Woodpress

Something’s up. I’m talking about a conspiracy.

There’s a parody of Yesterday, the Beatles song, called Leprosy (which I originally heard on Dr. Demento in the 80s). I’ve been googling for the lyrics, but all I’ve found are some failed attempts to recite it from memory (and some inferior attempts at original parody). WHY are there no accurate copies of these lyrics on the web? What is the web FOR if not storage of the lyrics of Leprosy for my convenient retrieval?!

I’m confident that none of the lyrics I’ve found are accurate, because NONE of them contain the brilliant line, “when my tongue fell out, I don’t know — I couldn’t say.” I’ve found some versions that have other portions right, and there are some recurring fragments that I don’t remember (which may mean they’re correct — I never memorized the song).

So, what’s the deal? This parody is too funny to have disappeared without help. Has it been banned by evil intellectual property censors? I hope not! Parody is a form of protected speech!

So… here are some fragments pieced together from my memory (jogged somewhat by other attempts I found on the web):

Suddenly,
I'm not half the man I used to be,
Pieces just keep falling off of me,
(???).

When my tongue fell out,
I don't know, I couldn't say,
(???),
(???).

Leprosy,
(???),
Now I've lost my chance for ecstasy,
How I despise my leprosy.

January 12, 2006 Update:
I found a web page (which I admit doesn’t look very authoritative), that claims Sony is stifling Beatles parodies. I thought Michael Jackson exclusively owned most of The Beatles’ music, but according to Wikipedia, Michael Jackson and Sony have co-owned the Beatles music since the mid-90s.

So… since I’m boycotting Sony I guess that means I won’t be buying any more Beatles albums.

I’m doing some .Net (specifically C#) coding these days, and I need to unit test.

NUnit – NUnit seems to be the most common solution, and definitely looks promising.

NUnit has a stand-alone GUI and a command-line mode, and although that’s sufficient, it doesn’t appear to integrate with Visual Studio 2003 like JUnit integrates with Eclipse, so I’ve decided to look around a little more.

csUnit – Another option is csUnit. It didn’t take me long to decide against csUnit. In fact, it made me want to rant. I have to confess up-front, it was an emotional response. I’m only *assuming* that their solution is inferior.

I didn’t make it far through their FAQ because it evades the questions rather than answering them. For example:

How does csUnit compare to XYZ? How is csUnit better than XYZ? (XYZ being a different tool)

The answer?

csUnit and XYZ offer different sets of features. Depending on your requirements and based upon your selection criteria, csUnit or XYZ may be the better fit. It is your decision! (blah blah blah)

Right… they’re “different”… I’ve heard of that happening, and they’re saying that I may want to use those “differences” as “criteria” to make my decision… but they’re not going to help me AT ALL in identifying the differences. Gotcha. They go on, using way too many commas, to explain that their “ethics and morale” make it undesirable to provide any sort of comparative analysis. Fine. OK, you csUnit guys go off and do your thing. I’ll go where the information is.

I wonder if csUnit was a school project that hasn’t been abandoned yet. It doesn’t seem to have an underlying philosophy that makes it different than other solutions — just an assertion of differentNESS.

So, what’s next on the list?

Visual Studio 2005 – It looks like Microsoft has added integrated unit testing into Visual Studio 2005 (and they seem to be claiming that they’re the first ones to offer unit testing integrated with the development environment — whatever). Unfortunately, this isn’t a good time for me to upgrade.

I’m not seeing anything else prominent, so it’s NUnit (for now at least). From what I can tell, switching from NUnit to Microsoft’s solution won’t be a major undertaking.

January 8, 2006 Update: Zanebug claims to be an NUnit-compatible solution with VS2003 integration. Like NUnit, it is open source. I will probably be using Zanebug instead of NUnit.

January 9, 2006 Update: I installed and fiddled with Zanebug, and although it ALMOST worked, I never succeeded in getting valid test results.

Rather than spending more than a short amount of time troubleshooting the default install with a very simple set of tests, I switched back to NUnit (which works just fine, although it doesn’t have IDE integration).

IDE integration is a nice idea, but actually working (without wasting my time) is much more important. I will probably not give anything else a chance until I switch to Visual Studio 2005.

Browsing through photos of bugs on Flickr, I found a reference to whatsthatbug.com. Thanks to that site, I saw a photo (taken near where I live) of a Jerusalem Cricket. I’ve never seen such a critter, but it’s a great looking bug! I used Google Images to find a relatively high resolution picture of a Jerusalem Cricket.

In case you were wondering, here’s what to do with your spare Jerusalem Crickets. It’s good to know!

