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Actually someone from SGI ported POV Ray to MPI about 4 years ago:

http://www.verrall.demon.co.uk/mpipov/

There is also a PVM version as well.

http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/p ovray/pvmpov.html

For one of my graduate classes I am MPI enabling the latest povray source based on Leon Verrall, Andreas Dilger, & Brad Klines previous work mentioned above.

This may be the motivation behind this story, but there is a real danger to having too much traffic that is unresponsive to congestion (e.g. UDP video streams). A traffic meltdown happened at Berkeley in 1987 and motivated the development of the TCP protocol we see today.

A fairly understandable research paper which illustrates the effect.

Thank you for your well-stated comment. You may want to consider, though, that some people find the use of the term "Mohammedism" to be inappropriate (they prefer the term "Islam").

I normally have little patience for politicaly correct "goodspeak", but in this case the objection makes fair sense. The problem with the word "Mohammedism" is that it can be taken to imply the worship of the prophet Mohammed, which is not part of Islamic theology http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/islam /beginnings/intro.html

Thank you for considering this comment.

You could, for example, put a 2-meter region of depths containing your subject in perfect focus, and have a sharp transition to blurriness at the edges of that 2-meter region.

Watching Solaris and Stalker gave me the impression that they were about 50% longer than they needed to be in order to provide Soviet workers with something to do.

"Nobody would go to work with Tarkovsky by accident," Vladimir Sharun remembers. "Everybody knew what kind of Personality he was. On the one hand they were afraid of his exacting demands. On the other, Tarkovsky productions were known to have taken a long time on occasion and during the Soviet times the crew were not paid for the idle periods.. And the most important of Tarkovsky's "faults" was that this great artist tried to do everything himself. After all he was even the set designer for Stalker. In all shots every blade of grass would be positioned by his own hand.

quote from: http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.co m/TheTopics/Stalker/sharun.html

Actually I whiled away an hour or two devising a zombie combat kit there last month. Basically you need to protect yourself from bites, mob attacks, and not much else, and destroy the brain. Assuming a near infinite number of zombies, high tech solutions will usually fail, meaning ammo runs out and equipment jams.

The best weapons to defeat zombies in close combat would be punch knives of some kind (similar to these, but with the guard across the front or even a full hand fencing guard) although the jury is out as to whether one or two straight spikes for penetration and ease of withdrawal would be better than a maximum damage broad bladed knife, with guaranteed brain destruction.

The method of use for these blades would be straight punches, head or eye height, in and out. A single person could take out a zombie a second with a couple of these. I might also recommend an oil soaked sheath to keep it lubricated. Speaking of oil, mobility is a factor, so some sort of loose link mail of ceramic or other light material would be good. This could then be oiled up to provide less traction for the zombies' gripping hands. What we're really talking about here is human bites, so even stff leather could do the job fairly well.

Full face coverage would be important, and a locking mechanism under the jaw to prevent the zombies ripping off the helmet, with high shoulder neck guards to prevent them gripping under the neck.

Its very hard to completely destroy a brain inside a skull at any range without guns or crossbows of some sort, so instead I would advise letting the zombies come to you. Rig up a corridor with a hinged floor going to a quicklime pit or even a sheer Y drop, to trap the undead in the pit, then bait them in straight and close the door behind them. Both of these can be done manually and with very limited technical ability. Once trapped, either pour in more quicklime or spear the trapped zombies with a spike. Once completed, rinse and repeat, either disposing of the corpses over the wall or by cremation. At a rate of a thousand zombies a day, you can clear out a city of a half million undead in just over a year.

For forays and travelling, groups would of course be advisable, trained in back to back or three corner fighting methods, to prevent individuals being surrounded. For larger scale incursions, Roman legion tactics would be best, shields and short blades or punch knives.

You are right to a point. Its mainly the leadership that are the extremists. PETA kills and puts down far more animals than they save. They kill far more than shelters that do not have a no kill policy. The true meaning on PETA is People Executing Tame Animals. Oh and if you have pets acording to PETA you own SLAVES.
And that is ONLY the beginning of the hypocrisy with PETA. And with that I give you the following...


