Software features

I am trying a new experiment. I am trying to create a list of "features" that one of my libraries has. So I am labelling each feature something like

// features.parser.parse_narrow_cstring

Roughly, each method, class or usage gets a feature. Normally, each feature requires one unit test, and if a feature has different behaviours requiring different unit tests, then I will subdivide the feature.

I must also make sure that somewhere in my unit tests, I include

// features.parser.parse_narrow_cstring.test

Hopefully this will give better unit-test coverage, and allow me to document and structure the library better. It will also allow features to be cross-referenced to code more quickly.

Hopefully this will make my code better organised. I shall report on whether it works.

Free VMWare server

I was initially really excited to see that this was a free product. It would solve a lot of my problems.

Having used it for almost a day (most of this time was spend waiting at an unreponsive computer) I have completely given up. My computer is completely unusable. It has 1GB of memory, and my machines were running on a second hard disk, so it should be able to run at least one other OS without causing too much difficulty. Not only does the emulated OS run quite slowly, but then my *real* machine ground to a halt as well.

It takes about half an hour to boot Windows Vista. Every key click takes about a minute to react. My mouse cursor (on my real OS) hangs.

This is totally unacceptable. What a pity I will never use this product again.