In Turbo Hearts, the 10♣ doubles your score final score, the J♦ gives you -10 points (good), the Q♠ is worth 13 points, and each heart is worth 1 point.

“Running” is defined as taking the Q♠ and all of the hearts. This is equivilant to “shooting the moon” in regular hearts.

Nines are also special in Turbo Hearts; if they are played in suit, they make a trick go around twice.

Charging is a technique that happens before a hand begins that has a few effects:

• The charged suite is now worth double. A charged Q♠ is now worth 26pts, a charged A♥ makes all hearts worth 2pts, a charged 10♣ is worth 4x your final score, and a charged J♦ is worth -20pts.
• The charged card must be placed face up in front of the player until they play it
• There is a caviate to charging a card however, you cannot play a charged card on the first trick in suit unless you are forced to do so. An example: You charge the 10♣ and the only other club you have is the 9♣. On the first club trick, you cannot play the 10♣ since you have another club, so you play your 9, making the trick go around again. Now, you have to play a second time and since your 10♣ is the only card in suit, you must play that card.

The game consists for 4 hands with the flow of the game as follows:

1. Passing – in order of the 4 hands: 3 left, 3 right, 3 diagonal, no passing.
2. Charging – anyone with a chargeable card (10♣, Q♠, J♦, A♥) can now charge.
3. Play starts – the person with the 2♣ plays first.
4. Tricks – gameplay continues until all tricks have been claimed
5. Scoring – scoring is tabulated and saved for later; more details below

Scoring may be the most complicated part of playing Turbo Hearts but it is really easy once you get the hang of it. Scoring is performed by totally up everyones points, multiplying if they got the 10♣, making negative if they “ran” and totally it up with the previous tricks.

We keep a notebook of scores, with each hand taking a line, the hand total on the left and the cumulative sum on the right. Negatives are wrapped in parens. It looks like this:

These are your hand scores and as you can see, I did really well on the last hand (ran for 248 pts!)

These scores are then kept cumulatively across multiple games and multiple players. Your final game score is calculated by “paying out”. What this means, is your total number of points, you must pay to all other players (and they must pay to you). It is good to have a low hand score but the opposite is true for a game score; higher scores are better.

So the final games scores are:

We keep these numbers are a long term tally. You can just sum up everyones game scores to see their standings.

The best way to think of these game scores is as pennies. In this game, I would be making $7.56 while the others would be paying out $1.46, $2.14, $3.86 respectively.

In my next post, I will lay out some basic strategy, but now you know how to play.

TabNamer @ GitHub

The script is:

set archiveFolderName to "@Archive"
set exchangeAccount to "My Exchange Email"

tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
	repeat with msg in (get current messages)
		move msg to folder archiveFolderName in Exchange account exchangeAccount
	end repeat
end tell

This script assumes you have an exchange account and a folder in that exchange account you want to use.

If you want to use an archive folder that is a subfolder of another folder, you’ll want to tweak the script to say something like “to folder archiveFolderName in folder parentFolderName in Exchange account exchangeAccount” and add a parentFolderName variable to the top of the script.

Now all you have to do is save the script in: “~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items/Archive\cA”

This will put it in your script menu and set the keystroke ctrl+a to “Archive”.

Enjoy!

What in the world was Apple thinking when you try to upgrade/register/sync your iPhone/iPod and you get “Error: -19″ or “Error: -20″?? What good does this do any one? How am I supposed to fix the problem if I don’t know what the problem is? Isn’t Apple the king of user-friendliness?

When you write software, you should use good error messages. You should use good exceptions. You should use descriptive values.

Granted, some things the user cannot fix. Telling the user the database connection was lost on a web application does very little good for the user. You can however tell the user that an error that was not their fault occurred. At least then I know I can come back and try again later.

Luckily, after rebooting my iPhone I was able to install the recent software update. This may not have been the problem, but certainly Apple could have notified me that I should attempt rebooting.

In any case, be nice to your damn users!

So, assuming you have some unit tests, how useful are they if they don’t test everything? At some level you will want to have a good idea that you’re testing everything. (NOTE: I mean everything really important. Writing perfect 100% coverage like this would likely be too expensive for the entire codebase.) This is where Emma comes in (and more importantly for us, EclEmma, an Eclipse plugin for Emma). Emma is a code coverage tool which lets you visual which parts of your code get executed during some execution (regular or JUnit).

Lets walk through using EclEmma to ensure that we have adequate testing being done. Lets test the following two classes.

GuessTheNumber.java:

import java.util.Random;

public class GuessTheNumber {

	private final Integer value;
	private final int min;
	private final int max;
	private int guesses = 0;
	private boolean solved = false;

	public GuessTheNumber(int min, int max, int value) {
		this.min = min;
		this.max = max;
		this.value = value;
	}

	public GuessTheNumber(int min, int max) {
		this(min, max, getRandomNumber(min, max));

	}

	public int guess(int i) {
		if (solved)
			throw new IllegalStateException();

		guesses++;

		int ret = value.compareTo(i);

		if (ret == 0)
			solved = true;

		return ret;
	}

	public void resetCount() {
		guesses = 0;
		solved = false;
	}

	public int getValue() {
		if (solved == false)
			throw new IllegalStateException();

		return value;
	}

	public int getMin() { return min; }
	public int getMax() { return max; }

	private static int getRandomNumber(int min, int max) {
		return new Random().nextInt(max - min + 1) + min;
	}
}