" PETA's Mary Beth Sweetland should also answer for her own personal hypocrisy. Like more than ten million Americans, she's diabetic. Sweetland injects herself daily with insulin that was tested on animals; she has conceded that her medicine "still contains some animal products -- and I have no qualms about it.... I don't see myself as a hypocrite. I need my life to fight for the rights of animals."

Theres alot of throw away prototypes in the Burgess Shale.

http://www.geo.ucalgary.ca/~macrae/Burgess_Shale/

Now on that note, auto and aerospace programs throw away alot of prototypes too.

...are located here. Looks kind of odd.

I think the point many are missing is that it is valuable to find ways to do useful things like refrigeration without elaborate industrial infrastructure.

People take for granted how complex (and ultimately fragile) are our first world networks for raw materials, purified materials, machine tools, energy for manufacture, skilled engineering and labor, transportation, finance and trade. A breakdown at any of these levels can make complex machinery impossible to manufacture.

And without spare parts and service skills, any complex machine can quickly turn into an inert lump.

Try to picture being stranded in the desert and finding a brand new Toyota Land Rover that is complete with everything except spark plugs. Not going to do you much good, is it?

It's like you can shit out of your mouth... amazing. You opened it up and shit just spewed from it. Good for you, you should be on Letterman's stupid people tricks.

www.talkorigins.org has plenty of info for you.

Evolution does not deal with how life started, no matter what IDers and creationists tell you. It is not about the origin of life, that's other theories that IDers like to lump in with Evolution to provide some disproof by association.

Evolution does not contradict the second law of thermodynamics. It would if the earth was a closed system, and we weren't getting all that great energy from the sun. The sun adds more entrophy back then is leaving the system.

Evolution is modeled from Genetics, fossil records, DNA research, and out continually growing knowledge of us and the things around us.

Species changes have been viewed through fossil records. Here are some examples of transitional fossils: Read up...

ID and Creationism doesn't attempt to fill any gaps in knowledge with knowledge. Instead, they attempt to fill it with crap about invisible, super-folks who fart out universes on a whim... But.. You cannot disprove this invisible farting super-folk because it's just not possible. So instead, prove God exists. Prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. You have to back up the invisible farting dude. You do not pull shit outta your ass and have it held as valid until someone comes along and proves you wrong. No, you make an arguement then you back it up. Evolution has done this, can't ID and Creationism have the courtesy to do the same?

So... In conclusion, take your (Not you specifically, IDers and Creationists in general) ID, take you Creation, roll them both up nice and tight and shove them up your prissy little ass, not down our kids throat.

The prototype was included in the Calgary Stampede Parade http://www.calgarystampedeparade.com/ last friday.

We have this at the University of Calgary:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/it/webdisk/

Basically, WebDAV over HTTPS with a Free OS X client but non-free Windows client on almost every public computer on campus.

The University of Calgary IT department had a similar task. Not finding any suitable tools to do this, they developed their own called Webdisk. It is a web folder accessible through FTP and the standard methods, but they also tie access to it into all U of C computers through a mapped drive. As well, they offer a program to map this webdisk drive to your home computer.

It's based on WebDAV, and works on Windows, Macs, and Linux. There is a PPT on this website that explains everything quite well (especially how they cam to develop it.) http://www.ucalgary.ca/it/self_help/webdisk/

I have to say that one thing I've generally been pleased with here at the UofC is the IT department, and the Webdisk is one reason why. It's very common to see all types of students making use of it, since it's such an intuitive system, mainly since it ties right into Windows Explorer.

Some years ago the great guys at the Advanced Computing Lab of Los Alamos National Laboratory built this very cool setup with a bunch of Thinkpads running Plan 9:

The Powerwall

Sounds like U of C's adline - "65 and You're In!"

There is a nice overview/tutorial on how the process of slowing light works here:

http://qis.ucalgary.ca/quantech/storage.html

Dr. Hau also has a powerpoint presentation on how it works as well:

http://www.deas.harvard.edu/haulab/101204%20standa rd_files/v3_document.htm

Bet you can't beat this tax form.

