It finally sank into my melon why Dependency Injection, Inversion of Control, and IoC Containers exist. The 'a-ha' moment came, and I wanted to share it. Here's my "explain it to your mom" definition of IoC Containers, and the back-story to make it make sense. First, we start with bugs ... Bugs: These are when a program malfunctions. They aren't good. An abundance of bugs means the program is broken, and users are grumpy. Trying to solve bugs more proactively leads us to ... Unit Testing: Automated testing of software leads to catching and solving bugs faster. ...

I've gotten quite a bit more feedback than I anticipated about my prior post about Google Maps and the iPhone. Who would've thought that not being able to mash up live GPS data, maps, and one or more external files of geographic data in a generic, consumer-driven way would be such a stir? Since then, I've made some progress on this rant. LocWidget: this handy iPhone app allows you to send Latitude, Longitude, and Altitude measurements as query parameters to a website of your choosing. It also takes it a step further, sending the...