He said: \“I wouldn\‘t connect it to the internet, though, as it\‘s not sophisticated enough to ward off attackers.\”

Now, I don\‘t know about you, but I think most spyware and viruses and rootkits out there were written without even thinking of attacking Windows 3.1 machines. Malware is more likely to depend on some DLL only 95+ have than to work on 3.1. Just saying.

When I first saw these ads, I described them as the following on Twitter:
The new Windows ads are about as random as Windows\’ crashes. rimshot

Apparently, I\‘m not the only person to have noticed that. Microsoft\‘s marketing department is clearly out of touch with consumers; which is sad because there\‘s lots of great video that\‘s come out of Microsoft in the last year. There\‘s the Windows Vista SP1 song, which Luc-Olivier and I still haven\‘t gotten over, and this year\‘s CES video about Bill Gates\’ last day as CEO. Microsoft can poke fun at itself, so why does it fall flat on marketing?

When you\‘re a monopoly with hardly any decent competition, you don\‘t need to market anything; people will go to you because you\‘re the least shitty option. With the arrival of OS X in 2001 and the success of the iPod, more and more people are switching to the Mac. Linux is slowly becoming more usable for desktop computing. Windows is no longer the only option, and Microsoft\‘s scared of losing market share. So they\‘re finally trying to advertise their product. And they haven\‘t done it in a long time; that\‘s why they\‘re failing so miserably.

Sure, maybe Apple took care of the backing up slowdown, but if you\‘re in a hurry and you want to sync your library to get new podcasts before the bus gets here, and suddenly iTunes is taking a half-hour to sync, it\‘ll piss you off.

Our teacher told us we had to do unit tests, which is great, since we\‘re going to be seeing how to do that in detail next year (probably using JUnit or some other library). She wants us to do it in paper. I asked her if I could do it in code, since that would let me explore the language a bit more, and she said yes.

The last hour of that class was spent coding together a basic should equal test case in Java, the hardest part being finding out why the fuck == wasn\‘t checking if my strings were equal. (Of course, Java has a stupid .equals method to confuse people!)

Once that was done, I noticed a pattern. So I could either refactor it and have a Java class that could do simple should equal tests on everything, or use my Ruby talents to create a Java code generator that would create wonderful tests.

Two hours later, I had my initial crappy version of JTGen (Java Test Generator) running on JRuby in my home directory at college. The hardest part was getting to un-tar the JRuby distribution, because the documentation ate up all my storage space. Oopsie. It only worked with strings, and it was really quickly put together, but it worked, and that was great.

This morning, I worked on it a bit more and it works with objects of any type. What it does now:

• should equal tests
• should not equal tests (decided to get those out of the way ahead of time!)
• code output in either French or English

• takes one line of Ruby and generates several lines of Java test code

This is an immense time-saver, and I figure with a bit more time I can make this something much much better.

The STTR doesn\‘t update its website much. I believe they\‘ve only changed two pages in the last year: the front page and the fare pricing page. What hasn\‘t changed?

• Last fall, the STTR announced that the Expressbus lines are now going to run during lunch time. I don\‘t even know at what time it runs during lunch though, because it stayed on the front page of the site for a week and then they replaced it with something else.
• The schedule says that during the summer, buses respawn each 60 minutes. That\‘s false, as of this year, they\‘re on a 30 minute interval, like during any other season. This was never even displayed on the site.

• Speaking of summer schedule, it\‘s not mentioned anywhere when summer schedule is in place. Not too useful.

I\‘ve noticed transit agencies\’ sites around here all tend to be old-school 1998 things, and since few people use the site, they don\‘t bother updating it. If only they\‘d realize that they could do great things with the website if they worked a little harder on it and kept it up to date.

I might have to go show them my webapp once it\‘s done.

Anyways, the big deal right now seems to be… Chinese regulation regarding flags and not pollution, communism, Tibet, or any of the things countries still under the Red Scare are going batshit insane about. You see, China doesn\‘t allow flags to be displayed that are not of internationally recognized countries. (I\‘ll let you guess why!)

And Quebec being the landlocked island of epic fail that it is feels that we should be cheering on the athletes by displaying the ugly Quebec flag instead of the \“oh no, there\‘s red in the flag therefore because red was in the Nazi flag, Canadians are Nazis\” flag.

Out of all the gruesome things that are happening right now in Beijing, that should be the last of our concerns.

Apple changed the Japanese fonts. If you have a song with katakana/hiragana and a song with Kanji: the Kanji will be bold, and the phonetic alphabets will be \“light\”. That\‘s not all!

If you have a song with all three character sets: the Kanji and Romaji remain bold, and the katakana/hiragana remain light. Long story short: it looks really stupid!