notes and rants : Random

Working on the Duc

alanpa — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 02:37:22 GMT

Although it’s Saturday and I’m currently doing a bit of work, I’m happy to say that I have had a bit more time lately for non-work projects. In addition to a few small projects around the house, I’ve had a chance to do a bit of work on my motorcycle (Ducati Monster). A few weeks ago, I chopped the tail off (literally – with a hacksaw), plugged the holes, and installed a new LED integrated taillight (integrated==turn signals && brake light in the same enclosure). This cleaned up the back end quite a bit (and it looks cool).

There was one problem with the installation though. The right turn signal blinked super-fast (strangely, the left was fine). I knew the root cause right away – LEDs draw barely any electricity, so the flasher unit basically thinks that there’s no bulb and blinks fast to warn you (I think this is how flasher’s work). Anyway – I confirmed with another rider that installing LEDs frequently causes this and was told how to deal with it if I chose.

I chose to ignore it initially – it was weird to have one side of my bike blink faster than the other, but I suppose the signals were still effective. This weekend, however, I picked up a pair of LED signals for the front of the bike. I popped off the old set, then wired in the new LEDs (without mounting them). I tested the turn signals, and they worked – but now BOTH sides were blinking at near strobe speed. I thought about leaving it that way, but decided I’d go ahead and make it a real project.

Earlier in the week, I picked up a few 10ohm x 10 watt resistors from the electronics store and had them ready (I basically needed to make the flasher work harder). The resistors were pretty big, but the wires were flexible, so I figured I had a chance.

I wasn’t sure if it was going to work, so I just sort of propped everything together – one resistor on each front signal (note – wired in parallel – not serial), then turned the key. I was ecstatic to see that the signals on both sides worked perfectly. I had extra resistors in case I needed to put resistors on all signals, but I left the other two in the package. Something tells me I should do all 4 corners anyway, but I’ll leave that for another project.

From here, it was a matter of wiring and mounting. I got fancy and worked the resistor and wires through some heat shrink tubing. Everything is tucked behind the headlight – not quite professional looking, but not bad. And, for $3 in materials (excluding the lights) and an hour or so of work, I’ll call it a success.

This project, as you’ve guessed by now, has nothing to do with testing – but it did require thinking, forethought, and attention to detail – all skills that I think testers should have. I guess I’m just a one trick pony.

Travel Notes

alanpa — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:52:25 GMT

Travel notes below, but first, I have a question for you. Parkinson's law states that "work will always expand to fill available time" - that the lengthened schedule encourages procrastination or inefficiency. Is the inverse ever true? I.e. if you have less time for a project, will your efficiency increase in order to meet the closer deadline? Take a minute to answer if you have it - I'll expand on the thought in a future post.

I've been in Copenhagen for almost a week now. The weather is pretty much exactly the same as Seattle. It's wet (including that Seattle-style drizzle rain), and cold, but not too cold. Days here are a bit shorter than at home, but I see a bit of daylight from time to time.

This is a long trip for me, so I have a weekend to sightsee a bit. My plans for the weekend include Sweden (a short train ride away), the Kronborg Castle and some laundry. I have a bit of prep work to do for my classes next week too, and I'm sure I have some other work I'll catch up on.

My body has adapted well to the time change, but it's weird to look at the clock on my laptop and see that it's 5:42am, when it's nearing time for me to go home for the day. So far, I've had a great time here, and I'm sure that will continue through next week.