And SequentialStrategy.java:

public class SequentialStrategy {

	private final GuessTheNumber guesser;

	public SequentialStrategy(GuessTheNumber guesser) {
		this.guesser = guesser;
	}

	public int solve() {
		for (int i=guesser.getMin(); i< =guesser.getMax(); i++) {
			if (guesser.guess(i) == 0)
				return i;
		}

		throw new IllegalStateException();
	}
}

Finally, we’ll write up a basic StrategyTest.java:

import junit.framework.TestCase;

public class StrategyTest extends TestCase {

	public void testSequentialStrategy() {
		GuessTheNumber guesser = new GuessTheNumber(5, 100);
		SequentialStrategy strategy = new SequentialStrategy(guesser);

		int value = strategy.solve();
		assertEquals(guesser.getValue(), value);
	}
}

So the question is, how good is our test? If you installed EclEmma, you can right click on your Unit Test in Eclipse, head to “Coverage As” -> “JUnit Test”

This will run your unit test against your code and when complete, highlight the code green, yellow, or red for covered, partially-covered, and not-covered respectively.

According to EclEmma, our code coverage when running StrategyTest is:

Thats not too bad, lets take a look at the output for SequentialStrategy:

We may want to test the IllegalStateException since we currently don’t and we are expecting it to happen if we’ve guessed everything between min and max and haven’t solved the problem. This would ensure if someone else comes in behind us and changes this code, the unit test will fail if they take that out and change it to return, say, Integer.MIN_VALUE.

Lets also take a look at some of GuessTheNumber:

It appears we also want the contract to include an IllegalStateException being thrown if you have already solved the guessing game. It also looks like we don’t ever call resetCount() and possibly retest after doing that. We also never check if getValue() fails prior to having a solution.

If we modify the test slightly to:

import junit.framework.TestCase;

public class StrategyTest extends TestCase {

	public void testSequentialStrategy() {
		GuessTheNumber guesser = new GuessTheNumber(5, 100);
		SequentialStrategy strategy = new SequentialStrategy(guesser);

		for (int i=0; i<3; i++) {
			try {
				guesser.getValue();
				fail("An exception should have been thrown");
			}
			catch (IllegalStateException ex) { /**/ }

			int value = strategy.solve();
			assertEquals(guesser.getValue(), value);

			try {
				guesser.guess(guesser.getMax() + 1);
				fail("Shouldn't reach this point");
			}
			catch (IllegalStateException ex) {/**/}

			guesser.resetCount();
		}
	}

	public void testBadGuessGame() {
		GuessTheNumber guesser = new GuessTheNumber(1, 10, 3000);
		SequentialStrategy strategy = new SequentialStrategy(guesser);

		try {
			strategy.solve();
			fail("Should not reach this point");
		}
		catch (IllegalStateException ex) { /**/ }
	}
}

And now our code coverage is:

I know this was a very basic example that really didn’t test any complex logic or conditions, but I hope it gives you a good idea of how you can use code coverage to improve your unit tests.

Sad coincidence?

Apparently, you can just click that “Use bright colors for bold text” checkbox and all of a sudden typing things like ls is no longer painful.

Just thought I’d share the tip.

That said, after installing the plugin, press Command+Shift+T to name a tab (or use the Name Tab option under the View menu).

NOTE: This has only been tested on Intel Macs with the latest version of SIMBL. If you have a PowerPC and it works for you, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Also, due to the nature of me giving this away for free, I cannot guarantee it won’t harm your computer, nor can I promise it will fix your marriage. This is for use AT YOUR OWN RISK. I wash my hands completely of responsibility.

Enjoy!

Terminal Tab Namer v0.1 ALPHA

If you notice on blogs or other sites they have something called “pretty urls”. Essentially if you had a blog, this lets you have /post/welcome-to-my-site/ instead of /post/?id=33. Using the Spring Framework and the hot new annotation support in 2.5.1, you can easily achieve that.

Specify your url on your method like so:

public static final String URL_POST = "/post/*/";

@RequestMapping(URL_POST)
public String showPost(HttpServletRequest req) {
...
}

Now all we need to do is pull out the part of the URL that has whats in the star. I’ve created the following class to assist in this manner:

public class UrlUtils {
	public static String[] breakUri(final String uri, final String expectedUrl) {
		Pattern p = Pattern.compile(expectedUrl.replace("*", "(.*?)"));
		Matcher m = p.matcher(uri);
		if (m.find()) {
			String[] ret = new String[m.groupCount()];
			for (int i=0; i<ret.length; i++) {
				ret[i] = m.group(i+1);
			}
			return ret;
		}
		else {
			return null;
		}
	}
}

So equipped with this class, you only have to do the following:

String[] parts = UrlUtils.breakUri(req.getRemoteUri(), URL_POST);
if (parts == null) {
    // Do code to show an archive or whatever you want when the * part is missing
}
else {
    // parts[0] will have what you want.
}

Note: This will also (sort of) work if you have a url like: "/post/*/*/" (the array will have a length of 2). However, if you get “/post/welcome/” as the URL from the user, breakUri() will return null, in which case you might want to check for "/post/*/".

Now, this code isn’t very complex but it does allow you to deal with pretty urls without the hassle of building the regex yourself (something you may sometimes have to do!)

Finally, I’ve put a request into the fine folks that develop the Spring Framework to include this type of functionality out of the box so your method could be something like:

@RequestMapping(POST_URL)
public String showPost(RequestParts parts) {
    if (!parts.hasParts()) {
        // show general page
    }
    else {
        // Show specific page (parts.get(0))
    }
}

Please go Vote for that feature at Spring’s issue tracking database.