My mate Rich finally set up a blog. Considering he's usually on the bleeding edge of technology, he's a about 4 years late to this particular party. Well, its all good.

Rich and I both joined the company within a few weeks of each other and were camped out in a Portakabin behind one of the Bracknell office buildings. When I wrote the original publishing engine we used to publish the company's web site globally, Rich wrote most of the evil XML scripts. When I moved to Texas in 2000, Rich wasn't far behind. He was then instrumental in helping us to port it to .NET at the tail end of 2000 - the same system that is used to produce the entire site to this day.

(Incidentally, we filed a patent for the scripting language, which just got issued after 5 years! If you read through it, you'll get some idea of what Rich was fighting with...)

He's now leading the development of Xanadu, and making the web client perform all sorts of unnatural acts. Its basically taking the .NET event model and projecting it to the client using DHTML. Ah well ... If life was easy at the bleeding edge, everyone would be doing it, right?

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So it seems like my RSS feed had gone down silently at some point. The company that was converting Blogger's atom feed to RSS had just gone away.

Anyway, I wrote my own Atom -> RSS converter... so I'm back up again.

The feed is at:
http://www.ruxp.net/rss.aspx

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So the big story on the new iPod was that there was no new story... It is exactly what we knew it would be yesterday. Very nice, and all, but not reason enough to replace the one I have.

Well, thats ok, I guess. The battery life must have been hurting them, as the Dell DJ and iRiver both outlasted it by a mile. The funny thing now is that it looks so much like the 1G iPod all over again. Thats progress, I guess.

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So it seems everyone already knows what the new iPod will be. Which makes me wonder... Surely Newsweek must have told Steve that they publish to their site on Sunday. And after the iMac was prematurely announced by Time, and Apple themselves pre-announced the G5 PowerMac... he must have known that the Mac rumor community would have been all over it like a rash.

So what if Steve kept something back... What if he didn't tell Newsweek the whole deal? A part of really hopes there's more to the 4G than we know. Either that or I wish I hadn't read all the rumors this morning... Its kind of like begging to be allowed to open all your Christmas presents on Christmas Eve, but still hoping your parents kept a few behind.

The one remaining hope I have comes from ThinkSecret stating (guessing?) that the announcement will be delivered through an out-of-the-ordinary publicity medium... Nothing I've seen from the specs would hint at anything offering an unusual medium. Of course, it could all be BS, but here's a few things I'm wondering/hoping...

• The new iPod screens show a new Music menu. Why? Is there another option for Video, or Photos or something that was Photoshopped out/switched off. Imagine the new iPod dock having a video out. Imagine iMove integration, H.264 support, or the ability to store 8 DVDs on the hard disk.
• The second option would be Steve wireless transmitting the audio for the press conference from a 4G iPod.
• My mate Fraize even suggested the combination of these — Steve apologising for not being there, but being projected up onto a screen at the press conference, and getting into the announcement... then walking in from stage right, while the onscreen Steve keeps going. Then on-stage Steve uses his iPod to stop the video. Then start it... and you realize he is wirelessly transmitting it from his iPod.

Of course, we probably already know all there is to know, but it would be cool if Uncle Steve has saved me a present for Christmas Day (i.e. tomorrow), and all the rumor folks have done nothing but a great viral marketing job for him by telling everyone to be ready for the big announcement on Monday, where he does something nobody had expected.

If nothing else, it would be a great way to play the rumormongers at their own game, which I'm Steve would love to do after the few black eyes they've given him.

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So after a couple of days with the Airport Express, I found it really inconvenient to have to go back to my Mac to start/stop my music. At the time it was announced this was issue was pointed out to The Steve, who just gave a wry smile...

... that smile... what did it mean!! Perhaps they were going to make a WiFi remote control that talked back to your PC. But what that would need to cross your firewall... Perhaps a Bluetooth remote - plug a USB Bluetooth dongle into the AirPort Express USB port, upgrade the AEx firmware, off you go. Salling Clicker lets me do this with my cellphone, but my phone's BT range isn't enough to go from my couch to the Mac...