There's already this exclusive image of Deep Impact's encounter up on the Web.

For Canadians, I know the University of Calgary has a bog-standard computer science degree with a "game design concentration" that entails taking graphics courses and a few game dev courses.

Unreal Doom3 HalfLife2 Enemy Territory Cube Savage Stratagus Freeciv Wesnoth NeverwinterNights Tribes2 Vendetta YohohoPuzzlePirates Civilization AlphaCentauri FrozenBubble Pydance Teg DeusEx BZFlag XPlane Flightgear Torcs Scorched3d Pingus Lincity Tuxcart Torcs Quake 123 VegaStrike Railz LBreakout Armagetron PPRacer Vendetta and there more impressive titles under development.

Here's my opinion. What "we" need are fewer people saying we need more games, and more people recognizing some of the excellent offerings we have right now. If we support these games (even with nothing more than just a little recognition), the companies WILL notice, see us as a market, and want to cater to us.

Send an email to the head of computer science at the U of C. Tell him what you think!

Here is the profs webpage and the link to his new course.

The prof is a pretty cool guy but his jokes are AWEFUL! (If you are reading this Dr. Aycock, I'm just kidding. :P)

Here is the profs webpage and the link to his new course.

The prof is a pretty cool guy but his jokes are AWEFUL! (If you are reading this Dr. Aycock, I'm just kidding. :P)

Course Description

This course will objectively examine two major, modern concerns: spam and other forms of unsolicited bulk electronic communication, and spyware. Relevant legal and ethical issues will be covered, along with tie-ins to other fields like business and economics. Spamming and spyware techniques will be studied, as will current and upcoming countermeasures. Some related computer and network security problems will also be examined.

Course assignments will involve implementing spamming and spyware techniques, and their countermeasures, under controlled conditions. STRICT assignment protocols will be in effect; failure to adhere to these protocols will result in an "F" grade in the course.

You will be required to sign a form stating that you have read and understood the assignment protocols, and that you understand that misuse of the information in this course can result in civil and criminal penalties under the laws of Canada and of other countries.

Actually, it's CPSC 599.63. Here's the instructor's web site.

From: http://www.ucalgary.ca/it/self_help/email/spam/

"The University of Calgary's Computing Policy prohibits U of C users from spamming others. If you receive spam that originated at the University of Calgary, please report it to abuse@ucalgary.ca."

I wonder if someone should inform the IT department.

It wouldn't be that bad an idea for a radio telescope.

You could put a satellite in orbit around the moon and transmit data from the telescope to the satellite and then to Earth.

You'd have a very large substrate (the moon) for building a very large telescope (think Arecibo). You could also use the moon to block out Earth sources of radio interference. During the time when the telescope faced the Sun, you could conduct solar observation experiments instead.

At the time, SNOWY was specialized for extracting biographical data. I don't know if it has been extended to other domains.

For a brief moment I thought you were taliking about a game based on the great Andrei Tarkovsky's movie Stalker, then I awoke and realised this is Slashdot ;-)

"Velásquez commissioned Hernán Cortés to explore, trade, and search for Christian captives in the Yucatán."

There are lots of other descriptions of the early trade between Europeans and American tribes, when the newcomers were at a disadvantage for mere survival, let alone conquest. When that phase passed, Europeans leveraged their superior firepower and transportation into conquest. All in the name of taking what the Americans had produced, in their lifetimes or over generations of breeding. Most of these Europeans, whose families lived in the relative squalor of European villages and countryside, were peasants whose Christianity hadn't changed their own clan/tribal culture much since around 1200, when they started to resemble the sophistication of the American tribal civilizations. Try reading The Indian Givers, which documents details of superior American culture taken by Europeans. Though they might have believed the Americans were "savages", or even devils, that doesn't change their interest in the superior agricultural products of those American people.

