Chinese comment spammers win
May 25, 2009
Unfortunately, you won’t be able to post a comment until I summon the energy to move my blog to something that has adequate anti-spam controls. Feel free to email me your thoughts if I post anything comment-worthy in the meantime. 150 spam comments in a day is just a bit much.
Tools for simulating slow and low bandwidth connections
May 4, 2009
I needed to do some page-weight testing on a new site, and found these handy plugins at http://www.uselessapplications.com IEThrottle is the Internet Explorer version, and Firefox Throttle is, unsurprisngly, the Firefox version. In Internet Explorer, for me at least, the plugin was hidden in the IE 7 tab bar, next to tools: In Firefox, you’ll […]
The Onion predicts the future once again!
February 4, 2009
The Onion shows off their systems-thinking skills once more. Compare this article on predictive sentence completion with The Onion’s Mac Wheel features at around the one minute mark in the video at http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary. Other clairvoyant articles are here and here. Find your own here.
My diabolical problem becomes simply a wicked one
October 28, 2008
I spent ages recently googling for references to ‘Diabolical Problems’, about which I thought I had read. Thanks to Matt Heusser’s latest post, I now know I should have instead been googling for Wicked Problems. Just in case I’ve sent anyone off on the same wild goose chase, this post should set them straight. For […]
Claims testing in the wild
October 2, 2008
As yet another poor internet soul is scammed by a man pretending to be a woman in online chat rooms, I’m reminded of the sensibility of my number one internet heuristic. Jared’s first law of online safety is ‘Assume that everyone you are talking to online is a man’. This has held me in good […]
Odd Asian fascinations and self-study resources
September 18, 2008
I don’t normally like to mix up entertainment with the software posts, but this one does have a vague relationship to the ‘Puppy poo’ story. It also invokes the PC Engine game of yore, ‘Toilet kids’. And it’s a nice interactive flash animation. Sit back, relax, and enjoy Kkukku and Yaya in ‘ppung ppung ppung […]
Requirements and specifications: What's the difference and what's it to you?
September 16, 2008
There have been a number of threads I have followed in a few different forums recently where people have discussed requirements, what it means for requirements to be ‘good’, and what it might mean for requirements to be unambiguous. What usually follows is a long-winded back and forth, with no resolution. At the heart of […]
It's a good thing I saved this in my Amazon wishlist…
August 21, 2008
Otherwise, I might not be able to remember to buy it later.
Test for Project Risk
August 19, 2008
An excellent quote from our development lead, James Ladd: How to test a project might be risky – – It has people in it. Thanks to James Bach for inspring this!
A first step toward saying what we mean when we say "Automated testing"
July 27, 2008
“In the universe, nothing can be said to be automatic, as nothing can be said to be without design. An imperfect parallel may be found in human inventions; springs may move springs, and wheels, indexes; but the motion and the regulation must be derived from the artist;” From Elements of Chemical Philosophy Part 1, Vol.1 […]