Then there were the 4G iPod rumors (even before the AEx was announced)... Would it be WiFi enabled (and now, could it talk to AirTunes)? Would it support the new Wireless Firewire standard?

We may not have to wait long to find out. People with too much free time found that by monkeying with the URL of the thumbnail images generated for Newsweek's front cover, you could find out what next weeks news is ... sort of like an Internet Crystal Ball :)

• The most obvious change is the adoption of the Mini's thumbwheel and the loss of those nasty touch-(in)sensitive buttons... This is good news
• It may just be a trick of the eye, but it looks a lot smaller than the 3G (or maybe Steve just has big hands)

There is also an article that goes with the Newsweek cover, but still nothing on AirTunes or my remote.

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I got my Airport Express this morning. This little marvel lets you stream music from iTunes over to your stereo using something Apple calls AirTunes. It took a bit of messing about to get it working on my wired network (IP conflicts mostly) but its working just great now.

Its a pity that it doesn't let you play through the computer and to AirTunes remote speakers, but I suspect network latency would mean they couldn't possibly be kept in sync anyway.

One thing that tripped me up: By default AirTunes won't work if you try to stream to the Airport Express unit through the ethernet port, and the setup guide only covers wireless scenarios. If you want to do this, the trick is to bring up the Airport Admin Utility, Configure your base station, and click on the Base Station Options button on the Airport tab. There is a checkbox there to "Enable AirTunes over Ethernet". Once I did that, it worked like a champ.

What a great product.

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I have just uploaded RUnit 1.2 beta... Get it at the RUnit page.

One caveat: RUnit 1.2 requires NUnit 2.2. The current build requires NUnit 2.2 beta 2.

• Major rewrite to support new NUnit 2.2 "categories" feature and to leverage NUnit's TestRunner class instead of directly manipulating the TestSuite (should help future compatibility)
• Support for selecting/running a specific test.
• XML output is now in the same format as that produced by the NUnit GUI, with extensions to support the RUnit GUI.
• Fixed a bug that prevents stack traces from displaying in Safari (MacOS X).

As you can see from the screenshot below, RUnit 1.2 looks really similar to the NUnit 2.2 GUI...

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Found this little bit of Internet frippery this morning... Made me smile (but then, I'm easy)

Rock, Paper, Saddam!

Saddam seems pretty feisty, considering how we set up him the bomb, and now all his base are belong to us.

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For 1.2 my main goal is to get sync'd up with NUnit 2.2. Right now there are two primary feature changes planned:

• Allow you to click on the tree and only run tests on that node and below (as in the NUnit GUI
• Add support for categories.

If there are thoughts on other features I should build in, let me know.

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Thats pretty amazing, when you consider that before iTMS they were predicting that Kazaa and the like were killing music. They seem to be doing ok now :)

The amazing thing is how fast it went up after it got above 99,000,000... At first I thought it was because the free entries were counting as songs, but they weren't -- they really did sell a million songs in the last 36 hours! I did my bit by buying 6 albums and 2 EPs yesterday...

Of course, iTMS still has its detractors, not least because it is primarily supporting the large labels, not the musicians. Perhaps now Apple can focus on making it easier for independent artists to get their music in there. How cool would it be if as a band you could create an account in the iTMS and upload your songs directly into the store, then have your account credited as folks bought your music.

Of course, the major labels would have a fit, but I know several musicians who are extremely frustrated that there is no way for them to get their music in there. Come on Apple!

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I've made some improvements since yesterday...

The two notable ones are:

• Support for server-side XSLT for browsers that can't do it on the client. RUnit sniffs the browser and will only return XML for Internet Explorer 6+, Netscape 7+ and Firefox (any version)
• Added a status area at the bottom to summarize the test run. This is an NUnit GUI feature that was missing in RUnit 1.0 (you can see it in the screenshot below)

Learn More

Updated source code is provided, and of course, its free!

