I am getting some acquaintance with the trade of professional testing; it is just amazing how far were my previous testing notions from the state of the art in such a profession.

Again, pillars from that trade like Glenford J. Myers and Cem Kaner help me to open my eyes.

For instance, in Lessons Learned in Software Testing by Cem Kaner, James Bach, Bret Pettichord, they said testing is applied epistemology; that is a very intense, deep in meaning and very compelling statement.

Very good article in IEEE Software January/Februry 2006 magazine:

Looking for Powerful Abstractions by Rebecca J. Wirfs-Brock

'Finding the right level of abstraction
takes practice and experimentation.
There are times when both concrete
classes and their common abstraction
add value to a design, and there are
times when they don’t. To find good
classes, experienced designers make
distinctions based on significant behavior
differences.'

There are words and phrases from experienced people in our industry of software design and programming that just feel right, it is like they are describing a higher level of truth I need to aspire.

Another example from How do we tell truths that might hurt?:

'Besides a mathematical inclination,
an exceptionally good mastery
of one's native tongue
is the most vital asset of
a competent programmer' -Edsger W. Dijkstra

That is a reason why these people are pillars of our trade.

• Upgraded to ExpressionEngine 1.4.2
• Deleted the ability to phone stories in - no one had used it and it was costing me $5/mo.
• Reimplemented the navigation tabs to be bigger and centered
• Pulled the first 100 words or so of the latest story to the home page.
• Pulled recent comments to the home page and other 'non-story pages'
• Changed most of the list icons, and added other icons from the Silk Icons set
• Added a 'social bookmark this story' link that allows people to submit the story to different social bookmarking sites.

• FAQ/Help Section with guidance on what to write, how to write, etc
• Author 'badge' - a graphic for story authors to post on their own site (since most seem to be bloggers as well).
• Print style sheet

Looking at Alexa, we can definitely see a trend:

Alexa might be contested, however. And, speaking of trends, Google Trends tells us a similar thing, this time with respect to Google search volume:

slashdot    digg   

Remember the days when 'getting Slashdotted' was every sysadmin's worst nightmare? Referrals from the 'News for Nerds' website would send so much traffic to websites that many crashed. But for those that survived the flood, it was the online equivalent of a papal benediction. Today, the buzz has moved elsewhere. Slashdot's editor-driven story selection model is being supplanted by user-generated systems such as Digg. According to recent Alexa data, Digg already has more daily reach and generates more page views than Slashdot. Malda knows his subject, and he's a good editor, but in the end, he's just no match for the power of the multitudes.

To its credit, Slashdot ran this item, filing it in the 'ouch-that-hurts' department.
read more:

If you like keeping an eye on how your site is doing in various areas you probably already use tools like the W3C's validator services and Alexa's Traffic Rankings, just to mention a few. But there are many other tools and services that let you study interesting trends, statistics, and technical facts for your site. In fact there are so many that it's hard to keep track of all of them, which is where The Scrutinizer comes in handy.

The Scrutinizer was created by Rosano Coutinho and is a service that allows you to analyze, assess and validate any link using various tools and testers on the web.

I spent some time having fun by feeding the URL of this site to most of the services The Scrutinizer links to. The actual value of several services is questionable, and a couple unfortunately seem to be defunct. Of the services that were new to me, my favourite is UrlTrends, which displays ranking and link popularity trends for a page.

Do you know of any other useful online tools or testers?

Add this to del.icio.us, Digg this, or Seed this. Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites.

Posted in:

• Quicklinks
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Web Standards

I'm writing this afternoon from the shore of Lake Keowee, an incredibly beautiful man-made lake in South Carolina.

Also on the water's edge: Oconee Nuclear Station, a massive three-reactor nuclear plant that needed the 18,500-acre lake as a source of cooling water. I haven't figured out yet whether I'm downwind.

I spent some time yesterday in a ginormous lakefront home, one of many I've seen here that appears newly built. The area -- not far from Clemson University -- contains some of the most expensive real estate in the state, which makes me wonder whether catastrophic nuclear disaster that renders the region uninhabitable for decades is one of the risks a realtor is expected to disclose. The plant went online in the early '70s with the same reactors as Three Mile Island. The lake flows atop a historic British fort and sacred Cherokee sites and was originally promoted by community leaders under the slogan 'Oconee: Arrowheads to Atoms.'

The people who live here 'have developed an easy peace with the plant,' according to one media account:

'We realize that it's here, and we know that there's always potential risk, but we also ride Harleys and there's a risk involved in that,' said Kenneth Klein, 58, who moved to Lake Keowee in 2003 from Ohio.