When Europeans landed in the Americas, they found lands filled with bounty produced by people. They stayed to get more of that bounty for themselves, whether they kept it all in their colonies, or sent some back to Europe. When we set up space colonies, colonists will be easier to justify and support when working within a human context than just extracting alien matter from an airless rock.

Phidgets (http://www.phidgets.com/) is something that has recently become extremely cheap and accessible to software guys like me who HATE hardware. Phidgets make it really easy to build physical user interfaces (think nobs, switches, pressure sensors, etc.) without needing to do any hardware stuff yourself.

They are extremely easy to use, as you can see by these undergrad projects (http://grouplab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/phidgets/gallery /index.html).

Full disclosure: I am a member of the lab from which this stuff was developed.

University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
CPSC 231 (1st year course). Took it last year. http://www.ucalgary.ca/pubs/calendar/current/What/ Courses/CPSC.htm#231
Yup. It's Pascal.

I was at a talk given by Jeremy Hall today, and he mentioned that the Suncor oil sands processing facilities are the single largest consumers of energy in Canada. When you factor in Syncrude and Shell's Albian venture, that adds up to a lot of pollution. He mentioned that the demand is so great that the government is considering building a nuclear reactor just for those sites (with waste to be dumped somewhere is Saskatchewan :)).

On a flat road, I don't think you are hammering nearly as much into shocks, especially in high cadence mode where shocks are *not* moving.

Anyway, MTB with dual suspension is great for roads, at least around here :) Much of the roads around here have potholes, and I prefer to waste some energy into the shocks, just so my back doesn't become the shock absorber.

This is not SUV mentality, it is a comfort mentality. I would say it is a difference between a Ferrari and a Cadillac. If you want SUV mentality, see this big bike

not the first time that's done :)

what could be done with a few leftover laptops: LANL and Plan 9.

what could be done with a few leftover read-projection screens and a nice opengl MPI library rendering on all them simultaneously: the GUT...

