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Canadian Weights & Measures

Canada is officially metric. We went metric in 1970. I came in 1978. I’m a Sagittarius.

How I think about weights and measures is completely screwy. Observe:

I measure my body weight in pounds. I measure the steak I eat in grams.

I know my height in feet and inches and I know my ceilings are 8 ft high. I know my work is about 2 kilometers away from my house. 

I can gauge something 10 feet high and 100 meters away; but not the other way around.

All fluids are measured in liters. Ounces confound me. How much rice do I make for our dinner? 1 cup (in 2 cups of water).

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TV DVDs

For Christmas, I got season 1 of Scrubs on DVD. I watched them all in a week. Then I saw a sale at the local Future Shop and got Season 2 of Scrubs. I watched them all in a week too. I love my Scrubs. Seriously, it’s hilarious; I only really started paying attention on real TV in Season 3.

While I was purchasing Season 2, I noticed Arrested Development Season 1 for an insanely low price, so I got that too. I watched what they call a third season. I’m in the middle of disc 2. Super funny. It’s a shame they cancelled it. I don’t think DVD sales will pull that one back a la Family Guy: the humour is a little too subtle for most people.

That got me thinking: what long gone TV cult hit (by that I mean show off the beaten track that I happened to like) would I want to see on DVD? The first one that popped in my head was Parker Lewis Can’t Lose.

Who remembers that show?

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Four Things

It must be a big meme if it reaches this dark, dank corner of the internet. I read blogs from two types of bloggers: hip, cool web designers and computer nerds. I’m definitely in the latter. The former goes through these fun blog survey question things every few months, then calls them memes. I’ve always looked on and thought, “Look what the cool kids are doing.” Then I wipe away the tears and wish for cool web friends. (No I’m not serious.) Anyway, my first meme:

4 Things

Four jobs I’ve had in my life

  1. Paperboy 
  2. Network Administrator 
  3. Drill Instructor 
  4. Software Developer

Four movies I can watch over and over

  1. The Matrix 
  2. School Of Rock 
  3. GalaxyQuest 
  4. Fight Club 

Four places I have lived

  1. Calgary, AB, Canada 
  2. Camberley, England 
  3. Baden-Baden, Germany 
  4. Victoria, BC, Canada 

Four TV shows I love to watch

  1. 24
  2. Scrubs 
  3. Grey’s Anatomy 
  4. My Name is Earl 

Four places I have been on vacation

  1. Sydney, Australia 
  2. Rio de Janiero, Brazil 
  3. Venice, Italy 
  4. Salt Spring Island, BC 

Four of my favourite dishes

  1. Pizza   
  2. Bacon & Eggs
  3. Hamburger & Fries 
  4. Anything made by somebody else.

Four websites I visit daily

  1. The Daily Grind
  2. The Superficial
  3. Wired.com
  4. Dilbert

Four places I would rather be right now

  1. A warm beach 
  2. A bar with the boys 
  3. Vegas, baby 
  4. But home’s just fine

Four bloggers I am tagging

  1. Phil Haack
  2. Nolan Zak
  3. Leon Bambrick
  4. Mike Flasko
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Test with Coverage.

Your unit tests aren’t as effective if you don’t use code coverage to measure how much of the code your tests are exercising. For development at home and work, I’ve been using NCover, which has worked wonders for my unit tests. When I started using NCover over a year ago, I wanted something that would integrate with VS so I wouldn’t have to do all this configuration work for every project. I started a project that held my interest for about three weeks. That fizzled (I blame TV).

What I resorted to was a batch file that ran NCover followed by NCoverBrowser. Add that as a solution item, and you can launch it from the IDE anytime. (I learned that last bit last week.)

Well, I no longer have to rely on batch files! Jamie Cansdale has taken TestDriven.net to a new level: testing with coverage. One of my favourite features Microsoft didn’t put in every version of Visual Studio 2005 is now present for Visual Studio 2003/2005, including Express Editions. Yes!

It does the exact same thing as my batch file, except I don’t have to write a batch file.

It requires NCover 1.5.1 Beta 2, a brand new version of NCover targetting .NET 2.0. It has some exciting features in its own right, including Attribute-based type exclusion.

Check it out.

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The MSBuild Blog

Avalon is flashy. Indigo is robust and extensible. Generics, iterators and anonymous methods make writing extensible code faster than ever. One of the workhorses that doesn’t get a lot of credit is MSBuild. There are so many things you have to do to get software out the door in your customers’ hands, so many things that I won’t bother enumerating them.

Doing them all automatically, the same way every time is a daunting task. In .NET 1.1, automating everything requires third-party tools, such as NAnt. The biggest disadvantage of any tool: VS integration. Visual Studio stores all the solution information in .sln and .*proj files; a third party tool either has to parse that file, which may be well-formed XML, but it certainly takes a lot more than an XML parser to interpret. Or, the tool requires you to add all that project info yourself.

With the new framework, that all changes: MSBuild is a completely new, XML-based tool that allows you to run arbitrary tasks related to your project. The biggest advantage? Visual Studio uses it. And uses it well.

However, you don’t see a lot about MSBuild in the blogs or articles, with the exception of the MSBuild blog. They have some really great articles, including a whole series on how Visual Studio uses MSBuild. One of their latest posts is about extending MSBuild with your own custom tasks.

Recommended.