Unit Testing

As some of you may know, I am TAing a class this semester. It is called "Analysis of Software Artifacts" and it covers many different forms of analysis from static and dynamic analysis to things like testing and formal inspections. It's taught by my advisor.

This week, as it turns out, my advisor is out of town, and I will be giving the lecture in his place. As it turns out, I actually volunteered to do this. Each of the TAs has to give a lecture this semester, but since I am really interested in the subject of unit testing, I chose to do this week's lecture. The lecture is going to be on a combination of unit testing philosophy and unit testing tools. I'll post the slides whenever I actually get them done. The lecture will also include some neat demos, for which I will post the source code as well.

The neatest tool I am demo-ing is a framework called EasyMock, which allows you to easily create and use mock objects in your JUnit test suites. It was (I think) developed at MIT, and it's an amazingly powerful tool. I subscribe to the Pragmatic Programmers' philosophy that unit tests should be by and for programmers, I definitely recommend you take a look at it.

In other news, this is a crazy busy time right now! This lecture and another big presentation are coming up. I feel like I am not getting any research done...

Last Week of Work, Son

This is my last week of work at the summer internship. I've had a good time working there this summer, but this last week I am really trying to get a whole bunch of last minute stuff done before Friday. I did a lot this summer, but it never seems like enough, and I feel a tiny bit stressed at the moment.

Friday, immediately after work I am leaving to go back to New Orleans for one week before the semester begins. I'm driving, which is absolutely rediculous for one week of vacation, but there's a bunch of stuff I have at my parent's house that I want to bring back. If you feel like I haven't been hanging out much in the past few weekends, it's because I've been out of town or busy or something, and most likely you may not see me for another week! Boo... that's unless of course you are in New Orleans, in which case, "Do you want to get some roast beef po-boys?"

Day Two o' Work

Today was my second day of work, same as the first. (Meaning pretty good)
I'm thinking it's going to be a good summer. I like the people I work with. They've got me working on what seems to be a very interesting project. Moreover, it seems like everyone there is pretty cool. Some of us went out to a Jazz club tonight after work, and there are some fun sounding plans coming up in the future.

New York was great, and I feel like I should mention a few of the things I did, but since it's already getting late in the PM, I'm going to do it bullet-point style:

• Stayed in an AWESOME hotel room thanks to my friend's friend who works there. It was right in midtown manhattan and awesome.


• Empire State Building, where we went to the 86th floor. (That's not the tippy top, but super high). It was like an hour and a half wait and I hate heights, but it was still awesome.


• Walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.


• Hung out with Friends from high school and from college, which made it fun.


• Remembered how much I loved traveling. Want to make it my full time business, but at least have an excuse to attempt to make money or something.

Wow, what a strange style of writing. Bah!

Today:Today was overall an excellent day. ...

Today:
Today was overall an excellent day.

• My advisor meeting went pretty well. He seems to actually be excited by what I am doing, and that's always good if you're trying to not get kicked out.




• I went to the dentist. I don't enjoy the dentist per say, but I enjoy the after dentist time when your teeth are looking their finest and you're all doped up on novacane so you can touch your lip and it feels like someone else's skin... It give me an immense joy...




• Right now I'm just working on homework, which isn't too bad, and I don't have too much of it.
  

Sure, that's not too much, but I am easily amused I guess.

Grand Buffet:
One of my favorite bands and the moment and for the past 3 years has been Grand Buffet. I saw them in L.A. once opening for Weslie Willis (post-irony gone wrong) and the a couple more times afterwards. But it turns out that they are actually from Pittsburgh. So now I've seen them here twice already, once this past Friday at the Pitt student Union. And if I may say, they rocked the lights out. Grand Buffet is basically a hip-hop group. A lot of what they do happens to be funny, especially at the live shows, but I really believe that musically they are like one of the best rap groups around right now. Grape-A-Don, the red headed guy who does most of the raps, has serious flow, like I'm not even kidding. And they come up with some strange, driving, groovy kinds of beats. At this last show they did this song that sampled "Dirty Laundry" by either Don Henley solo or the Eagles, and it was very nice. They dedicated it to 'the other guy who sings and plays the drums' and then went on to proclaim that Don Henley wasn't fit to wash Phil Collins' underwear.
I went with K-Dog, and it was hard to get a read on whether or not he liked it, but at least he was a good sport. I invited a bunch of other people, none of whom came, and then decided afterwards that it was probably a good thing.
Anyway, here's the poster, I ripped it off a telephone pole.

Belle and Sebastian:
I just read in the Burgh city paper that Belle and Sebastian have a new full lengh album, The Life Pursuit. It goes on to say that, unfortunately for B&S's hardcore fans, the band will be continuing where Dear Catastophe Waitress left off, higher production values, bigger sound, etc. Can I say that this is awesome news? I love almost every CD of theirs that I own, but Dear Catastrophe Waitress was just incredible, song-wise and sound-wise, and I'm glad to hear that their pushing on and not giving in to the criticisms.