On Topic, programmers are getting beat to death like the auto workers and steel workers in the 80's. By dimantling the middle class one industry sector at a time, the rest of the middle class ignores it. Unfo. for the elitists there's a snapback effect once a critical mass is reached. Perhaps they think by extending the process over 50 years the effect will not occur? I theorized while studying Western Cic. in HS that about 18% of the people have to get really pissed and then they start protests and then the snapback snowballs. When you see people actively attacking the elitist governemnt, then you are seeing that people are pissed.
National Debt (well, basically embezzlement by the politicians and their cronies) is just one reason. Take a look at the last page of this link and see pure embezzlement from our government: embezzlement?. Who's stupid enough to vote for an incumbant? Bush and Kerry are both incumbants. They should both tear their clothes, gnash their teeth, and ask the American people to pray for a better government. They don't.
I was looking at the debt before and got some numbers from various US gov. web sites. Amazingly the dis-information campaign has not shut these down. Funny thing is that it has increased ever since like 1962 but Democrats claim Clinton had a Balanced Budget. This FALSE accounting is nonsense. Ask a kid in school if spending more than you take in is a Balanced Budget. That said, the administration prior to this one did do alot better. The USA cannot afford another Republican government if you believe that relates to the debt trendline. We will be bankrupted and forced into servitude to a world government/bank. "Don't cry for me Argentina...." :-)
First look at the situation for UK and Canada. UK
Canada
These can be graphed in Excel... I did not find a good site with the chart on the web.
,Budget Surplus or Deficit (-) as % GDP,Cyclical Surplus or Deficit (-) as % GDP,Other Adjustments as % GDP,Surplus or Deficit (-) as % GDP,Revenues as % GDP,Outlays as % GDP,Debt (100B),Debt as % of GDP,Debt as % of Tax Income (x100),GDP (100T),Debt,Tax Income (100B),Tax Income (B),Tax Income as % of GDP (x100) 1962,-1.2,-0.4,0.1,-0.7,17.3,18,,,,,,0.5,46.5, 1963,-0.8,-0.3,-0.1,-0.6,17.5,18.1,,,,,,0.5,49.1, 1964,-0.9,0.3,0.2,-1,17,18,,,,,,0.5,46, 1965,-0.2,0.8,0.2,-0.8,16.2,17,,,,,,0.5,51.1, 1966,-0.5,1.9,0.4,-2.1,15.9,18,,,,,,0.6,58.6, 1967,-1.1,1.7,*,-2.8,16.9,19.7,,,,,,0.6,64.4, 1968,-3,1.4,0.6,-3.7,16.5,20.3,4,,4.7%,, $358.00 ,0.8,76.4, 1969,0.4,1.6,*,-1.2,17.7,18.9,4,,4.0%,, $368.00 ,0.9,91.7, 1970,-0.3,0.6,0.2,-0.6,17.8,18.4,4,,4.4%,, $389.00 ,0.9,88.9, 1971,-2.1,-0.3,0.9,-0.9,17.1,18.1,4,,4.9%,, $424.00 ,0.9,85.8, 1972,-2,*,0.3,-1.7,16.9,18.6,4,,4.2%,, $429.00 ,1.0,102.8, 1973,-1.2,1.2,0.6,-1.7,16.7,18.4,5,,4.3%,, $469.00 ,1.1,109.6, 1974,-0.4,0.7,1.3,0.1,17.7,17.6,5,0.3%,3.9%,1.5, $492.00 ,1.3,126.5,8.4% 1975,-3.3,-1.4,2,0.1,18.5,18.4,6,0.4%,4.8%,1.6, $576.00 ,1.2,120.7,7.5% 1976,-4.1,-1.4,0.8,-2,17.3,19.3,7,0.4%,4.6%,1.8, $653.00 ,1.4,141.2,7.8% 1977,-2.7,-0.6,1,-1.1,17.8,18.9,7,0.4%,4.4%,2, $718.00 ,1.6,162.2,8.1% 1978,-2.7,0.1,1.3,-1.5,17.5,19.1,8,0.3%,4.2%,2.3, $789.00 ,1.9,188.9,8.2% 1979,-1.6,0.5,1.4,-0.7,17.9,18.6,8,0.3%,3.8%,2.6, $845.00 ,2.2,224.6,8.6% 1980,-2.7,-0.7,1.6,-0.4,18.8,19.2,9,0.3%,3.7%,2.8, $930.00 ,2.5,250,8.9% 1981,-2.5,-0.9,1.2,-0.4,19.5,19.9,10,0.3%,3.5%,3.1 ," $1,028.00 ",2.9,290.6,9.4% 1982,-3.7,-2,0.7,-1.1,19.2,20.3,12,0.4%,4.1%,3.3," $1,197.00 "

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. Sometimes I think he's just promoting that developers learn more than one programming language. I can dig that. I don't agree with equating intelligence with choice of programming language. Things are harder than that, particularly in a large company.

In a general sense, there has been a long debate about whether language influences thought, or if all languages are independent of thought. In oral human languages, Steven Pinker would argue that language is an instinct, and doesn't influence thought -- it evolves from thought.

In computer languages, however, you're not just communicating. You're representing. Also note that computer languages are written langauges, not oral languages. Harold Innis and Marshal McLuhan have both shown that written languages do influence thought, particularly the western phonetic alphabet leading to a paritcular societal pattern vs. eastern pictographic languages.

Turning to computer languages, one could argue that if you've only been exposed to one way of "representing" a thought, say with Visual Basic 6 - you are limited in the boundaries you set up in your own mind about what's possible. Ideas like dynamic dispatch, inheritance, etc. are all foreign, unless you've been exposed to them in another language.

Or, on the other hand, you may be using a language like C with very few boundaries, but this doesn't help either -- there's a lot of freedom there, and not a lot of guidance about how to use it properly. I always find it interesting when C programmers defend their choice and suggest "but, you can do object oriented programming in C!". Well, of course you can! But it required another language, Simula, followed by Smalltalk, to generate the discipline and ideas around what object oriented programming really was. Could that paradigm have evolved without another language to naturally support it? It's possible, but somewhat unlikely.

