Saturday, March 6, 2010

Who to blame, Apple or Microsoft?

I've been having problem with my air tunes box for a while and I really couldn't figure out why it's silent for a few seconds every minute or so. Today I found the explanation on the apple home page. It seems like when Windows updates the list of present wireless networks the music skips. The solution, make sure the network you're on is in the top of the list of known networks. What makes this even more interesting is that it seems like air tunes has a buffer of some 3 seconds which makes volume changes and music pausing really frustrating since all effects are delayed. How can a system with 3 seconds buffering start skipping because of the short interruption when the network list is updating? Why am I not experiencing the same gaps in other internet connections? Who shall I be upset with, Apple or Microsoft? Perhaps both for good measures.

A completely unrelated thing, Dependency Injection is probably the most hyped trivial concept I've seen so far. I've read the explanation of it some 5 times and I just can't figure out what the buzz is about. The way I understand it, it turns out to be as trivial as passing an implementation of a class through the constructor for another class rather than choosing the exact type inside the constructor. This makes it easier to switch implementations and provide testing mock classes. I've done this for ages, just didn't come up with a fancy name. It turned out I wasn't the first to make this observation.