O Blog do Pilingrin

2009-07-06T02:50:00.003+02:00

Short Flight update

The block arrays logic is smooth now. There is a little glitch when mixing and nesting different type of arrays like TypeA[,,][][,,][]. But we are working on it.

2009-07-02T20:47:00.004+02:00

Depths

In the dramedy tradition of Latin-America politics, Honduras Supreme Court and Congress ousted an president who was clearly violating the constitution he was supposed to uphold.

Not even his own party backs him up. Honduras Congress deliberations have been unanimous in this regard.

The Honduras military has been following orders by Honduras Attorney General and Supreme Court.

Now OAS is going to explain Honduras Congress and Supreme Court how to interpret and apply the Honduras Constitution. Kind of presumptuous, I think, to explain two of three branches of a State how to interpret the law they have written.

The only article with some common sense is from The Economist, it ends suggesting to put the burden of the solution on foreign diplomats. But the solution has already been put in place by Honduras: oblige the president to follow the constitution.

Another who's on first? moment.

2009-06-28T17:59:00.003+02:00

Pink Elephants

During one week in June:

The Iranian electoral body recognized that 3 million votes of its last poll were cast by people who do not exist. But it is still called an election.

The hondurean president defies rulings by the hondurean supreme court, goes against the hondurean congress, his own party and expects to get away with.

Meanwhile the UE calls to restore the constitutional order in Honduras.

Not even Monty Python could come up with such a senseless plot.

2009-06-24T16:06:00.002+02:00

Short Stop.

Block arrays have become stable. Cut and Paste of tree nodes will wait.

2009-06-20T17:27:00.002+02:00

Tweeterish update

Making great progress. Generics is stable. Block arrays (of the form [,,,]) not so much.

2009-06-16T18:01:00.002+02:00

The New Raw Deal

It is no secret that the economic growth and bubbles since the mid nineties until today were financed with north-american consumers money. These revved up the economic engine of the world.

They are leveraged out. Their savings rate was until recently virtually nil. Their debt level was not healthy. Banks became creative to continue lending to keep the ball rolling until hell broke lose.

Now the bottom line question is who is the next group to foot the next economic expansion bill?

China's growth depends on somebody else's expenditures. Europe has another set of problems: demographics, high unemployment, slow recoveries, etc. The rest of Asia?

Geithner's warns of more economic pain ahead for USA, specially in the job market. The most flexible and dynamic job market is going to be dragged down even worse. The average/median salary is going to fall more.

So the natural question to follow would: is the north-american consumer going to save and reduce their leverage or expend to make corporations rich before their jobs are outsourced or the federal government bails the business out?

Interesting questions for lenders, borrowers, and policy makers.

2009-06-02T21:54:00.002+02:00

Generics core

The interesting thing about last post is that the cpu utilization averaged 50% during the entire rebuilding of the suite (3.4 million tests) If memory is managed with common sense the throughput of DevRiot in multi-core machines with several cpu would be hard to match (mine is a duo)

On the down side the internal compiler choked at complex generic types like:

"ns1.t2<ns1.t1<system.byte[][],system.byte>,System.Byte,System.Int32>[][][]"

Problem solved. Smooth..

2009-06-01T23:50:00.003+02:00

3,400,003 and counting...

We spent the weekend fixing an old disconnection problem when running large amount of tests. We fixed it. It works like a champ, it executed some really ineffient code for 24 hours straight without a bleep.

We also managed to squeeze 3.4 million tests with some complexity: runtime generics, different levels of validation and the engine ran like a champ. The pudding:

2009-05-31T00:34:00.003+02:00

DevRiot for .Net Beta Update...

Having a little bit of trouble with nested generic types and bulk creation (25,000 or more) but other than stable an smooth.

BTW properties will not be supported for this beta.

2009-05-30T09:43:00.003+02:00

On Mac, again!

A renewed interest on DevRiot for Eclipse (Mac) has appeared in the last couple of weeks which is great.

The problem was that the demo link inside the whitepaper was broken. The link has been fixed now. I apologize for the incovenience. Enjoy!

White-paper

Demo

2009-05-29T02:29:00.003+02:00

Another Short Update

DevRiot for .Net is coming along well. We have spent extra time ironing out the code that deals with System.Object, interfaces, and abstract types because it is adding more dynamic input to an already dynamic engine.

Since the user never writes code, tests are generated/executed on the fly, the former types add more complexity to the logic so the ironing of bugs turns more complex too.

Hit a unexpected behavior between the recompiling process of DevRiot and VS debugger. Specially annoying when handling 10,000 tests or more.

2009-05-28T12:37:00.001+02:00

Visca al Barça!

It is a tough job to play Barcelona these days. When a team has too many players worried about defending, how come can they think about attacking?