My blogroll

alanpa — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 20:56:30 GMT

If you read my blog through syndication, you won't know what I'm talking about. However, if you read it from here, you have probably noticed the long list of blogs cluttering up the right side of the screen. I use newsgator to read blogs, and also to generate my blogroll. Unfortunately, although the list seems organized in the newsgator interface, the dump on my web page is just an alphabetized list of the blogs I read. I do like that the list is dynamic - if I drop or add a blog, my blogroll is updated in a few minutes, so if you're curios what I like to know about, all you have to do is look. I add blogs all the time, and drop them just as often (My rules are simple. If a blog looks relevant or interesting, I subscribe. If I catch myself selecting the "mark all as read" link without reading anything other than the headlines, I dump it). Sometimes, I catch myself skipping the second part of this rule. In fact, I realized this last night when I dumped Scoble's feed to the ether for the umpteenth straight day. As a blogger, I feel like I'm supposed to read Scoble (he's like the king of blogging :}), but I just can't justify ignoring my rules anymore.

I would be happy to comment on every blog I read, but I'll just give you the highlights and exceptions (I'm leaving out hyperlinks - you can find the subscription link on my blog).

If you work with software, I can't recommend joelonsoftware and codinghorror enough. Larry Osterman's blog, Scott Hanselman's blog and secretGeek are excellent tier two (and relatively low output) supplements.

I read a ton of testing blogs. Other than Bj's imtesty blog and (occasionally) testingreflections, none are very prolific nor highly interesting (to me), but I keep reading waiting to be inspired. Joe Strazzere and Keith Stobie almost always have some great things to say, but they post even less than I do :}

I also read blogs of personal interest. I read Kevin Smith's blog because I love his movies (maybe not Jersey Girl), and I"m a huge BNL fan, so I read their blog too. I, of course, also read minimsft and the other "MS is going to fail" blogs...probably for the same reason I read Dilbert, Ctrl-Alt-Delete, bug bash and user friendly - I like to be entertained.

That's only a dent in the list, but I've been thinking about writing a post like this for some time, and wanted to do it before I got back to focusing on testing and quality.

I'm always happy to comment on what I read, or give suggestions on what to read to find out more

Live Writer

alanpa — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 03:10:11 GMT

I had doubts about live writer working with community server, but it looks like it works.

I'm also going to see how well live writer edits existing posts, so I apologize in advance for making edits to this post.

It seems to do most of what I need. It's non-intuitive how to do a table or a code block.

// Had to switch to html view to 
// add this
// printf("Hello world");

i'll play with it a bit, but word12 is still a better choice for me.

Pens and Microphones

alanpa — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 01:58:00 GMT

Last week I was home taking care of a few random work issues after dinner. I was wrapping up, and, as I usually do before I go to bed, logged into my hotmail account to clean up the daily deluge of email (I use my hotmail account primarily for non-work related mailing lists, so I get 20 or so messages a day that I pretty much delete without looking at).

Anyway, when I logged on, I had about 90 unread messages. About 2 seconds later, I saw that nearly all of them were from a popular online auction site, and I was being informed of auction status, inquiries from buyers, and even “auction ended” emails. Knowing that I haven’t logged on to any auction sites in nearly six months, I suspected something fishy (how could I not). I carefully logged on to the site (carefully == making sure I wasn’t redirected), and sure enough, my account was hosting a plethora of auctions for Mont Blanc pens and Shure SM58* microphones. I quickly changed my password, then not-so-quickly shut down all of the running auctions (not-so-quickly because it is impossible to end more than one auction at once). I then sent email to everyone who paid for something explaining what happened. Surprisingly, everyone was pretty good spirited about it.

I then (this is all in the space of about 30 minutes) sent email to the web sites security team describing the incident. They replied about five days later pretty much telling me just what I told them.

I’m still not certain how Mr. Zhang (see below) got my password, but I can eliminate phishing for two reasons: 1) I never click on links in email, and 2) I hadn’t logged on in 6 months even using the regular site. Other than conspiracy stories about inside jobs, that pretty much leaves password guessing. My password for the site was slightly strong by definition (capital and lower case including numbers), but definitely guessable (side note #1: I opened my account at this site in 1999 and never changed it – I don’t use passwords this weak anymore; side note #2, to be safe, I changed my password at my paypal site and I was dumbfounded to discover that paypal doesn’t allow spaces in passwords – haven’t they heard of pass phrases?)