Any Turing complete language could implement a programming paradigm, it's just a matter if it's natural to the language's constructs or if it requires more elaborate structures. For example, if anyone has programmed Microsoft's COM realizes that the underlying concepts are relatively simple, but the elaborate syntax for achieving it in C++ (prior to ATL especially) is ridiculous. In this light, .NET really is about bringing the level of language up to and beyond the semantics that Microsoft technologists already had with COM.

Nevertheless, there's still a practical problem with modern dynamic languages. The world has a legacy, and that legacy is large, chaotic, crufty, and not very dynamic. Getting a handle on it requires simplification, constraints, and classifications for the kinds of languages, tools, techniques, and platforms for the future. This is the main reason why languages like COBOL, C++, or Java stick around: we have to stick to something for a few years to simplify the system dynamics in the large. Picking "one standard" or "one vendor" is a key way of ensuring quality - by constraining and simplifying the business environment.

Java is clearly not a "thought leading" language like Python or Ruby , or even older languages like Lisp or Smalltalk. But that's not what it was supposed to be. Java was an "action provoking" language that took a very large C and C++ legacy of systems, skills, and mindsets, and pushed them forward an inch.

A lot of independent technical people may not agree with "constrainting" the environment, because it limits innovation. Modern dynamic lanaguages make life so much simpler for the programmer. And I agree they do. But there are levels of simplicity -- and organizational simplicty in the large often trumps simplicity in the small. We'll get there eventually, but it will take a while. Most enlightened organizations will have an emerging technology lab to bri

Did I say scientists couldn't be wrong?

Nope. In fact, let's get in the wayback machine and see just what I said:

"When given the choice between a scientist and an administrator on matters regarding the usefulness of something in the field of science, I tend to lean toward the sciencey-types."

You also missed one of my favorite science vs. science gaffs, one from right here in the heart of the Pacific Northwest. For background more, google J. Harlen Bretz and the Missoula Floods.

Bretz was a mere public education science teacher who pitted his interpretation of the Channeled Scablands against all of the scientific conventional wisdom of his day. It wasn't until the Corp of Engineers started flying over Eastern Washington that Bretz's opinions began to take hold.

You also missed Fahrenheit's famous 'miss' regarding the age of the Earth.

These examples are, among others, why I cited "The Appeal to Authority" fallacy. The problem with low-G manufacturing is that the testing performed so far has produced not one interesting result. Yet it is paraded out as one of the Holy Grail-ish reasons to go to space.

I personally like the idea of adventure. Sending out humans to do a robots work has an important psychological factor. I once had a copy of a political cartoon done by Pat Oliphant that showed a group of people standing at the edge of the Great Plains watching an unmanned Conestoga Wagon headed out into the frontier. The gist of the text below it was "How the West Would Have Been Explored if We Hadn't Sent Settlers".

That comic was published shortly after the Columbia explosion.

This will be an interesting battle to watch! I think it is unlikely that either patent will be eliminated due to lack of merit. Rather it will be genuine prior art claims that win the day.

BTW. I'm not employed by either party anymore.

You probably need acrobat 5, I whipped up some half-cocked counterpoints that are probably pretty self-evident and embedded them in this PDF as comments (double click the little yellow ballons, I haven't tried this in Acrobat 4 reader/linux - suffer..)

Responses

"It's" is a contraction of "it is". The apostrophe in this case shows a contraction.

See http://www.comcul.ucalgary.ca/Web/efwr/apostrophe. html

"The rule to remember is simple: it's = it is or it has (otherwise, write its)"

I'm awaiting your apology for calling me a dumbass for a grammatical error that I did not make.

Since you're Canadian, here's some data from MacLean's survey of 15 Canadian "Medical/Doctoral" Universities - the relevant category is "Student Retention", which is exactly what you're talking about (% of first year students who return in 2nd-year)- this percentage ranges from 95.3% for Laval to 80.4% for Manitoba. None are even close to the 65% rate you're claiming most have.