Here is RUnit 1.1 running in Safari (a browser that is not XSLT-aware):

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XUnit (see below) is now called RUnit. RUnit lets you run your NUnit test harness from your browser, and develop NUnit test harnesses that exercise your ASP.NET-specific code. RUnit currently has been compiled and tested with NUnit 2.1. However, full source code is provided should you wish to tinker. Learn More

Here is a screenshot of how the UI ended up... see how similar it is to the NUnit GUI...

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So everyone agrees that NUnit is pretty cool... but its not very useful in ASP.NET apps right now. If you have been good, and split your application tiers apart so that your business and data tiers don't know or care if they are in a web context, you're probably in good shape. But it in the real world you're putting things into the HttpRuntime cache (for the ease of use of file dependencies), and doing other things with HttpContext that make it nigh on impossible to use NUnit.

At Dell I built a wrapper around NUnit to let us do application monitoring of live web apps, but it was really for monitoring, not unit testing... NUnit test harnesses just provided a convenient way to describe the monitoring hooks.

I've now put together something I called XUnit. I'm sure there's already an XUnit (are there any *Unit letters left?) and I plan to rename it. I also plan to make put it out in the public domain... but it'll probably be tomorrow before I do it.

Anyway, XUnit gives you a web page that looks a lot like the NUnit GUI. It uses frames and each frame returns XML together with a stylesheet to make it look right. Below you can see the NUnit GUI on the left, and the equivalent XUnit run on the same assembly. Best of all, it is simply wrapping functionality in the NUnit framework, so its works just fine with anything NUnit supports...

NUnit

The same test results in XUnit

I guess I should use this forum to petition for a new name... I guess if the N in NUnit is show for NET, then this should be ASP.NUnit ... Is that confusing enough?

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With levels of the Colorado being the lowest ever recorded, and scientists saying its dryer now than in the "dust bowl years", farmers in Katmandu may have hit on one possible solution :-o

Farmers bare all for 'rain God'

KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) - Female rice farmers are plowing their fields at night in the nude to please the rain god during a dry spell in southwestern Nepal, a news report said Sunday.

A 35-year-old farmer, Ambika Tharu, said she and other women were daring to bare all for the rain god because of a delay in the annual monsoon season and the need for precipitation for their rice crops.

"My mother-in-law said the God would be pleased and make rainfall if women till the land naked,'' Tharu told the Himalayan Times newspaper.

The delay of the monsoon rains, which usually begin in the first week of June in Nepal, have prevented farmers from planting rice.

Weather forecasters in the capital Katmandu - 310 miles northeast of Baijapur village, where the naked farmers are appealing for rain - said the situation is expected to improve in the next few days.

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So the work of the past few months is almost complete... I've been working on a new framework for building Dell's internal sales management tools.

Codenamed Xanadu, this framework is kind of interesting because it doesn't allow you to write UI code. Most applications have some UI code, some business tier stuff and some data tier stuff, but in Xanadu you don't (can't, actually) write any UI code, and you write almost no data tier code either.

The trick is to define your problem, then describe everything around your problem in a declarative fashion using XML. The XML defines how things should behave, and what actions to perform in the business tier when buttons are clicked or drop-down lists need filling in. But all the complex inter-relationships, automatically disabling as information is provided, having fields hide based on security and so on is all done in XML.

There are actually some startling things that came of this. For one, we aren't tied to a delivery platform. I can run a Xanadu app through a web site, as a WinForms client, or even on PocketPC (in theory). And all the XML, business and data tier logic would remain 100% identical.

Of course, similar platforms have existed before. There were 4GLs in the late 80s and systems such as dBase that let you build apps that were cross platform. There were even systems that let you quickly go from web client to smart client. But all of them required you to write a bunch of code to plumb the bits of the UI together.