This is why, imho, Ferguson had to waste a player like Rooney defending too much and leaving the brat swinging from left to right unable to deal with the backs. Last night, Puyol was as good as Ronaldo attacking while Ronaldo was not even half the defender.

2009-05-22T09:19:00.004+02:00

2.5OOO...

Our visit to Vancouver is behind us. Beautiful architecture, beautiful outdoors. We didn't make it to the coast. Next trip.

For $2.50 (Canadian) one could ride a bus from downtown to the airport. In a reasonable amount of time (less than 1 hr.) For a 2.1+ million people, it is very good public transit.

It was hard to see a traffic jam, at least between downtown and the airport.

Wonderful local breweries, parks, and coffee shops. We found a blackberry porter worth a pint or two.

2009-05-06T22:42:00.002+02:00

Blues blue...

A long time Barcelona supporter but Chelsea's defensive effort deserved to be in the Champions League final. Hiddink is an amazing defensive genius...

2009-05-06T18:48:00.002+02:00

Opinions...

If anybody feels the need to make a change or needs a sensible idea, I suggest help reduce corruption in developing countries.

It is hard to ask joe-six pack for help in the next disaster while Wall Street bankers deplete his 401K and corrupt local officials in the next ground zero resell his donations.

Logging off this thread.

2009-05-06T13:27:00.002+02:00

Two-stepping on empty:

American consumers are deleveraging, in other words spending less to reduce their high levels of debt. Their average wage is falling too.

By most accounts businesses have a lot of excess capacity. Why would they need to invest/spend?

No other country's consumer seems to be ready to step in for american's spending.

So it is hard to figure out from where the future cash flows for this stock market rally are coming.

On the other end of the spectrum, it is amazing to see how these anti-.... groups are still stuck in 1917.

One person suggested to me looking at X Movement as a "new way". The first thing one sees in the movement's web-site is a picture of a banner that states: "Abolish Money".

Pol Pot and crew tried this brilliant idea 30-some years ago and starved to death millions of people.

No room for common-sense...or memory.

2009-04-20T14:05:00.003+02:00

Sunset...

If it was easy for IBM to rule the java roost while Sun was weak, it is going to be a LOT tougher to continue that easy ride with Oracle calling the shots.

Why did IBM let the deal go south? After all these years and money to become the main java shop? It looks like a misstep.

2009-04-19T16:43:00.002+02:00

In May, Vancouver way!

We decided to move the great travels few hours west to see how another NW feels like: ocean, snow, cool town. Not a bad destination, isn't it?

2009-04-11T19:25:00.003+02:00

Adriatic Coast...

I have been told that it is a nice trip, specially from Pescara to Senigallia. It has been a stage of the Giro. It may be worth a try

2009-03-31T17:52:00.002+02:00

Here is Johnny!!!!

The funny thing about international politics is that the biggest "critics" of the west, need the west/capitalism to succeed otherwise their standard of living or their regimes fail.

Their dependence on oil prices is big. They haven't figured out another way of creating wealth and rise standards of living on their own since the 19th century.

Some parts of capitalism need reworking but the modus-operandi of accusing "capitalism" and not proposing anything that is meaningful and viable is getting old.

P.S. I read more often Saramago than Grass.

2009-02-13T16:17:00.003+01:00

Feature complete!!

Finally, the feature set that is to be included in DevRiot for .Net is complete and stable. Next in line comes the installer and the delivery logic.

We are considering delivering a double plug-in . The users will install a Visual Studio add-in that will download DevRiot's engine. This way fixes will delivered easily.

This beta will support only Desktop Framework and unit testing. GUI testing, since it depends more on the running device, will be delivered at a later time when support for Compact and Micro Frameworks is polished.

A demo video will follow soon.

2009-02-04T01:38:00.002+01:00

Another glitchy update...

We have been dealing, for the last several days, with an annoying timing issue that messes up all the symbols displayed in the UI.

2009-01-27T12:05:00.004+01:00

Cause & Effect:

One would have to think there is a correlation: a tech giant profit falls, they download our whitepaper.

It seems that our wp has a reputation.

The beta is coming along great. I have had to devote time to help family, but I fixed bugs and DevRiot, I hope, it is getting close to be as useful as the whitepaper.

2009-01-11T20:36:00.004+01:00

Me too!!

There will be no public beta for DevRiot .Net. Just access to the people who kindly signed up to try it out.

So for those me-too with a laundry list of me-too features, stop poking around!

2009-01-08T21:33:00.004+01:00

Meet the Press...

In what could be a series of fortunate events, I missed a plane on Jan 1st. So instead of flying, I was working when CIO Senior Editor was gathering opinions about another QA mess. The last one I knew of was from MySQL. This new one was from MS.

So I decided to chip in my two cents since not many people was supposed to be working, the published article is here.