Having a lot of interest in security, I thought I’d try to figure out what happened. The first thing I did was look at the auctions. They listed an email address (not mine), and also the note of where the paypal payment had gone to. I logged out of hotmail, and tried logging in under the email address listed on the auction using my old auction site password…success. Unfortunately, there were only a few emails either asking questions about the auction or “instant purchase” notifications. There wasn’t much else I could do (other than change the language from Chinese to English, but that didn’t really help me at all. I went to passport.com, logged on, and saw that a Mr. Li Zhang (no idea if it’s a real name) had established the account that morning. Just in case, I changed Mr. Zhang’s password to something “appropriate” and moved on to paypal.

Unfortunately LZ wasn’t dumb enough to use my password on his paypal account as well, so I tried 20 or 30 made up passwords. As I expected, I didn’t get access to his account, but what concerns me is that paypal doesn’t seem to mind repeated attempts to access an account. I figured the least I could do would be to lock him out of his account, but I couldn’t do it. I tried clicking the link to have the password sent, but it obviously went to another address.

Everything is back to normal with my accounts and email, but it did take several hours out of my time last week to put everything in order. I did hear back from one of the buyers though – and they were actually sent something (why LZ bothered, I don’t know). Apparently, the buyers received a very good knockoff of what they ordered – close enough that they would probably even get away with it for non-educated buyers. I guess the scam is that they go after accounts with good feedback scores that have been inactive for a long period of time.

* If you’re going to buy a vocal microphone, do yourself a favor and splurge the extra 30 bucks to get a Shure Beta 58A. It’s twice as good of a microphone for a nominal amount more (ymmv)

Catch up...catsup...ketchup...?

alanpa — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 21:27:00 GMT

Not that there's anyone eagerly anticipating my next entry, but anytime I don't blog for a while, you can safely assume that my day job is taking all of my time. The good news is that I have a lot to get off of my chest, so I'll be getting some writing practice in over the next few days.

Things to look forward to over the next week or so include:

My ebay fiasco
Thoughts on a few comments from mini's blog
Reiterating a few thoughts from a co-worker's blog (details in the post)
and of course, much more on test patterns

Finally, a blog editor I really like

alanpa — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 00:22:00 GMT

Since I started this blog a few years ago, I’ve gone through a few phases where I took some time to try to find a blog editor that fit my needs. My needs are pretty simple – all I really want is an editor where it’s easy to do any text formatting I want. I don’t usually do crazy formatting, but somehow, I’m convinced that I need it. Doing something like this shouldn’t take too much effort. Luckily, just about every editor does this. The one I’m using now makes it extremely simple.

The main reason I look for an editor is that I want the ability to easily work off-line. Community server (the sw running this site) has a web based editor, and you can’t really use a web based editor if you’re not connected to the internet. At any given time, I have 3-10 blog articles started, but just finish one up and post when I have time. Up until a few weeks ago, I would just write all the articles in Word and paste them into the web based editor when I wanted to post them. I abhor inefficiency, so although it hurt me to do this, it worked.

The two biggest problems I ran into trying to use any of the popular editors were getting them to work with this site (I usually could get this to work eventually), and the ability to post both through the corporate firewall (I couldn’t get any editors to do this consistently).

Just a few weeks ago, I discovered that the Word 12 beta has blog posting built in. I’m not usually one of those employees who rah-rahs about the ms software, but the blog editor is perfect (well, it has a few bugs, but the functionality is exactly what I want). The interface is simple (can you believe it – a simple interface from Microsoft), and the posting works without a hitch (almost – but I’m sure they’ll fix the bug).

The post that will never happen

alanpa — Tue, 09 May 2006 19:08:00 GMT

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I like being a "d-list" blogger. I know I don't post often, but I enjoy writing and many of the posts I've written have actually helped me think through testing issues close to me.