And why bother doing all this, you may ask? Well, we have a small team of 8 or so developers trying to maintain 20 apps. Xanadu will let us boil most of them into a handful of apps in a single environment and maintain them all very quickly. Its really just an extension of my recent embrace of agile development methodology, and in particular the idea of supporting rapid development. Where most rapid development approaches require a strong cross-functional team, Xanadu makes it easy because the team doesn't need to be masters of UI programming or even data tier programming to write a great app. And being rapid means we can be highly agile and adaptive to change because change doesn't cost us much to implement.

At some point I will be resurrecting the XSD-to-C# parser and integrating that too. That would allow us to not write much business logic either, or at least not have to write code to define business objects. The business logic is then reduced to an orchestration of business objects defined in XSD, with XML orchestrating the other tiers.

And they say Dell doesn't innovate. Bah!

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I don't know, but in the whole time I've live here, I've never really "gotten" the whole 4th of July thing. Sure, I understand that you threw the Brits out and got a new Consitution. Thats great. And the fireworks are very nice, and all. I guess in part its that unlike most other holidays, as a Brit we don't have anything analagous to this one. The last time we were conquered was in 1066 and nobody came and liberated us. We had a kind of peasants revolt that gave us the Magna Carta... but not enough to warrant a national holiday. Then we got all full of ourselves and invaded most of the world... and gave most of the world either influenza, tuberculosis or syphillis (or all three) along the way. And then of course they quite rightly almost all threw us out again little by little over the last 200 years.

The irony is that with all the erosions of freedom during this Administration, I'm not sure what most Americans are celebrating either. I mean, if another country held American citizens in prison for over 2 years on whatever charge without letting them see an attorney, you'd see them send the troops in to "bring our boys home", right?

Of course, putting all this in perspective, it was predated by the UK's own Criminal Justice Bill of 1994, which was arguably just as much an erosion of civil liberties and allowed many seemingly harmless activities to become illegal in the eyes of the beholder. For example, if you took a picture of one of your children in the bath and just happened to be able to see their "naughty bits", you could be prosecuted as a paedophile. No really.

Nah, nah, mate... calm down... its not worth it...

On a more positive note, went down to Fadó, an Irish pub in downtown Austin to watch Portugal vs. Greece in the final of Euro 2004 (its a soccer tournament for those that haven't been keeping up...). After England were knocked out by Portugal (because of a dodgy referee decision to disallow an England goal in the last few minutes of the game), we were totally rooting for the Greeks. And what a game. The Portugese were clearly the stronger side, but the Greeks played their hearts out, and the goalkeeper deserves the highest honor their country can bestow - he was awesome. And the Greek supporters were just amazing through the whole game - just totally happy to be there. The pub erupted when Greece went 1-0 up, and the energy never subsided until the final whistle. What an awesome result - I'm so happy for them.

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So, it seems like Apple accidentally ran out of iMacs today (oops), and the new ones won't be here until September. Last week there was a lot of talk of a new iMac excepted at WWDC including how it would look - supposedly a G5-based system with a vertically arranged motherboard and built in flat panel. The vertically arranged part suggests the old G4 Cube to me - that they might be looking to combine their liquid cooling with a passive convection based approach that doesn't require fans like the heatpipes you see on some of the Shuttle XPCs.

Anyway, the funny thing is that yesterday before Apple announced this, the French rumor site MacBidouille posted their conspiracy theory on the when the new iMac was going to be released, and that it would be a special "20th anniversay of the Mac" kind of deal. After today's announcement by Apple that they ran out of iMacs and won't have new ones before September, this wacky theory may actually be pretty close to the truth...

Given how Apple never preannounces products, and how the Mac has such a fervent rumor community, it seems hilarious (if true) that Steve would give away the date and place where the new iMacs are going to be released (based on the three Spotlight searches he did: "iMac", "Paris" and "birthday", pointing to a birthday launch of the iMac at MacWorld in Paris in September).

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Dell.com just got revved to the Storm 3.2 platform - the first version that I wasn't involved in (beyond helping out with some GDI+ changes). Total creds go to Thom Phipps who did an outstanding job designing and leading the feature set implementation. It went into production like a champ and there have been no issues with it. Great job Thom.

The new Product Compare pages are especially neat.

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