I blogged a while back about the exciting(!) purchase of my new Dyson http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/davef/2008/09/09/hoovering-up-engineering/

I’ve just had an email asking me to write a review. Being an opinionated guy and someone who values user reviews I thought I would just type a quick “yes it works” at http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/product/406848/DYSON-DC14-ANIMAL. but what do I get?

“Done, but with errors on the page” and no chance of making an entry.

I’m using ie 6.0.2800 - if it don’t work with that what does it work with? More to the point what did the designers check it with?

The email is from a  no reply address and I’ve got better things to do then spend 20 mins trying to get a contact address from the the website so the world will have to live without my opinion. Anyway it may explain why there are so few user reviews on the Comet site!

Stop press on that - I have tried to track down a contact and on their “contact” page I noticed “we recommend using the Firefox web browser ” I’m cool with OSS but things do need to work with MS stuff if you want to maximised your audience!

1. As individuals we can recycle kit.
2. In our companies we can use what influence we have to make sure kit is recycled.
3. As IT sales people I guess you can’t just stop selling them! Maybe a recycling program can feature in the service though?
4. As s/w / infrastructure designers we could aim to keep stuff runable on old kit (it won’t make you popular with your h/w sales team if you have one!). Also, unless you support the latest interfaces it makes your product look old.
5. Perhaps the hardest option is that at home and in the office we can choose not to keep up with the latest kit. On the bright side that means when you do need to upgrade you can either go for cheap recycled (not creating more waste) or super state of the art  (not needing updating so often).

Hmm, that’ll be recycled at home and state of the art at work please

Qu’est-ce que c’est le point? As Georgia Nicolson might say (I haven’t seen the film but the books are excellent.)

Spoof videos on you tube? News? Well no, but I can’t resist this one You know us programmers get all excited about recursion… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw8gE3lnpLQ

I’m using quite an old Music Match Juke Box (v7.5) as my CD ripper. The newer one screws up some other apps and is just bigger & bloatier & I have registered this version (I don’t just use freeware, on occasion I will pay for stuff!).

I use my own player “what I wrote” as an MP3 player as MM tends to hog resources, displays the tag name when I want the file name and doesn’t do some of the shuffle effects I want (like play next sequential track when in shuffle mode). Also it saves play lists as text files so it’s easy to manipulate them & doesn’t create weird libraries I never use. Anyway writing your own apps is cool & a CD / MP3 player is so easy with Visual Basic why not?

 However, back to MMJB. The problem I have is that it doesn’t tend to find newer CD & I end up typing in track names (well not typing, cutting & pasting from Amazon CD listings usually). Is there a new CDDB? Can I get MM to look it at it? Has someone declared copyright on track listings so they can’t be accessed?

OK having said I have no use for tabs http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/davef/2008/04/14/slow-internet-explorer/ I was horrified to learn that MS Visual Studio 2005 (oh yes, I’m right up to date) uses the damn things instead of the old MDI type lots of code windows it used to have in MSVC v6.

After cursing and muttering I discovered that you can turn them off and go back to the old look. However, I have turned them back on - just as an experiment! In the spirit of open minded adventure I’ll give ‘em a try for a while and see how they go. Watch this rant…

Testing, something I have never been happy about - there are just to many options. Maybe I’m a bit mathematical, a bit completist, alright perfectionist but if I can’t do it properly I don’t like to do it at all. I remember in my university days I was asked to write a “comprehensive” RAM test. Since any RAM cell could theoretically leak to any other I figured the only way was to try every combination by counting from 0 to 2^(8*4K) (it was a 4K 8 bit chip). I got an idea of how long this would take (checking every bit at every increment) when I converted the run time from seconds to years and it didn’t dent the figure much! This still wouldn’t be a complete test as it might take a fixed time for the leak to happen so the test should pause between each increment…

My latest GUI is in QT so I had a look at http://www.ics.com/products/qt/kdexecutor/index.html Which has some ideas on testing. Because of the way QT works it is possible to assume the clicks will work and then just test the event handling of simulated clicks which is a good start. Testing methods that rely on recording mouse positions (click at 300,400) and checking against bitmaps (you should get a screen that looks exactly like this) have got to be limited. Most of the bugs that get reported from customers relate to weird (ie ones I haven’t tried) settings they are using - 640×400 screens, 2000×60000 screens (OK I Lied about that one), default fonts of “Hip Hop Graffiti 3″, Korean locale…

Oh well, back to my usual GUI testing. Aim for pressing everything, in every order at every screen resolution but settle for the old company standard. (I should explain that the “old company” started out in hardware so the official testing of a unit was to power it up and see if it performed its self test successfully - indicated by a single beep. )

The old company QA standard is therefore - if it beeps ship it!

If you’ve not come across this guy check out

You sometimes wonder if in a world of management speak stating the obvious is genuinely seen as a clever thing. Over at

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/04/09/virtualization-rsa-malware-tech-virtualization08-cx_ag_0409virtual.html

Someone is (being paid for!) saying if malware controls the virtualization host it will have access to all the virtual machines and their data without the virtual machines knowing!!! Well I never, that’s as if someone bugs the telephone exchange you won’t find the bug on your handset and they’ll hear all the calls not just the ones on your phone.

Who’d have thought it? Well who’d have thought you could get paid for telling people something quite that obvious.

Then again someone is probably being paid for the comment “Rather than the usual pattern, where we deploy a technology and wait for it to get hacked, wouldn’t it be cool to try and secure it first?”

Wow, someone should suggest to the O/S people to try adding some security when they design things. OK, you may think Microsoft didn’t but I think you’ll find they just didn’t do it very well. They didn’t design it to be full of holes (except maybe any employees who moonlight for anti-virus companies).

And “wouldn’t it be cool”??? Surely doing the obvious is the opposite of cool, what we used to call “sensible”.

I am assuming the people designing virtualization software are putting some security in there and that it will be considerable more secure than end user systems just because it is not designed for end users. It can’t be tweaked with downloaded screen savers and won’t have clots (oops, busy, non technical people) opening dodgy emails.

 Going back to the phone exchange analogy, I hope it might be a bit harder to get in there and plant a bug - or am I being optimistic and expecting people to do the obvious (cool?) thing?