Steve Rowe's Blog - All Comments

re: Steve Jobs on the Value of Saying No

Yogesh — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 11:20:15 GMT

Hi my name is yogesh kumar. I like this blog website. I say thanks to that person who made this

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re: Pruning the Decision Tree in Test

Deepa — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 18:52:28 GMT

very useful blog. Makes lot of sense in practicality.

re: Listening to the team

Mark S — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 21:22:43 GMT

www.dilbert.com/.../2009-08-12

re: Steve Jobs on the Value of Saying No

mohad hussein — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 05:56:19 GMT

one day you will look back over all that you did in this life and you will die with laughter surround your self with light everyday

re: Steve Jobs on the Value of Saying No

Mike Borozdin — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 02:15:59 GMT

Great post Steve! It's also great that this is posted on MSDN. MS definitely needs some creative destruction and also more products to focus on customers first. It's great that they still got folks like you in there!

re: Pruning the Decision Tree in Test

tree pruning — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 07:37:53 GMT

Indeed a very nice post. I do lot of netsurfing for finding the key information on trees and forests. I just came across your blog and has subscribed with a wish that you will be posting good posts like this over the coming days. Thank You.

re: Pruning the Decision Tree in Test

Mark S — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:28:09 GMT

Speaking of servicing:

* Always test your auto-update functionality (and make sure it's bulletproof)!

* Testing your failure/error reporting is almost equally important

re: Pruning the Decision Tree

Mark S — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:25:01 GMT

Here was a post by Raymond on this topic, vis-a-vis shipping:

blogs.msdn.com/.../1922203.aspx

re: How much did Steve Jobs Mean To the Tech Industry?

Jim — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:16:04 GMT

If it were not for Steve Jobs (and Steve Wozniak) I probably would not have had a career in computers. I am of the generation that grew up with the rise of the personal computer. I started toying around with them in 1979. Started my career in software development in 1987 and have been going since.

RIP Steve Jobs, you were truely the Thomas Edison of your generation.

re: Listening to the team

Mike Borozdin — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 20:36:05 GMT

nice post Steve!

100% agree that the job of the manager is to allow amazing people to an amazing job. I have not met a lot of people in software who are no passionate about shipping a great product. When the team says it can't be done - most likely its because it really can't.

re: Follow my adventures at //build/

Maurits [MSFT] — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 18:56:27 GMT

Although Twitter displays the link as you entered it, clicking on it doesn't take you there; http://twitter.com/@steverowe will work.

re: The Sidebar is Back!

Eman — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 20:43:10 GMT

I want the "back-one directory" button (the folder with a green arrow pointing up). Made browsing my C drive WAY easier.

re: The Sidebar is Back!

Mark Sowul — Wed, 12 May 2010 17:00:27 GMT

You can also just copy the old Program Files\Windows Sidebar from Vista.

Now if we could just get the Windows Media Player deskband back...

re: Resume Advice: List Your Classes and Projects

Mikey — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:11:29 GMT

OS Development is rough I bet Wish I became a better coder than I am.

<a href="http://forexrobotsadvisor.com/fapturbo-review/">Were to Get Fabturbo</a>

re: The Complexity Hammer

hiryu — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 13:46:10 GMT

I agree with jonathan opinion about this article Jonathan what you meant by memoization is it suppose to be memorization or something else?

re: Resume Advice: List Your Classes and Projects

Mike Borozdin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:25:30 GMT

Absolutely agreed! UW CS&E put us through some really relevant projects that are key for Devs and Testers. OS Development, Languages, Databases... that information on the resume speaks volumes about someone's aptitude for a particular job. It also speaks volumes about their interest in computers. For example I took databases, OS, languages which shows that I am more interested in hands on coding and applications. Some people liked set theory, turing machines and applied math - they would be great researches. A third group of people took circuit design and robotics and they would probably be great in hardware or low level drivers.

re: Pass Rates Don’t Matter

Maurits [MSFT] — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 21:44:05 GMT

"Failing cases can mask real failures"

I love that sentence.

re: Pass Rates Don’t Matter

Andrew — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 20:22:13 GMT

Indeed. Too many people forget that the reason why we test software is to gain knowledge about the state of the product. The purpose of testing isn't to find bugs or even to raise the quality of the product, it's to obtain information about the product. What we do with that information can affect the quality of a product but in and of itself testing has no bearing on product quality.