Whoa. Was that December? Is it 2006?

A few days ago I stepped on my pocket digital camera (a Sony Cybershot DSC-T1) and broke the LCD. I am very sad about that. It wasn’t my high-end camera, but it was very respectable (5 Megapixel, 3x optical zoom, and excellent macro capabilities — most photos I’ve posted were taken with it), and more importantly it was the camera I had with me all the time.

Here’s what the LCD looks like while the camera is powered off. It’s pretty. Looks kinda like a fractal…

Now I’m in the market for a new ultra-compact digital camera. Unfortunately, Sony’s recent digital rights management rootkit demonstrated such a severe disregard for the rights of the people buying their products, I’m boycotting them. (If you’re my wife or one of my kids, I love you, but this is why we’re not getting any more Playstation stuff. Sorry. *DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT DID THIS TO YOU!*)

If you know me, you probably realize that it’s a big deal to me to boycott Sony. As I write this post, I’m using a Sony VAIO VGN-A190 laptop a few feet from my son who’s staring intently at a Sony WEGA TV. My wife is in the next room playing a game on her Sony VAIO desktop PC, and my daughter is downstairs chatting and listening to music on her Sony VAIO desktop PC. (Of course, I’ve uninstalled the support.com semi-spyware Sony bundles with VAIO computers.)

I’ve spent a lot of money on Sony stuff: at least seven digital cameras, three digital camcorders, several Clie PDAs, at least four laptop computers, at least six desktop computers, multiple monitors, an HDTV, some VCR/DVD players, various Playstation stuff, bafrigginzillions of videos and CDs, countless accessories, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot.

I could explain WHY I’ve bought so much Sony stuff, but I don’t advocate them anymore, so I’ll refrain. I’ll just say that I’m not some kind of Sony nut — I buy what makes sense. It no longer makes sense to buy Sony.

In the past I’ve advocated/recommended Sony hardware and digital cameras to many people. Now I discourage people from buying Sony, and Sony is definitely losing a digital camera sale that I would have been happy to give them. In fact, it’s my annoyance with having to shop around so much more that inspired this post. (I had become extremely familiar with Sony’s product lines.)

To Darth Sony (and other people pushing DRM), I say: The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

To the Good Guys: “Digital Rights Management” is your enemy. It is an attempt to “manage” (i.e. strip you of) the rights granted to you by law when you acquire a license to use Copyrighted material. Sony’s DRM Rootkit takes this WAY too far. In addition to attempting to prevent you from pirating the “protected” CD, the software installed on your computer takes measures to hide itself, avoids removal, spies on you, degrades system performance, and even makes your system vulnerable to attack.

(If you can direct me to a good authoritative non-technical summary of the Sony DRM Rootkit, I’d like to link to one. I’m currently linking to a boingboing timeline and the original sysinternals announcement, both of which are highly informative, but not casual reading for the average person.)

Oh, and back to the camera tragedy… some statistics. I took 8440 pictures/movies with the Sony DSC-T1, starting on 3/18/2004. At about $500 for the camera, that’s about $0.06 per picture, which seems worth it to me. Of course, there were other expenses, but the base camera cost me $0.06 per picture. That’s satisfactory.

At the risk of sounding like I think people care about such things… the official Woodpress URL has changed from http://www.snark.com/~woody/wordpress/ to http://www.snark.com/woodpress/

This change shouldn’t break anything because the old URL will redirect.

I’m announcing it just in case something somewhere DOES break, in which case changing the URL should fix it. (I’d be interested in knowing of anything that breaks… please comment on this post if you encounter a problem that you think was caused by the URL change.)

As far as my reasons for changing the URL (at further risk of seeming like I think someone cares)…

• It’s a simpler URL to tell friends. (It’s shorter and includes no tilde.)
• Naming the directory after the weblog itself (Woodpress) seems more appropriate than naming it after the weblog software (WordPress).
• I’m a rebel, and they say “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

I work near power lines. They’re above the parking lot. When I walk through the parking lot, I hear them buzz and crackle. Why do they crackle and buzz? What’s really happening up there? Specifically, what causes the crackling sound? I suggested to a co-worker that it might be arcing, but he was skeptical, since that’d be an awful lot of power being wasted.

Here’s a picture of the power lines I took on a walk a couple weeks ago:

A few days ago I took this photo on a walk near work.

I really like the stripey pattern on this bug… and the subtle colors on the wings.

A little over a week ago we helped my parents do some work in their yard. They had a pitchfork. Naturally, I had them pose in front of their mobile home for an imitation of American Gothic. So, for everyone wondering what what you get when you ask my parents to do the American Gothic pose, this is it: