, I’m really enjoying listening to “My Band” by D12, “Going Under” by Evanescence (man, pop radio really missed the boat on that one!) and “Yeah” by Usher. “Yeah” is amazing because of how simple the music is. The interplay of the elements in that song make for a phenomenal piece of pop music (12 weeks at #1 says that I’m not the only person who thinks is phenomenal pop…)

MT 3.0 is coming out now and many bloggers seem to be shocked beyond belief that Six Apart wants to make money off of their work. Nevermind that they’re still offering a free edition of Movable Type that would probably work just fine for most bloggers. They’ve always specified that MT couldn’t be used for free by commercial interests. They’ve just added the restrictions that if you have more than one author and more than three blogs, you’ve gotta pay up. Big deal.

There are several options for the whiners:

1) Odds are that you probably still fall into the category of people who can use MT 3.0 for free

2) Or, you can stick with MT 2.6.

3) Pony up the cash… it’s not that much money.

4) If you really must, switch to one of the many fine other blogging systems. I just think that the only truly reasonable reason to do this is if there are features there that you want to have that you can’t get out of 1, 2 or 3.