My current team contains some of the best software testing thinkers at Microsoft. Of course, when you have a handful of highly experienced thinkers concentrated on one team, interesting personalities are bound to break out. Sometimes I'll discuss one of our team discussions with my wife, who will notice that everyone on the team (including me) will respond to a variety of discussions exactly the same way.

Recently, I created a character sheet for our team - much like the description of characters that exists in a script for a play, but probably a little over the top. I was going to post the descriptions and a few "scenes" based on hallway discussions. Probably only I would find it interesting, but I saw it as a fun creative exercise.

This is the post that will never happen. I recently discovered that one of my teammates reads this blog (if he uses newsgator, he's one of the 21!). Although nothing I was going to post was derogatory, I like keeping my stereotypes to myself. So much for semi-anonymous blogging.

I'll probably get over my fear in a few weeks. I'll keep the character sheet around just in case.

PSQT

alanpa — Wed, 03 May 2006 03:57:00 GMT

I'm on my way home from PSQT. McCarran airport in Vegas has free wireless, so I was able to find an unpopulated corner to charge my laptop and get some work done.

The conference was good - presentations were on the level of STAR, but this is a much smaller conference (~100 total attendees). I had a chance to talk with the conference chair and shared our views on the relationship between MS and testing conferences. I also attended one of his presentations, and liked what he had to say. He has a great understanding of the problems in software testing, and understands what the solutions are.

Tomorrow I'm back in the office and will be attempting to get everything back in order by the end of the week.

Oh yeah - I totally blew the lyric in my last post title. The real lyric doesn't make any more sense, but I'm glad someone saw it and corrected me. I know the song is about Bowie's drug problems, so maybe those are meant to be drug induced lyrics :} ?

Pictures of jack girls in synthesis

alanpa — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 22:26:00 GMT

Only a few will know what the title of this post is. It has nothing to do with this post, but it was the line playing on my Zen player when I began typing this.

I just finished a week teaching in Ireland. I didn't have time to do much in Dublin other than just work, but I had a great time. I do miss working on products some times, but I do like making a difference in the way testers view their jobs, and I think I was able to do that this week. I'm currently somewhere over northern canada playing with boeing's connexion wireless network. It works, but it's s l o w. I just did a tracert to msn.com - 30 hops, the last 8 or so timing out. I re-ran it to see if it would do better, and... it didn't. We'll see what happens when I hit the post button in about 30 seconds.

I'll be home tonight, and will get to spend 36 hours catching up at home before I leave for PSQT. I'm looking forward to it despite the travel strains it's putting on me.

I was going to talk about the title, but I'll leave the investigation up to my 21 readers (yes - I've added two readers (according to newsgator) over the last 3 months).

Managers, managers, managers

alanpa — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 21:27:00 GMT

Readers who know me already know that I have no plans in my career to manage people. Although I've been a successful manager in the past, I get more satisfaction as an "individual contributor". However, since I work with managers so much, I crashed a 4 day manager training event last week. Overall, I had a good experience. I learned and saw a lot that will help me in my career. I don't think I can share details (and more importantly, I don't think anyone would find the details remotely interesting), I would like to share a bit of the craziness I went through.

The one detail relevant to the story is that the training was project based. We were given tasks to accomplish and broken into a set of teams to accomplish the tasks (think a non-competitive version of The Apprentice)

The training started monday. The projects were assigned just before dinner, and after dinner people were to pick their projects (some, including myself, had already been put on projects). I was taking notes on my laptop drinking a glass of water, when someone decided it would be cool/exciting/dangerous to jump on top of the table. The tables were not much more than card tables, and although the table managed to support the excited managers weight, it did manage to dump half a glass of water across my beloved thinkpad. At first, I didn't realize how much water had spilled, but as I began wiping the water off, I quickly realized that it was much more than I could brush away with my hand. While I was assessing the situation, I briefly saw a dialog saying there was a "power surge on the usb port", and my laptop turned off.

