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Dave Thomas of The Pragmatic Programmers posted an interesting blurb on the differences between test-driven and test-first development. In Agile / XP circles, these two practices are usually lumped into one, but Dave points out some good arguments for distinguishing between them. Test-driven development simply means that the design is influenced by the unit tests, for example by refactoring the code to make it more easily testable, since code that is difficult to test is often an indication of bad design....

We got it! Unfortunately (well, I guess fortunately, since we would not have gotten it otherwise) our initial offer was countered and we had to increase the offer amount (which was already beyond our original limit) quite a bit. Oh well… I’m trying not to think about the amount and instead be happy that we got the place we wanted.

Last christmas we finally gave in and bought a TiVo, and even though I had my doubts at first, not being a big fan of TV in general, I have to admit that I like this device a lot more than I would have thought. Previously, I was fed up with cable TV to a point where I would watch almost no TV at all, other than maybe the occasional Startrek episode. First of all, being tied to the particular time that shows aired was getting increasingly difficult with two kids. Second, most TV shows simply aren’t good enough to compensate for having to sit through endless commercial breaks, and third, it seems like all the interesting shows are always on when I don’t have time to watch TV or simply don’t feel like it. VHS is simply too much of a hassle to be a real alternative. And for movies, we pretty much gave up with TV and switched to Netflix 3 years ago. This is the main reason that we have not bought a TiVo before, since we were (and still are) happy with Netflix, which meant that we always had some new movies at home. After about 5 months with a TiVo, I find it hard to imagine not having one any more. Even though I still watch very little TV, the added convenience is simply great. Whenever I have a few minutes and feel like watching TV (for example when bottle-feeding our baby), I simply switch to an episode of The Office, Southpark, Chapelle’s Show, or whatever else I might have recorded. I can easily stop in the middle of a show and continue to watch it some other time, and even if my wife wants to watch something else in the mean time this is no problem, since the TiVo remembers where I left off. ...

I am feeling very jittery today because we are about to make an offer on a house in San Francisco, and while the offer price is high enough that it will likely ruin us financially, we are expecting so much fierce competition about this property that the chances of actually getting it are probably fairly slim. So please keep your fingers crossed, because we really love this place.

My wife and kids (one almost 3, the other 11 months old) recently returned from an extended Germany vacation, after which I discovered that it is much more exhausting to have children that suffer from jetlag than to suffer from jetlag myself. For the first couple of days, 2 AM to 4 AM suddenly became play time, dinner time, potty time, etc. Not much fun when you need to get up early to go to work....