The Google C++ Testing Framework known also as Google Test, based on xUnit has been used by many of the Google C++ developers to help in unit testing their C++ applications. It is portable and works on Linux, Windows, Mac etc with GCC and MSVC compilers and even embedded systems. You can even use it to kill your Linux applications so that they die as you expect them to. Or have it continue testing after non-fatal errors. Now they have made it available as an open source library.

Google doesn’t claim that their test framework is better than others but they have made it easy to extend it by adding new test macros. You can read more in the primer and faq.

Link: Google C++ Testing Framework

Microsoft is seeking partners including Time Warner and News Corp. in a new bid to acquire Yahoo’s search business, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo search, with the partner, likely a media company, taking the rest of Yahoo’s business. CEO Steve Ballmer called Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and arranged a meeting set for Monday, but that meeting was cancelled, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation.

Microsoft officials contacted in London had no comment Wednesday morning.

As I reported in January, Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to buy all of Yahoo, an offer the latter refused. Although Microsoft later raised its offer price, Yahoo continued to decline, and in early May, Microsoft ended the negotiations.

On Monday, his final day as Microsoft’s chairman, Bill Gates stated that he thought any deal between his company and Yahoo was unlikely.

However, the matter has refused to go away with Microsoft indicating it would still be interested in buying part of Yahoo, namely its search business. At the same time, Yahoo investor Carl Icahn has pushed for a deal with Microsoft. He has stated publicly on several occasions that the company’s board failed to serve shareholder interests by refusing to sell, and is maneuvering to replace the board at an upcoming investor meeting in August.

NASA is inviting people to send their names to the moon on-board their Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which is due to launch later this year. Go to this page before June 27^th 2008, submit your name and you are done.
The database with the names will be placed on a microchip that will be integrated onto the spacecraft.

As an added bonus, you can get a lovely certificate to show their name will be carried to the moon on a chip on-board the LRO.

I have really no idea what the point of this is. But I think it’s a bit of fun and thought I’d share it. By the way, do not fill out your name if your are worried about they may steal your identity.

Every developer, including me, has some amount of code that they feel is reusable to them, but doesn’t clear that bar to be reusable for everyone.

This is what I call Pocket Code - reusable code that does not belong in reusable libraries that is shared amongst projects and team members, but code that you keep handy somewhere to be cut-and-pasted into applicable projects.

For the reason not to keep just around with you on a memory stick here are some ideas besides keeping it more clever:

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Development Websites

There are tons of code snippet sites and directories in the web. Some are generic, while others are very specific to language or need. Here are the few that I use frequently:

• Code Project
• DZone.com Snippets
• Regular Expression Library
• VS.NET IDE Snippet Library

Please feel free to add a comment below to your favorite snippet website.

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Repository

The first thing I do when starting a new project is to create the SVN repository. The second thing I do is immediately create a a toolbox of repository for that project.

Anything code that does not contribute to the product but does indirectly support it (quick and dirty data migration apps, record matching apps, or that crummy State enum) gets saved for prosperity in this repository.

I have seen people attempt to organically grow “reusable” libraries from these snippets in the forms of assemblies and jars. I highly frown upon this practice - you wouldn’t keep your yeast and flour in the same jar, why are you keeping junk and clean code together?

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Blogging

The majority of developers who blog create posts only around code - making their code available for the entire world.

Here are a couple of thoughts on this:

• I love bloggers who post and explain code because it adds to community learning
• I loathe bloggers who post uncommented code with no explanation further than - “thought this might be useful to someone else”
• If you are blogging about something - normally you are passionate about the topic, so I will take that piece of code a little more seriously.

Do you need an easy way to find recent web pages? Have a look at this…

When looking for an option to specify the date or daterange you’ll soon notice that Google only provided three options in the advanced search: see all the pages last updated in the past 3, 6 or 12 months and a difficult-to-use operator (daterange).

These days Google updated the advanced search page - now it shows four more options: find the web pages first indexed in the past day, week, month or in the past 2 months.

If you remove all the uninteresting parameters from the search url, you’ll find that as_qdr is responsible for date restrictions. For example, here’s how to restrict a search for “[Obama]” to pages first seen by Google’s crawler in the past 24 hours:

http://www.google.com/search?q=obama&as_qdr=d

Note that you’ll only find new web pages and not pages that were updated in the past 24 hours. That means you won’t find homepages from popular sites or other frequently-updated pages. If the date range is small, you’ll mostly find news and blog posts.

The nice thing is that you can change the value of as_qdr to custom intervals. Here are all the possible values of the as_qdr parameter:

d[number] - past number of days (e.g.: d10)
w[number] - past number of weeks
y[number] - past number of years

For example,

http://www.google.com/search?q=obama&as_qdr=d10

lets you search for pages that contain “obama” and were created in the past 10 days.

I don’t think it’s that complicated as it seems to be at first sight
If you can’t keep as_qdr in mind think of “advanced search - query date range”.

Earlier this year, as I reported, Microsoft offered to purchase search engine company Yahoo, however, the board of directors of Yahoo shot the offer down beause it ‘massively’ undervalued the company.

In Yahoo, Microsoft saw a way to make gains in the online realm. But after all the entreaties and ultimatums, the software giant wasn’t able to get its way, and Yahoo remains an independent company.

Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Jerry Yang didn’t really want Microsoft Corp. to buy his company. By Saturday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer didn’t want that either, leaving both technology giants facing fundamental questions about their futures.

In a letter to Mr. Yang on Saturday in which he withdrew Microsoft’s acquisition offer, Mr. Ballmer cited a divide over price, saying Microsoft had been willing to raise its offer for Yahoo…

According to my opinion it’s good to see that not every company can be embraced by Microsoft. Unfortunately it’s not that easy:

I’m getting the feeling that Yahoo is not acting in the best interest of their stockholders, but rather do what the board wants for personal reasons. Yahoo is in my opinion a sinking ship as google and others are fighting for marketshares.

Maybe things will chance quickly and all we have here is that Microsoft is publicly withdrawing their bid while they wait for Yahoo’s stock to crash and burn come Monday and let it plummet for several weeks. When the stock is at what they consider an acceptable price they’ll go back to a now humbled Yahoo with a much worse offer than what they’re getting now.

The defenite winner out of Microsoft’s failed attempt to buy Yahoo is Google because they no more have to to be scared of loosing their market leader position on the online ad market.

This is far from the end of it…