Rob Villahermosa's WebLog : Random Thoughts

BlackBox Testing

robvi — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 03:46:00 GMT

Today I attended the Microsoft Research Group's Techfest. It's like a giant science fair for the folk over in MS Research to strut their stuff and show us blue badges the latest and greatest in the world of technology. Anyways, I can't say much other than I was VERY impressed.

In particular, a lecture by Colin Campbell from the Foundations of Software Engineering group was particularly interesting.(http://research.microsoft.com/foundations/) One of the often forgotten areas of research is that of formal software testing practices. I'm sure that everyone out there who's been through Electrical Engineering/Digital Electronics 101 courses knows about finite state machines and how you can model event driven scenarios as as set of transitions between various states. In fact, I remember an interview question somewhere in which I was asked to model a Pop machine as an FSM in order to test it. Anyways, the basis of using this model for testing comes from a language called ASML (Abstract State Machine Language). The idea is that ASML provides a way to communicate a design non-ambiguosly, and that you can identify the behaviours of your component and generate tests from this specification.

Check out the free download: http://research.microsoft.com/fse/asml/ Cool stuff, eh?

This post is stated “as is” and confers no warrantees and guarantees no rights.

XML and my heartrate monitor info...

robvi — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 08:51:00 GMT

So, one of my passions in life outside of work is riding bicycles. I currently have 2 bikes - one is a 2002 Cannondale 900 SL, and the other is a 2000 LiteSpeed Ultimate. The Cannondale 900 SL is actually a replacement for my beloved Killer V 900 which I raced on through college but was unfortunately stolen from my balcony last year :(

Anyways, to get down to the technical part of this post... I started training with a heartrate monitor about 2 years ago. It's a Polar 710. It kinda sucks that I have to use the Polar Software to do everything, because I think it'd be pretty cool to be able to store that data to Pocket PC's, watch computers, and other electronic toys that don't exactly run the Polar Software. Well, .I took a look at the format they're using to store data. It's pretty much straight text - there are the recording parameters at the beginning of the file, but then after that it's the periodic data that the monitor takes every time it does a reading.

I'm going to munge all this into a nice XML file so I can then feed it to other programs for consumption. Hehe, isn't technology great? It can make you faster biker...

Why Compat, when there's Side by Side?

robvi — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 06:11:00 GMT

I used to (and still do) play computer games. I remember playing this flight simulator game as a kid on Windows 3.x which I totally loved. I used to think about playing it at school and couldn't wait to get home just so I could sit my arse down and shoot down attacking cat-alien beings. Anyways, I installed some poker game one day and it apparently copied over some newer .dll's that my beloved flight sim needed and everything broke. That stunk. Well, side by side seems to be a solution to this - just allow multiple versions of libraries to exist simultaneously and you'll never hit this “.dll hell” problem.

This is a great idea, but we often forget that there are drawbacks. First, what if a new FX version has significant perf improvements? It would suck if your app couldn't take advantage of this especially if there were no changes that would break its functionality. Second, if you want to run against one and only one version of the FX what happens if someone doesn't have that version and doesn't want to install it? Here's a scenario - you have this managed app that doesn't ship with the redist on its CD, but your laptop has a newer FX version installed. You're sitting in a hotel room in TimBuk2 and they only happen to have dial-up 'net access that's sporadic at best. It would smell like old cheese to have to download the redist before running the app. Wouldn't it be great to just have it work on the newer FX?

I could go on and on about this, but the truth is simple. Though side-by-side is an important concept and can be a solution in some scenarios, the need for compatibility going forward is great. I'm glad I can be part of this, it's a huge problem and we're on the forefront of trying to solve it.

Anyways, that's it for today's rant. I'm going to eat sushi over in Redmond Town Center now as it's my friend's bday and on your bday you get to eat free. They have lots of tuna there everytime I go and it's always pink and fresh. Mmmmm... tuna ;)

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.