Velvet Turman shares her sunset views on Lake Keowee with a sidedoor shot of the Oconee Nuclear Station.

Since moving to the lake four years ago, she says she's made peace with the plant knowing she is downwind and out of luck if something were to happen.

'It's in the back of my mind,' said Turman. 'You have a plan in your mind of what you're going to do if something happens, but you just cannot live that way. You just look at the lake -- it's beautiful -- and just go on.'

I don't ride Harleys, but as I sit here and weigh the picturesque natural setting against the risk we might need to flee in terror at a moment's notice to avoid certain doom, I'm tempted to think it's a fair trade.
read more:

This picture was taken on Saturday in Titusville, Florida. If you look closely, you'll see the space shuttle not taking off in the background as thousands of people watch with excited anticipation along the banks of the Indian River, 19 miles across the water from the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center.

I'm standing in a field on U.S. 1 just south of the Miracle City Mall, which the Unofficial Space Shuttle Launch Guide recommends as one of the best places to not see the shuttle take off:

If you can't get a launch pass I suggest you come to Titusville. Go east on State Road 50 from I-95, to US-1. Go north on US-1 to the 'Miracle City Mall' at Harrison. Park somewhere north of this spot. Anywhere north along highway 1, or east (as far as you can) along highway 406 (402) is good (specifically Sand Point Park), just as long as you can see the VAB and don't have trees blocking the view.

Because another disaster would mean the end of the program, I dragged the kids on one of those 'memory of a lifetime' moments when parents force their children to enjoy something under protest, like the time in 1981 my siblings and I were subjected to a live performance of the Gatlin Brothers.

Traffic was horrible on Interstate 95 between the scheduled launch, the Pepsi 400 race in Daytona and July 4 weekend vacationers. After the shuttle was declared a no-go because of gathering storm clouds, the three-mile drive back out of Titusville took an hour.

The family will never forget the time we spent six hours in the car to stand spend 45 minutes in a weed-filled vacant lot.

On Sunday, we saw the launch from Butler Beach south of St. Augustine, which looked like a lot like this picture from Canova Beach to the south of the cape. This was a thrilling experience that left hundreds of beachgoers awestruck -- especially if miraculous feats of human engineering make you weepy.

But next time around, I'm going to get close enough for the launch to shake loose a few fillings.
read more:

This phone has brought web access to a remote South Carolina campground and now the interstate highway system, leaving the bathroom as my last safe haven from total connectivity.

The SPH-A920 connects to the laptop's USB port and acts like a dial-up modem, requiring a call to one of my ISP's access numbers. The claimed speed of 230.4 Kbps seems like wishful thinking -- I'm getting one page load of web traffic per half-mile, and the connection dropped a few times as we zoomed through the Sumter National Forest. But the phone was fast enough for me to read the news and update the Drudge Retort.

When I first attempted to hook up the modem, Windows XP wouldn't install it without a driver. Sprint didn't include a CD and there weren't any A920 drivers available from the Sprint or Samsung support sites. The problem was fixed when I ran Connection Manager for Sprint PCS, a free download that installed the driver after a reboot while the phone was disconnected.

I routinely drop phones on hard surfaces, so without Sprint's blog-swag program I wouldn't have tried an expensive phone that offers live TV, music downloads, games, a camera and decent web access. After using this one on the road, I'm sweating the prospect of my free review period ending in a matter of days.

If I can't resist the urge to take the phone to the bathroom, I won't provide such a high-resolution photograph.
read more:

Linux and filesystem experts, I need your help. A while back, I started looking at installing Ubuntu after discussing various options with Stuart Langridge. I've subsequently burned 3 different releases of said OS to DVD, up to and including the latest 6.06 LTS x64 version. Playing with the live CD on a few occassions has convinced me that it is the right idea: it's a tidy little Linux distro that gets out of your way until you want to really start messing around with it. I have not, however, installed it yet for two reasons. Primarily, it has taken me a fair amount of time to investigate everything I needed to know about Ubuntu before being happy with it, making sure I've thought through any potential problems. I'm glad I did that because I've hit a real problem, which brings me to my second reason.

My computer is an AMD64x2 based machine with two 200Gb SATA drives, both of which were formatted as NTFS volumes. The first of those is the boot drive, which contains installed programs and games and has almost 125Gb free. The secondary drive is my data drive, containing video, music, pictures, websites and a whole load of other application data I don't want to lose. It is full, give or take a few gigs.

