I’m hardly the first person to observe that it’s hard to test code that needs a database. Production usage almost certainly needs a database server, but then the tests need some way of getting a suitable database handle.

Perhaps this is a little too much Unicode for one day, but, well, that’s life.

John Gruber links to an amusing proposed typographical term, also available as a t-shirt. In plain text, it looks like this:

The Unicode character U+029A ʚ is named LATIN SMALL LETTER CLOSED OPEN E.

Both CLOSED and OPEN? That’s a neat trick.

Freecycle is a pretty good idea. Lots of people have stuff they no longer need; lots of people need stuff they don’t currently have. If those people could get together in local geographical communities, so that the first group can give stuff away to the second group, then more stuff will get reused rather than being filed away in landfill for a few centuries.

But the implementation of Freecycle is, shall we say, somewhat suboptimal.

A colleague approached me today regarding a unit test he was writing. He was constructing a series of test cases from a data structure; his code at the time used a multi-line string of which each line had several fields which together described a test to run.

In the context of a discussion about the Y2.038K problem, Craig Berry surmised that the 32-bit Unix time_t type originated on 16-bit machines. That’s entirely true; for those with too much time on their hands, here’s a short history of Unix time handling.