Today's news includes finally finding an open source, LGPL spellchecker in Java that looks like it might be useful, even if its name is "Jazzy". I think I've stumbled over this before, but I wasn't real impressed. The demo seems to work okay, however, so I'll have to give it another look soon.

In other news, I lost about 73,000 potential customers (tongue in cheek there, a little) for my email list parsing software recently. Not so good. Though the lists and the site in general were pretty hack-n-slash, I did enjoy the lists' content. It'll be a pain to see asplists.com go. I'm a little upset Mr. Carroll has allowed himself to become so upset over the matter that he's cutting his support of MS and ASP & ASP.NET completely like this without even offering alternatives to keep the lists going, but that's certainly his prerogative.

And admittedly, I really was hoping putting a link to the app in my sig on those lists might bring me a few bucks. 73,000 is a little high, but maybe five or ten. Oh well. It's hard to sell Java to MS sellouts anyhow.

The only other thought for the day is beta testing. I'm not sure if I'm going to expand beta testing much past myself for my application. Trying to rationalize that I'll be johnny on the spot with fixes for the first few customers, and I really don't know that asking for volunteers on the net is the best way to get real testing done. At work, the beta testers were pretty quiet until they were using version 1.0 (or 1.3 or 2.0 or what-have-you) to get *their* work done. Then suddenly, a month past the close of the testing period, the reports come flooding in from the same people who were supposed to have tested the app in the first place. That might have gotten me a little unfairly wary of beta testers.

Testing is an interesting beast. Every programmer knows that no matter how many times and ways they test an app, they only come at its use from one angle. Introduce person #2 and you'll get a completely different way of doing things. I like to close windows with the keyboard, you might with the mouse, etc. Your biases mean missed bugs, as anyone who has finished just one software project already knows.

Anyhow, still have a ways to go, so I have some time to think about that one. Update: Looks like Joel's making the same excuses. Sounds like his recent product release has him pretty frazzled.