What does "non-commercial use" mean?

Google Maps Terms of Use, "For individual users, Google Maps, including local search results, maps, and photographic imagery, is made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. For business users, Google Maps is made available for your internal use only and may not be commercially redistributed, except that map data may be accessed and displayed by using the Google Maps API pursuant to the API terms and conditions" (paragraph 1)

Google Maps API Terms of Use, "The Service may be used only for services that are generally accessible to consumers without charge" (section 1.4)

The most confusing part comes when I look at the Google Terms of Service. "The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service".

What does "non-commercial use" mean? The most concise definition I can find is "Non-commercial means that you are not getting compensated in any form for the products and/or services you develop..." (Intel® Software Development Products).

Is this the definition of non-commercial? "Non-commercial means that you are not getting compensated in any form for the products and/or services you develop. You cannot use the service to assist you to develop products and/or services that you are compensated for". This definition would mean I cannot use Google to search for programming references.

Perhaps non-commercial means, "you many not use this service to sell a product or service". By this definition employees of the company I work for cannot use Google Maps to sell our products or services. On the other hand, I can use Google Search to find programming references and tutorials.

How to Setup nUnitAsp for Unit Testing

After months I finally set up my first working unit test using nUnitAsp. It is great because it has classes that mimic the ASP.net web controls.

I ran into a bug that was hard to reproduce. After a day or so of exploratory testing I reproduced it. I did not want to lose this knowledge to I decided to try to implement a testing suite to document it with a test. (See “Code the Unit Test First”)

After looking into and trying to implement several blends of unit testing frameworks, I chose, nUnitAsp which extends nUnit so that you can easily test web controls. I also installed TestDriven.net so I could more readily run tests from VS 2003.

This article was the guide that produced results for me, “Advanced Techniques with NUnitAsp” by Tim Stall. I only followed the simple example and then adapted it to reproducing my bug.

I downloaded nUnitAsp version 1.5.1. I ran the nUnit 2.2.0 installer included with it at \NUnitAsp-1.5.1\bin. I installed TestDriven.net-2.0.1605_Personal.

Now that I have coding the unit test first, I can fix the bug.

The good, fast and cheap triangle

The good, fast and cheap triangle.

I saw this on Bernie Mac last night. His general contractor to add on a spare room showed him this triangle. It rings true. There are some that think you can have all three.