Just to report some oddities about Apple I stumbled upon today:

• Portuguese Apple store oddities

Although I am very happy to finally see the opening of the Portuguese apple store online, I must say two things:

– WE ARE NOT SPANISH!!! Half of the store, including many product descriptions, are in pure plain Spanish. If it was Microsoft everyone would be talking. SHAME ON YOU APPLE!

– Today I went to the store trying to buy a Mini-DVI to VGA adapter (yes, you have to buy it separately). I was surprised when the product description said “free shipping” (in Portuguese). I didn’t look back, I really need the adapter! So I clicked in the product, it was added to my cart, and when I went to checkout I have a beautiful message “You have to buy another 81€ to have free shipping”. THEY LIED TO ME!! ARRRRRRRGHHHH……

• Mac OS Leopard

Now that the hype is settling, I decided that I should try Leopard, just to see if it was a good step forward. Unfortunately I work everyday with a Mac fan (you can’t imagine my suffering) that installed Leopard the first day it was out. He is having random problems like every day, it seems that the SO isn’t ready for production yet.

Then I just found this article.

So Vista seems a big disappointment for Microsoft. Is Leopard in the same situation for Apple?

(Linux! Linux! Linux!) :-)

As you probably might felt, my domain was having serious DNS problems for the past week or so. In spite of the problems, I manage to get a large number of visits on a rant post with a smart title “Apple Hardware Sucks” :-)

For a while I was using the free zoneedit service. It worked for a year or so, and I recommended it to all my friends! However, one week ago, the slave NS stoped updating from the master NS. This resulted in all kind of problems when using this domain. I contacted the zoneedit admins and they were quick to anwser, saying that they were aware of the problem and their sysadmins were working on it.

3 days passed and the problem persisted. I contacted them again and they told that the sysadmins still didn’t found what is causing the problem. What the *? I quit!

Since I’m using ddclient to update my dynamic IPs, I searched the docs and the first protocol supported was dnspark. Registered, moved my NS, updated the scripts, back online :-)

Bye bye zoneedit, you served me well.

As you probably know, I am working at a Macbook right now. Unfortunately, using a 13.3’’ display kills my (beautiful) eyes!! So I thought on bringing a 22’’ wide TFT to my work place.

On a normal laptop, I would just connect the VGA display directly or via a DVI → VGA adapter (there are tons of them, and cheap!), if the laptop has a standard DVI socket.

But Apple insisted that they should innovate!! They put a Mini-DVI socket on the Macbook! Mini what?? Who the hell uses that? To make things better, Apple does not give you any adapter on your new macbook!!! Basically, I buy a laptop with a useless external display socket.

But fear not! Apple sells the adapter as a separate item!!! So I went to an official Apple seller, and bought a bright new and shiny Mini-DVI to DVI adapter from Apple! TWENTY TWO F* EUROS!!!

Now the best part. After I got home, pissed off, I brought a simple and common DVI → VGA adapter, and GUEST WHAT, *THEY DO NOT CONNECT TO EACH OTHER!!!! Since you probably won’t believe me, I decided to take some pictures and post them here.

On the first picture you can see the bloody Apple adapter. On the second picture you can see a very standard DVI > VGA adapter. Notice the little “-” on the left and the four pins around them? Where do they fit on the Apple adapter??

And now, the coolest thing.. I took a picture of the package where the adapter came from. Just see the diagram, compare with the picture above, and just LAUGH! That explains a lot about Apple hardware designers…

Don’t be surprised if you hear about a bomb on an Apple store O:-)

Mark this day on your calendar! Google finally launched the Android SDK. I was impressed with the feature set: Linux Kernel 2.6, FreeType, SQLite, OpenGL, WebKit and a optimized Java byte code interpreter!! Opensource geeks, rejoice! :-)

There is an excellent video where the API is explained in good details. Maybe my Internet connectivity is having problems, but I had a hard time just to download the movie (I didn’t even try to watch it in real time).

I’m curious about the modifications made by Google to the standard Linux Kernel, for instance, how do they optimize it for mobile (and possible real time) usage. At the same time, Google announced big quantities of money for the best applications for the Android! Kudos for Google! Can’t wait for a phone with Android…

I never liked the TDD technique. It was too much XP(Extreme Programming) for me. There are people that are just convicted that TDD is the best development technique since sliced bread!

Recently, I’ve been watching alternative development techniques. One that caught my attention was BDD (wikipedia). The basic idea is that one should question and write the expected behaviour of the application, creating a specification that guides the development process.

There are many helper tools available to integrate this kind of behaviour tests in your favourite language. Since I am becoming a Ruby fan, I looked at RSpec:

RSpec is a a framework which provides programmers with a Domain Specific Language to describe the behaviour of Ruby code with readable, executable examples that guide you in the design process and serve well as both documentation and test.

The examples on the RSpec webpage shows a slick and natural DSL for describing behaviour specifications. Try them! So natural, so practical, so clean…. I’m in love! And if you are a Rails addict, you must know that on the same RSpec webpage, there is a plugin you can use to integrate RSpec tests and ActiveRecord helpers in you favourite Rails application!! SWEET!!

Oh and it is incredibly simple to extend RSpec with your own matchers. And I even didn’t talk about Mocks and Stubs! So much things to explore… At the end, BDD could not be the answer for all your testing requisites, but IMHO it is a serious candidate for my future applications’ tests.

PS – Do you know any BDD framework for Perl applications?!