The problem is the data drive. I want a volume that I can read and write from either windows or linux (Mac support would be nice, but not essential) but, as the drive is NTFS, the linux support is poor for writing and this is data I don't want to lose. I've been giving it some thought and have a few ideas:

1. Long, bitty migration. I could offload a good chunk of the data drive to the non-data drive, create a new partition on the data drive (in the new freespace) with a better filesystem (whiche one), migrate the data back to that partition, and repeat with the other section. This strikes me as potentially messy.
2. The Linux-NTFS project. Although they now have NTFS support, it's at the expense of 'speed and stability'. I don't know if that's a worthwhile trade-off.
3. Checking out NTFS for linux. I'd be willing to pay for the software if it safely met my needs, but I am not sure it will.

Of course, those options all miss a key point: the data drive is absolutely full. I will need more space at some point though the largely free non-data drive can be used for now, so this might be a perfect opportunity. I think (though I am not sure) my motherboard, an Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe, only has two SATA slots and that makes just shoving in another disk tricky. So I'm also looking towards NAS solutions:

1. Buying a NAS box from Infrant. It's quite a cost up front to get even a diskless NAS box, but it's the sort of investment that might be worth it. While I'm wary that nothing will be compatible forever, an ethernet-accessed blackbox with upgradeable firmware seems like a safe bet for at least the medium term. Cost might be an issue, but I'm also not sure about all the access issues. Presumably it uses some standard access protocol (Samba-based most likely), but it's been a while since I have looked at the issues around network storage.
2. Build my own NAS box based on FreeNAS. This would be a fun little project, but I'm not sure it would be any cheaper than buying a more sophisticated box given a) the cost of components, b) time taken, c) reliability, d) feature set, and e) lifespan.

So, gentle readers, have I missed an obvious or better option? Do these options look good? Which is best? Are they problems I have overlooked? All comments and suggestions welcome.

An update, at last! :-P

Anyway. Last weekend Jen and I went with some friends to see Over The Hedge. Jen and I both had qualms about seeing it; from the trailers, we both expected it to be not-very-good. We were wrong. It was said afterwards that it’s the best animated movie Dreamworks has made; better than Shrek, and while I don’t know that I’d necessarily give either the nudge myself, OTH is definitely a worthwhile viewing experience. The Grand Theft Auto sequence in particular is awesome, as is the movie version of Ben Folds’ “Rockin’ the Suburbs”. And stay through the credits—it’s worth it (partially because the end credits themselves are well-done and interesting), unlike the ending of X-Men 3.

I also watched the first part of Robots this week. Despite the program guide’s generous four star rating, I found it completely uncompelling and deleted it after about twenty minutes. I, Robot, on the other hand, was entertaining if not particularly thought-provoking. It’s Will Smith, what do you want? ;) Constantine was not terrible, for a comic-book movie. If I see it in the $5 bargain bin at Wal-Mart, I might pick it up. I’m a sucker for storylines involving an eternal war between Heaven and Hell with humans as proxy combatants, though. Tomorrow should result in Resident Evil: Apocalypse (which I had watched approximately half an hour of, while programming on a laptop in a client’s home at my previous job) as well as The Maltese Falcon (which I’ve never seen, but I like noir and Bogart, so…) and even more excitingly, the first episode of the new season of Deadwood. I’ve missed Al Swearengen’s poetical utterances, truly I have. I find it interesting that Robots was something I deliberately Tivoed, while I, Robot was a Tivo Suggestion—I submit to you that perhaps the Tivo knows me better than I know myself. Of course, it also recorded Prince William and Hide and Seek—so perhaps not, after all.

This week we also moved Jenny to College Station for the next two months, more or less. Which isn’t much fun. I have plenty to keep me busy, including lots of work stuff (enough that I worked for a few hours today, which is not usual for me at all) and yet more home improvement Activities™, but I am accustomed to intense Jeopardy duels, and it takes all the fun out of an entire category devoted to the Oz books (not the movie!) if Jen’s not here. :-P

Our parents banded together and gave us an anniversary present of a digital camcorder (for obvious reasons), so if I can manage to lay hands on a DV cassette sometime soon perhaps I will encourage the pets to do goofy things I can put on the site. Or something. I dunno. It seems like a wonderful piece of equipment, though; I can understand why people do things like this or this, when digital film technology is so accessible. I even know a few people who I’m sure would be happy to be extras in a Firefly fanfic… ;)

The hockey draft was this last week as well. One of the players from my spring team is a captain in the summer league, and had intended to try to keep the team together as much as possible. This is complicated by the fact that aside from himself, he only gets to “protect” a single player, and further by the fact that three of our players got drafted into the next league up (including my defensive partner, all unwitting). Still and all, it looks like the core is there, and it should be fun regardless. I got a little bit of an ego boost when I found out that apparently I was selected in either the third or fourth round of the draft, which seems fairly early for someone in their second season. Not that any OHL or NHL scouts are likely to be darkening my door anytime soon. And it’s only a small ego boost, as I can depend on Jenny for a realistic (by which I mean occasionally depressing ;)) appraisal of my “mad hockey skillz”, as it were.

