June 2006 Archives
Okay, there's been a lot of tech coverage here lately, so here's a really basic cooking tip. Heck, it doesn't even directly involve cooking. But if you've done any amount of cooking or baking, you've probably come across rock hard brown sugar. A new brown sugar box comes with sugar in a plastic bag. When you first open it, the sugar is very soft. If you just store your sugar in the opened original bag, it will quickly dry out and become rock hard and useless. Thankfully, this is not permanent. The molasses in the sugar has just dried out, and needs to be re-hydrated. [As an aside, did you know that most brown sugar is white sugar with molasses added back in? It's not "more raw" than white sugar. Dark brown sugar just has more molasses than light brown sugar.] There are a number of different ways to reverse the dehydration, but my favorite are these small terra cotta disks, which you can get for about $3 from various places including Sur La Table and Cracker Barrel:
Wolf's recent King of Xcode post reminded me of one of my major gripes with Xcode. As of Xcode 2.1, Apple's developer tools have shipped with support for writing unit tests in Objective-C, C++, and C. I'm a huge fan of unit testing, so this was exciting news, when it first hit the streets. For Objective-C, they incorporated OCUnit. OCUnit is a mature, well-tested, and Open Source ( BSD-style) unit testing framework. It's been around nearly as long as JUnit, and it shows. It's pretty darned good.
However, for C++, they used a framework called CPlusTest. What's that? Never heard of it? That's because Apple created it. Apparently none of the multitude of existing frameworks were good enough. So they created their own. And made it closed source.
So surely, if you were going to create your own, it would be better than all existing frameworks? I mean why go through all the trouble just to come up short? Well, unfortunately, I don't find CPlusTest to be very good at all. I've used CppUnit in another project, and I'd use CppUnit over CPlusTest, hands down. I'll review CPlusTest using the same seven criteria outlined in Noel Llopis' article, because why mess with a good thing.