With that frame of mind pass rates are only of interest if, as you say, failures are masking the ability to obtain accurate information about the product (i.e. preventing other tests from running).

re: The Complexity Hammer

Jonathan — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 03:45:44 GMT

To me, factors that would impact on how well someone goes on a task like this would be:

* problem solving skills

* level of nervousness

The interviewee that has well developed problem solving skills may be helped secondarily by having the confidence to sit back and think about it, and conversely, a nervous interviewee probably won't have that confidence.

I've noticed that "sitting back and thinking about it" can't be done (well) in front of the computer, or at least, not while using the computer, because it seems to bring the thought levels down to details and pixels, not concepts and possibilities.

Also, I came across some brain fitness research (can't recall the link, sorry) which relates to how well they deal with the solution being wrong. Basically, when someone is afraid (read "nervous") or tired, and fails at something, they tend to retry the same or similar solutions - thus getting stuck in a rut. This can be applied to life, and gives me some food for thought - I think it has been picked up by some self-help book authors too.

But also, and slightly off on a tangent, relating more to my previous post, what may also affect the outcome is how well they know the language/tools, and thus how well they can match the problem (or sub-problems) to existing solutions. For example, regarding optimization, because of the way it is written, the lisp solution above is amenable to memoization.

re: The Complexity Hammer

Jonathan — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 11:41:18 GMT

A bit OT, and it's probably unreadable, but it came to me as I read your post. It loops a total of 557 times, but also uses recursion. Perhaps it will stimulate discussion :).

>(defun make-change (&optional (amount 100) (coins (list 25 10 5 1)))

> (when coins

> (if (cdr coins)

> (iter (for i from 0)

> (for remains downfrom amount by (car coins))

> (while (>= remains 0))

> (appending (mapcar (curry #'cons i)

> (make-change remains (cdr coins)))))

> (if (zerop (mod amount (car coins)))

> (list (list (/ amount (car coins))))))))

re: The Complexity Hammer

SteveRowe — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:55:49 GMT

@Chad/Rick. Good catch. I'll change it.

re: The Complexity Hammer

Chad — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:14:25 GMT

@Rick, the equality test in BetterMakeChange() should be with 100:

if (100 == (quarters*25 + dimes*10 + nickles*5 + pennies)) print…;

re: The Complexity Hammer

Rick — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:33:58 GMT

In BetterMakeChange(), the if check only evaluates to true on the first pass through, when the change for a dollar is 0 quarters, 0 dimes, 0 nickels, and 0 pennies.

re: The Complexity Hammer

SteveRowe — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:59:29 GMT

As I said at the bottom of the post, this is meant to demonstrate a way of solving problems that is often indicative of a broader pattern. Don't get hung up on the specifics of the implementation. The fact that there are hard coded constants is because it makes reading simple for this example. The penny loop isn't optimized away either and it doesn't abort when the total is too high mid-loop. This is to demonstrate a point, it's not how I would advocate writing such a program.

@Mike, how do you enumerate all ways of making change without a loop?

re: The Complexity Hammer

Maurits [MSFT] — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:27:15 GMT

Some free complexity analysis: the stateless example makes the "is the total accurate" comparison (4 + 1) * (10 + 1) * (20 + 1) * (100 + 1) = 116,655 times.

By comparison, the stateful version makes the comparison 6,962 times (I calculated this by incrementing a global every time the comparison was executed. I an not aware of s a way to calculate this elegantly.)