I finished wiping the water off and pressed the power button. Nothng happened. I finished up the evening activities, took the laptop back to my room, opened it up to dry, and went to sleep.

The next morning, I popped the battery out and back in, pressed the power button, and let out a sigh of relief when it began to boot. I headed to breakfast, and propped the laptop on the table to take care of a few emails before getting started. Five minutes later, the laptop shut off again. I pressed power, and nothing happened. I popped the battery again, pressed power and watched as windows began to boot. Thirty seconds later, my thinkpad turned itself off again.

Crap!

The good news is that the data on the hard drive was still there, so I can (and did) pull it off. The bad news is that I actually needed a computer to get the coursework done. In the planning the night before, our group decided to make a video. Since I had (limited) experience in this area, I was volunteered to be the video editor. Now I didn't have a computer to do the work on. No one else on the team had a laptop capable of doing the editing, nor a laptop with a firewire port for getting data off of the DV cameras.

Everyone did have a laptop capable of email, so I commandeered a laptop and sent mail to our wonderful admin who helped me track down a machine at work I could borrow for the week. The problem was that there weren't any loaner laptops available. However, there was a desktop computer I could borrow (in the end this worked out better). Since I was reasonably close to MS, I sped back, grabbed the box (no firewire card), then swung by my office for a monitor, keyboard and mouse. I stopped by bestbuy for a firewire card and cable (I needed a 4->6 pin cable), then snuck back into the training before any of the instructors noticed I was gone (not that they would have cared). I installed the card, connected the cables, found a wired ethernet connection, installed my video editing software and got ready to work. At this point, I realized that audio wasn't working. I kind of needed audio to make the right cuts and fades in the video editing. I did all of my usual disable/enable, uninstall/reinstall, and find an updated driver tricks, but nothing worked.

Double Crap!

Now I was getting pissed, but new I had to start getting some work done. I ran home, and borrowed my mother in laws laptop (a Dell POS, but with a working firewire port). I sat down with it, shut down the 30 or so programs that load at boot, and began installing my video editing software. Installation hung. I rebooted and tried again. Installation hung again.

Triple Crap!

While I was waiting for the install to un-hang, I popped the lid on the desktop computer with the audio problems and noted the motherboard model and began searching. I don't remember the exact MB, but what I can tell you is that windows detected the same AC97 audio chipset that's installed on millions of other motherboards. What I learned was that this MB had a different audio chipset. I installed the "proper" drivers and was blessed with the windows startup sound after rebooting.

While it certainly wasn't smooth sailing from that point, things certainly went better. In the end, I'm not sure if I would have been able to get the work done on my laptop. The machine I borrowed had dual 3.2gig procs and 2 gig of ram. Even with that horsepower, the final video took 40 minutes to render. It may have taken 2 hours on my laptop, and I didn't have that kind of time at the end of the project.

I'm pretty sure there's no point to this post, but I know I appreciate reading stories about overcoming obstacles and wanted to share this story. The video I made definitely won't be on channel 9, and in fact, no one will probably ever watch it again. One bright spot is that I learned enough that I can start doing something effective with the videos of my kids...I can't wait until I have free time!

Oh yeah - the guy that jumped on the table and killed my laptop. His only comment was "...now you have an excuse to get a new laptop".

#@*$!!

Back again

alanpa — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 19:45:00 GMT

Once again, the beast called work has taken me away from blogging. The good news is that I thought of a bunch of stuff to talk about - which is a good thing when you don't really work on a product and have to find other stuff to blog about. It was a few days short of a year ago that I started on the engineering excellence team, and it's been a year packed full of challenges and learning opportunities. I've kicked butt on some of the things I've tried to accomplish, and floundered on others. All in all, I think I'm much better off than I was a year ago, and have a much better plan in place for my career. I do, however, miss working on a shipping product, and miss being away from coding, design, strategy, and the more hands on product direction I have had in the past. I have a lot more I want to accomplish in this group, and plan to work here another year (or maybe even two) before I go back to a "real job"

Two weeks away* from the office (both working), and I'm about as far behind as you can get. I am planning to post over the next two weeks (until I have to travel again) as much as I can.