If anything, retention rates are higher at major US universities- a few years ago, when the US News & World Report rankings added a "graduation rate" category, Caltech was the worst in this category and downgraded because "only" 85% of freshmen graduated within 5 years. This notably low-retention-rate school currently has 91% of its freshmen return for a second year- a more typical rate among top US schools is Stanford with 98%.

Well, duh.

But also, add on the fact that PETA endorses it. PETA doesn't even endorse having pets.

This paper reviews history mechanisms in web browsers back in '97. One of the mechanisms mentioned, MosaicG is stunningly similar to the work in this article.

MosaicG was released in 1995.

It's interesting though that Tauscher's paper (the first link) conlcuded back then that the 'stack based' histories we used were not optimal, mainly because sibling history branches disappear. She found that the best method tested was to have a 'context sensitive web subset', ie a graph showing the relationships between visited nodes in relation to the current node, rather than a strict history.

Yes, I know there are a couple of schools out there that offer SoftEng degrees, but until industry distinguishes them from CompScists and requires the engineering designation for key positions they are meaningless.

I wouldn't say that. It's certainly a start. Sort of a Catch 22, no?

Unit testing does not require eXtreme Programming. On the other hand, eXtreme programming does require unit testing. We've studied XP's practices, and they seem to be roughly broken into two groups: programming for ever-changing requirements, and quality assurances (refactoring, unit testing) to make sure the code doesn't fall apart.

As many anti-XP pundits will point out, unit testing is worth applying to any project that you can apply it to, and there are precious few that can't.

I do a lot of framework-level programming, and I must say that stability, as well as my confidence in the code, has increased substantially from putting unit testing into the mix. Some folks advocate TDD (Test-Driven Development) in the canonical sense (test first), but I find that the completely up-front test creation works in practice only when you have rock-solid easy-to-translate-into-source-code checklisted requirements. I compromise, and build the tests after the interfaces, rough algorithm and rough support objects have been put together.

Here are a few things I've learned over my unit testing experiences:

• If the individual test methods start to get beefy, spin off the pieces you can into English-sounding methods on their own, especially if it's something you find yourself using in multiple test methods. Methods for creating test objects and comparing the test results are usually prime candidates.
• If you have a facility to use generics in your programming, use it for anything you've had to do exactly the same 3+ times over - you can cover off the generic with a single unit test module
• Classes are easier to test if you make liberal use of interfaces or abstract base classes - this lets you create classes for use by the test that implement extremely rudimentary functionality (instead of asking a web service for a value, it returns "1", or gives back an error) and/or that can be used as counters/loggers for the number of times and with what parameters the services are requested.
• Negative testing is important - if you don't explicitly test what out of bounds, null or otherwise invalid input parameters and states do to your object, you're leaving yourself open to a host of "undefined behaviors" which can cause bugs.
• For unit testing lower-level classes, you'll often find that a unit-test-per-method works well. For unit testing higher-level classes, you'll find yourself keeping the class the same, but the test methods will vary the data that gets fed into it.

I haven't figured out a good means to unit test concurrent code, but you can often stack the deck for fast-running processes by adding in delays in key spots to extend the exposure to weak spots.

Unit testing isn't for everything. It coughs and sputters a bit when you don't have full control over the environment (databases, sockets, network configuration, user interaction). You can shoehorn it in, but it's usually better left for the likes of regression testing and functional integrated testing.

For a quick start to functional testing, we've started test-driving TestComplete at our office; it's proven itself to be a capable tool (our lead QA man has put up a sign on the computer entitled, "I am Q-Tron; I Test Software While Mere Mortals Sleep" - it has been testing out communications while he sleeps :)

I take it you've read The Moral Animal?

http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~saul/hci_topics/pap ers/apple.html

I'm pretty sure that's the webpage you were talking about. Google wins again!

Good link though. I had never read that before. A little offtopic, but their design method is brilliant. Have two groups simultaneously creating their own versions of the same idea in a sterile environment, and then sharing the best ideas from both at a later date to create the ultimate product.

Read up on the difference between:

terminus ante quem, and

terminus post quem.

This site even uses coins as an example.