WOKING

.. it's all in the mullet...

What an all star cast! Boris Johnson doing his charming messy hair thing, Tony Benn in full flow, complete with "when I met Lloyd George...", and everyone having to admit defeat to the formiddably clever and sensible Shami Chakrabarti.

.. oh and then, Mr Toad from the CBI...

Originally, I thought that the proposal to stop Blair selling peerages by having the state fund political parties was quite sensible. But Shami pointed out that state funding of politics is just plain chilling - our big 3 weren't founded by 'the state', but by ideas. None of the other panelists could do anything but concede and nod and try to somehow make out that that's what they'd meant all along....

I also thought Boris was quite brave to admit he'd made a mistake voting for the war, and David Laws was quite brave to be un-liberal on jilbabs at school.

So, the BBC have finally got around to making the videos available - click on the little video button on the right. They don't seem to have quite got the editing right though - there's about 3 minutes of other stuff before the program.. which just happens to be a Tory party political.. which is probably against the BBC's charter.. but there we go, it's a good start..

In the Lib party in Oxford East, we're having an election to decide who will be our candidate to run in the real election.. (it's all very democratic you know...) I've been electronically canvassed by two of the candidates.

These are the questions I've sent them:

National things:
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If elected to parliament:

1. How would you vote (were there to be a vote) on taking action in Iran?

2. What would you do to enforce the Equal Pay Act?

3. Would you join a coalition with Labour? If so, what would be your conditions?

4. Would you join a coalition with the Tories? If so, what would be your conditions?

(I know 3./4. have been "banned" by the party - but it's an important question - if not *the* important question - and we have a right to expect an answer.)



Oxford things:
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If elected:

1. What would you do to help young people in Oxford's deprived estates?

2. What would you do about the University's new Animal Lab / the protesters?

In Evil Unit Tests, Paul Wheaton says that you should be picking on little independent units - it's supposed to be "unit" testing isnt' it! Tests that involve lots of pieces of the puzzle are really 'functional' tests - JUnit or no JUnit.

He says that functional tests aren't really as useful - they have fingers in too many pies - they tend to break as a result of changes some distance away.

I think I'm writing tests at the whole range of granularities, but it hadn't occurred to me that coarse ones might really be "functional" rather than "unit".

I think the not-being-able-to-test-private-methods thing might encourage (force?) people to write overly coarse grained ones too.

See the bit at thevery bottom - "I took out the keyword 'private',. In order to achieve testability, he's had to promote a method to package access. I have been doing that too, but feeling guilty about it..

So.. the Google Maps API turned out to be well nifty.

I'm not a big fan of JavaScript (I remember the full horror of coding for Netscape 4.7..) That said, I read the docs, got a key, pasted the thing, it worked, it took minutes - can't complain. No getting, no xml parsing, all happens by magic. Nifty.

Posting javascript in blogger is another matter..!

I'm mulling over a "where is my polling station" mashup for the May elections.