*I was never more than 5 miles away from my office over the last two weeks, but I didn't have a computer (that story to come), and never had an opportunity to go to my office.

Spaces after sentences

alanpa — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 21:27:00 GMT

I "learned" to type about 25 years ago in high school. The truth is that I went to typing class, but I didn't pay attention much, and I was in a stage where...certain..."chemicals" altered my outlook on school, and in particular that little round ball bouncing up and down while I typed...but that's a completely different story.

I apparently did get something out of the class. When I started working with computers, I knew hand position and a few of the other basics of typing which I have been thankful to over the years. I'm not a fantastic typer, but these days, I can type 70wpm or so while looking out the window or having a simple conversation. I've certainly reached a skill level adequate for my job.

When I learned to type, two spaces were expected at the end of a sentence. These days, with proportional spaced fonts and all, many are saying that one space is not only sufficient, but is superior (I don't want to continue the debate here, use msn search if you want to see the arguments).

Now, I have a problem. I actually agree with the one-space theorists. For those of you keeping track, however, you'll notice two spaces at the end of every sentence in this post (and every other post) of mine. How can I teach myself to only use one space at the end of a sentence?

Interlude: Random bits

alanpa — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 10:38:00 GMT

Ever have one of those periods of time where you work your butt off all day long and at the end of the day realize you barely made a dent in the backlog of work that has to be done "asap"? That was the last two days for me.

My wife was generous enough to offer to take care of both kids on Sunday to give me time to catch up on my backlog at work. I had a soccer game at 2:45, but I got to work about 9:30 to try to get through as much backlog as I could before my game. I sat down, made a list, and started working - next thing I knew, it was 2:30, and I was almost late to my game.

On a related (and random) note, on my last dentist visit, I was told that I had 3 cracked teeth. My dentist informed me that while the cracked teeth generally break when eating, it's the clenching of the teeth that ineveitably cause the cracks (I've had 3 other teeth break on me). We've discussed a bite guard for sleeping, and I'll probably go that route. In the meantime, I've tried to pay a lot of attention to my jaw to see if I realize when I'm clenching or grinding my teeth. As I was leaving the office sunday, I noticed that my jaw was aching, and that I had been clenching for hours. I guess I'm glad that Microsoft has a decent dental plan.

Monday (today) was filled with 3 hours of teaching, followed by 3 hours of meetings in 3 different buildings over a 4 hour stretch. After work I drove to Port Orchard and back to drop the oldest off at his grandparents. Tomorrow I have another 6 hours of meetings and 2 doc submissions due. Wednesday, I'm sleeping in.

I'm not complaining - although it's not always like this, I do love to work hard, and enjoy the challenge of digging myself out from under a humongous pile of work. Once I see the light, I'll finish up the QA vs. Testing series.

This is not an excuse

alanpa — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 01:06:00 GMT

I wanted to reflect a bit on why my posting has dropped off so much since I changed positions at Microsoft. I'm not convinced that my postings will become more regular while I'm in this position, but on the other hand, I don't see why they shouldn't.

I think the main differences between my current group and MED are 1) MED (or any product group) is externally customer focused, and 2) I was more isolated, and felt there were more things I could talk about publically. As I type this, I realize that the second point is complete bunk. Although I do have access to a bit more "privileged information", there's very little of that information that would even be worth talking about in a public forum. In my current group, the "customers" are Microsoft folks - who I assume some of my readers are anyway, so why not keep on writing about things relevant to my job...or would that make more sense on an internal blog site? I dunno - something for me to figure out. I think any inibitions on what I could talk about are purely self imposed and unfounded.

I'll see what I can figure out and try to post again soon.