Yesterday I gave a presentation to a group of campus web developers on Test Driven Development, and how it relates to web applications.

The topics I covered included:
* Test Driven Development
* Unit Testing
* Selenium & integration with unit testing frameworks
* Continuous Integration & Cruise Control

Overall I think everyone was able to grasp all the topics covered, and leave with a basic understanding of TDD philosophy, the benefits of it, and how to get started.

Slides available online at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgtbrg66_52fjqngh

When you proudly proclaim that your application works in mobile browsers, and you’ve dedicated resources to creating a mobile edition of your web application – you might want to make sure it actually works.

This page contains the following errors:
error on line 2 at column 848: EntityRef: expecting ‘;’
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.

Now that you can easily integrate HTML validation into your PHP Unit test suite, are there any other excuses? Come on guys, entity references?!?
“it’s like I’m playing with my brother’s kids or somethin’” – Billy Bob in Tombstone

As my wife can attest to, when I opened our electric bill this month it was as if I had won the lottery.

$50.13

Now that might not seem like a big deal to some, but, considering that we have no natural gas bill – I think that’s quite a number.

I’ve already blogged about our Energy Star home, heat pump and electric water heater, and my use of compact florescent light bulbs – but I’ve also tracked our electric bill since we moved in.

We’re now over 1 year in the house, and to celebrate, I’ve published our electric bill as a Google document.

An interesting tidbit of information is the fluctuation of the price per kilowatt hour. In the winter months, the price drops quite a bit as electricity becomes more abundant due to the majority of homes using natural gas for heat. By looking at the numbers you can see that our usage goes up quite a bit in the winter, but the cost stays relatively low.

Our house is probably an average sized starter home, 1246 sq feet with a 560 sq ft basement… so about 1800 altogether and while pretty efficient – I’m sure there is room for improvement. A step would be enabling the power saving features on my computers, which I’ve refrained from doing. Next to that, tweaking our thermostat settings may allow me to kill-a-watt. (wishlist item)

I’ll continue to track this and see comparably how we’re doing over the next year – with the goal of reducing the average kw/h usage. Overall it’s an exciting time to be excited about energy efficiency and conservation.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pub1-LI1gApqqofh2WT5EQQ

I’ve waited quite a while before I could fully endorse the iPhone as a complete mobile platform, but the latest ‘improvements’ have pushed me over the fence in favor.

When others had asked me how I liked it, I usually would state that Apple warps people into believing products are great – and their users tend to overlook any problems.
Here’s some problems I’ve run into:
* Safari crashed quite a bit – with the two updates, it’s better.
* My iPhone crashes/locks up more than my Palm Treo 650 did.
* The 802.11 wireless will cause lockups when connecting to some access points.
* The ATT Edge network is slower than alltel’s.
* Mail app is crap – I can’t manage all the email I follow without threaded conversations (perhaps there’s a setting).
* Price reduction hit me, but I didn’t really care that much.
* Stupid headphone jack size.
* No disk use – come on Apple?
* Notes don’t sync anywhere!

Some benefits:
* My wife has a phone she’s happy with.
* iPod & phone in one!
* Slimmer than my Treo, and any other phone I’ve had.
* Battery life is awesome.
* Camera capability works with Linux.
* http://jailbreakme.com/ and the Installer unlock everything.
** IRC on my phone!
** iFlickr uploads photos to my flickr account.
** Tetris – nuf said.?
** The ultimate geek tools: bsd utils, ssh, and a terminal.

Jailbreakme was the turning point. Custom applications make this mobile phone the best I’ve had yet, and for what I use it for extended the life of my desktop at home for at least another year or two. I use my desktop at home for development, email, and web… and it’s turning 5 years old this Christmas. I would be purchasing a new computer this year, except the utility of my iPhone has given me no reason to buy a new PC – everything I need is now in my pocket.

The iPhone is a very slick mobile platform.