This weekend’s project, aside from “entertaining the dogs” (via early morning trip to the dog park) and “dealing with crunch time” (viz., working today) is “cleaning the garage”. Anyone who has lived in a house with a garage for more than ten minutes knows precisely what I mean by that. :)

Last night I had a bout of insomnia, and ended up out on the hammock in the back yard at about 2am. It’s worth noting that, by 2am, the mosquitos appear to have quit for the day and, in June in Austin, the temperature is literally perfect. I almost slept out there, but it on further reflection I supposed that to be a bad idea and merely enjoyed it until I felt sleepy. :)

A final thought: reading the Baroque Cycle sure does turn me into a wordy son of a gun, doesn’t it?

Though Armstrong's message board postings related to Bluepoint are no longer available on Raging Bull, I found dozens of messages on the InvestorsHub site in which he promoted a related company before a merger, never revealing he was issued 25,000 shares in the deal.

An SEC filing reveals that Armstrong received the shares in a reverse merger executed by the Chinese wireless startup AccessTel, which acquired a publicly traded online mall called Shopss.Com on Dec. 18, 2000.

From September 2000 to March 2002, Armstrong posted 95 messages using the account myDDdotcom on AccessTel's InvestorsHub board. He predicted great potential for its technology and a big increase in price, deriding critics as 'bashers.' He never mentioned his relationship with the company, which was formed by some of the same executives who created Bluepoint.

On the same day as the merger, Armstrong announced that he had just bought 250 shares of the company:

... i did DD call quite a bit this weekend, and am satisfied to continue holding, patient for their plan to become widely known. Today I just bought a whopping 250 shares in my son's (Jackson) educational IRA that I just set up for the toddler, hope it grows as much as he is.

Before Armstrong's SEC case went to court, he reached a December 2003 agreement with the commission to provide testimony in related investigations and never engage in stock touting. He did not admit guilt but is prohibited from denying the charges:

Defendant agrees (i) not to take any action or to make or permit to be made any public statement denying, directly or indirectly, any allegation in the complaint or creating the impression that the complaint is without factual basis ...

The agreement makes it unlikely that Armstrong will eventually 'go on the offensive' to answer these charges, as Daily Kos founder (and business partner) Markos Moulitsas asserted last week in a private mailing list post to liberal bloggers. If Armstrong does, even through intermediaries, it'll reopen the case against him.

The SEC's suit alleged that he touted Bluepoint on Raging Bull when it began to trade publicly in March 2000, receiving stock in three companies at below-market prices. He made at least $20,000 selling the shares, the commission estimated, and none of his posts revealed that he was being compensated.

Armstrong denied the allegations in an August 2003 court filing, but his denial confirmed that he was posting on Raging Bull about Bluepoint while he had a financial relationship with company insiders Michael Markow and Francois Goelo:

Armstrong recalls that at least one of the three stocks under question was bought at above the market price. ... Armstrong does not know the specific amount he gained from selling the shares of three securities in question that he purchased from 'Markow and Goelo.'

Markow operated Global Guarantee Corporation, a company that received 1.5 million shares in the AccessTel merger.

Bluepoint has gone out of business. The company laid off all employees in 2005 after an aborted attempt to develop Linux software for the car industry and exists today as an empty shell hoping for a merger. 'As of December 31, 2005, the only asset the Company owned was cash of US$514,' its annual report states.

Shares of AccessTel are worth seven-tenths of a cent now, down from around $1.25 at the time of the merger. The New Jersey company has left the wireless business and sells ladies pantyhose manufactured in Lebanon.

In an October 1, 2000, posting on InvestorsHub, Armstrong said that SEC enforcement of messages on an over-the-counter message board was extremely unlikely:

The only thing anyone ever gets nailed for in the OTC is deliberately and misleadingly pumping to dump, anything other than that is just too ordinary for the SEC to bother.