Reading some of the software development weblogs lately, it seems like the anti-unit testing backlash has begun. It wasn’t too long ago that people were talking about becoming “test infected” and that Test Driven Development became an important buzzword, the idea being that you would write automated tests to verify that your code worked before writing the code itself, and then making sure that your code complies with those tests throughout the development cycle.

I was a bit late jumping on the bandwagon and becoming test infected, but as soon as I really leapt into it, the value became apparent to me immediately. Indeed, one thing that has been confirmed repeatedly lately is that all of the most embarrassing bugs I’ve had to deal with have been direct products of having poor test coverage for a feature. Had I written all of the unit tests I needed to, I would have caught those bugs and not had to deal with customers contending with them. And the thing is, in every one of those cases, it’s not like I couldn’t foresee needing to write the unit tests I miss. Rather it was that cycles are short and there are too many things to do, and so testing suffers. Anyway, unit testing may be a fad to a certain extent, but it’s a fad that I won’t be leaving behind anytime soon.

There’s no worse feeling than getting burned by a bug and knowing that a bit of extra work on the testing side could have saved you.

Probably most developers already know about O’Reilly’s Safari service, which, for a monthly fee, enables you to have a set number of books checked out of an online library and use them in electronic format. I had known about it for ages, but hadn’t ever subscribed until I recently started using PHP and JavaScript a lot more than I had been. I had never been attracted to it as a Java developer, because between experience, the books I own, JavaDoc, and source code, I can pretty much find the answers I need without additional reference material. In areas where I’m less experienced, though, Safari is incredibly helpful. I don’t want to go out and buy a shelf full of books for things that, hopefully, I’ll never have to use again, so Safar is a great deal. Just throw a few relevant books onto your bookshelf and go. Like I said, everyone but me probably already knew this, but if you didn’t, then go check it out.

One other thing I had wondered about was the Safari business model. I had assumed that there was enough reference material freely available online for most things that Safari wouldn’t provide a significant marginal benefit. As I wade into the PHP world, though, I find that the online reference material is generally lacking. The PHP manual is pretty uneven, and most of the developer resource sites run by third parties are advertising-laden crapfests. Safari really hits the sweet spot there. I wonder how many subscribers they have? Any money they do make must be almost pure profit since O’Reilly already owns the rights to the books and the site must not be horribly difficult to maintain.

Could Eliot Spitzer be our future President? I’m willing to bet he’ll be New York state’s next governor.

As Paul Krugman points out today in his column, there is no financial crisis facing Social Security. Readers of this site already know that since I hashed it out awhile back. On the other hand, Medicare, like all health care programs, is in trouble. Nobody seems to be doing much about that.

You know, there ought to be a principle of software engineering that says something like “Every one-off turns into an application.” I started working on some simple reports that were just going to basically dump the contents of a database table onto a Web page. Simple enough. Then I started adding features — splitting results onto multiple pages, letting the user sort based on columns, letting them adjust the time frame for the report and filter the results based on various fields. I showed it to other people. Soon you could customize the report to only show the columns that you wanted. Now I’m working on custom reports that let you specify the filter conditions for each report and which columns belong on that report. Next thing you know, you have a full blown reporting application and you’ve been working for two weeks on that project you planned to originally whip up over a weekend. Why do I always forget that that will happen?

Your tax dollars hard at work.

So there’s this show on ABC that I like to watch. It’s a reality show called Wife Swap, which sounds really stupid, but is actually hilarious and sometimes even educational. Fox has a really crummy show that’s a knockoff called “Meet Your New Mommy” or something stupid like that — it has actually been on longer but the truth is that Fox stole the idea when they heard about it and rushed their show onto the air. Anyway, the catch is that you have to watch this show this season. These shows were all recorded before any of them aired, and they carefully selected the participants for maximum entertainment value. Now they’re asking people to sign up for the show, and everyone who’s on it in the future will have seen the show and adjust their behavior accordingly. The only way reality shows really work well (unless there’s a compelling competition) is if the fish bowl is really a fish bowl. If the fish know they’re in an aquarium, the entertainment value isn’t there. Right now it’s great TV. Don’t miss it.

I have a CSS question for the web design gurus who read this site. I have an example page with a navigation bar across the top, which you can see here. When you mouse over the links in the navigation bar, the background and foreground colors change. What I’m wondering is how to make the background highlighting extend so that it occupies the entire height of the grey bar across the top of the page. I’ve tried setting the height of the grey bar, which is a div using line-height and padding, but neither approach includes the background in the link. Any ideas? If so, post to the QuickTopic.

Am I the only person who’s shocked to learn that IBM is looking to exit the PC business? Granted their desktop computers are no great shakes, but when it comes to laptops, IBM is the industry leader. The idea that there won’t be an IBM ThinkPad any longer blows me away.

About a month ago, my buddies over at worldchanging posted an item about the Java Log fire log. It’s a manmade piece of firewood made of recycled coffee grounds. The logs cost about as much as any other fire log (Duraflame being the most famous), but are a whole lot better for the environment. Anyway, I happened to be at Target a couple of days later and picked up a case of them, and am completely sold. I used to buy regular old firewood when I lived in a house, but I don’t have room for firewood at my apartment, so I had to buy those expensive little bundles of wood at the grocery store. The Java Log is cheaper, infinitely easier to ignite, and leaves nearly no mess. Oh, and it’s much better for the environment than a wood fire or a Duraflame fire as well. Amazing product.