John Sands' Radio Weblog

John Sands' Radio Weblog :

Updated: 3/18/2004; 9:33:51 PM.

Tuesday, April 16, 2002

More about testing. In my HTTP testing, for each test in the suite I save expected and actual HTML output into files. If they're different, I launch WinDiff from the GUI to compare them. This gives me a great way to inspect differences without doing much programming. It's a bit lame because there are many minor differences that show up as errors when they have no effect. An HTML-aware comparison would be better; but not worth the effort.

I was planning on doing a similar thing soon for a program that modifies an Access database: programmatically export the expected and actual databases into text files and using WinDiff again if they differ. But clearly a SQL statement that could do a smart comparison would be better. Hey! Here's one: Comparing Data Sets with SQL.
9:03:49 PM

This five-step process works for any security measure, past, present, or future: 1) What problem does it solve? 2) How well does it solve the problem? 3) What new problems does it add? 4) What are the economic and social costs? 5) Given the above, is it worth the costs?
Read all about it in the latest Crypto-Gram.
8:26:30 PM

Peter again: Nice idea - the email equivalent of using Google instead of bookmarks. Exactly. The only bookmarks I have left are for things like my kids schools and the local library site (awful, though it is) and some company intranet pages - all things I can't find in Google (I keep them at Yahoo! Bookmarks so I can get to them from anywhere).

I have always disliked the way bookmarks work. Hierarchies are so often a convenience for programmers, but not for users. That decision of which folder to put the bookmark in bugs me. I can make a folder for "SVG" and one for "JavaScript", but then where do I put "Generating SVG with JavaScript"? In both? What happens when I become interested in new things? Do I go through all my bookmarks and reorganize them? Ranting about bookmarks is silly, I know, but the same organizing principal applies to other things, like file systems and wikis. Sometimes I don't want to decide where to put something. Just save it for me and when I want it I'll search for it. Just make sure the search is fabulous.
4:14:33 PM