It is Saturday evening here. I’m just starting to wind down, in preparation for Sunday and a complete day away from the computer, from all the chores and all my hobbies and interests. I shall go and walk along the seafront instead, and rest and relax and recharge.
Sometimes it is very hard to do these things. But this custom of always keeping Sunday free from everything has been a lifesaver over the last twenty years. Most of my interests are quite compelling. Without this boundary, I would have burned out.
Phase 2 of the QuickLatin conversion from VB6 to VB.Net is complete. Phase 1 was the process of getting the code converted, so that it compiled. With Phase 2, I now have some simple phrases being recognised correctly and all the obvious broken bits fixed. The only exception to this is the copy protection, which I will leave until later.
Phase 3 now lies ahead. This will consist of creating automated tests for all the combinations of test words and phrases that I have used in the past. Code like QuickLatin has any number of special cases, which I have yet to exercise. No doubt some will fail, and I will need to do some fixes. But when this is done then the stability of the code will be much more certain. But I am trying to resist the insidious temptation to rewrite bits of the code. That isn’t the objective here.
I began to do a little of this testing over the last few hours. Something that I missed is code coverage – a tool that tells me visually how much of the code is covered by the tests. It’s an excellent way to spot edge-cases that you haven’t thought about.
It is quite revealing that Microsoft only include their coverage tool in the Enterprise, maximum-price editions of Visual Studio. For Microsoft, plainly, it’s a luxury. But to Java developers like myself, it’s something you use every day.
Of course I can’t afford the expensive corporate editions. But I think there is a relatively cheap tool that I could use. I will look.
Once the code is working, then I can set about adding the syntactical stuff that caused me to undertake this in the first place! I have a small pile of grammars on the floor by my desk which have sat there for a fortnight!
I’m still thinking a bit about the ruins of the Roman fort which lies under the waves at Felixstowe in Suffolk. This evening I found another article exists, estimating how far the coast extended and how big the fort was.[1] It’s not online, but I think a nearby (25 miles away) university will have it. I’ve sent them a message on twitter, and we’ll see.*
I’ve also continued to monitor archaeological feeds on twitter for items of interest. I’m starting to build up quite a backlog of things to post about! I’ll get to them sometime.
* They did not respond.
- [1]J. Hagar, “A new plan for Walton Castle Suffolk”, Archaeology Today vol 8.1 (1987), pp. 22-25. It seems to be a popular publication, once known as Minerva, but there’s little enough in the literature that it’s worth tracking down.↩