Musings of a Software Engineer

Just like probably every other computer blog in the UK, the iPad has hit our shores… Its been over a month in waiting since it was launched in the US.  If you watch Formula One racing in the UK you will have already seen the iPad replacing good old pen and paper.  At the last GP I watched they even started showing a video on it.  Here was I thinking that the BBC wasn’t suppose to be doing product placement.

On Friday, I was in town and walking past the Apple Store I couldn’t resist a play with the fattened up iPhone.  As you would expect it looked fantastic as most Apple products do.  Looking at photos was great being able to quickly view what was inside of a folder and the speed between loading of photos was a joy.  The example iPad had a copy of the FT App which is a very well thought out app, fitting nicely to the screen size and turning the pages was great by just moving your hand across the screen.  Sadly it looked like the facebook app did not have an iPad big brother because the screen looked stretched and pixalated.  I loved that the Flight Control App had been updated for the iPad allowing to people to play at once.

So would I want one?  Well I am a geek by trade and they do look shiny and new.  I can certainly see a use for them in meetings across the world, instead of turning up with pen and paper you could use your iPad instead.  Access to email on the move around a workplace would be good as well.  The problem at the moment is they are alittle bit too expensive for what they do.  I will be interested to see if anyone comes up with a stylus and writing app so you can take notes on the iPad easier than using the touch screen keyboard.  The keyboard is good but I suspect its not as good as a nomal computer keyboard over time.  Knowing new gadgets I think waiting a few months while the leading edge people find all the nasty bugs with it and app come out with iPad 2.0 or what every they call it.

I think it might definitely be on my shopping list in the not too distant future.  Plus some of the adds on like the camera card reader are a great idea.  The iPad case that Apple sell as well looks to be well thought out and a decent price as well (£19).

Wow its been a while since I’ve posted here, so much to my good intentions of trying to post at least once a week.  Where does the time go!

This is slightly off topic, one of our local radio stations has created an iPhone app (actually saying that just about every radio station has an app now!).  But the reason that I’m writing about it is because of the way they advertise it on the radio.  If I can remember correct it goes along the lines of “now you can take nnnnnnnnn with you where ever you are, with our new iPhone app”.

Now maybe I’m getting old or something but isnt the whole point of a local radio station (broadcasting on FM) that you can take them anywhere and you dont really need an iphone to do this…..

I will admit the app is pretty good and you can email the presenters and see what is currently playing and if you like it buy it straight from iTunes.  But the tag line of now you can take nnnnnn with you seems abit odd to me.

Anyway I promise that the next post (when ever that is) will actually be a useful one rather than a strange rant about a local radio stations advertising.

So I’ve been having issues with startup time of my laptop, over the years its been getting slower and slower.  The standard thing that appears to happen with Windows Machines.  So the usual approach is to reduce the number of programs that setup when windows is initially loading, nice and easy using either msconfig or a program like spybot.

This made a difference for a while but it turns out that there is another thing that will really help with windows startup.  Something that I really really cannot believe, it turns out that on startup Windows looks through all your files and folders on your Desktop.  So if you have loads of files and lots of folders (with files within them) then windows spends most of its time looking at them.

So my question is Why?  So far I’ve not come up with an answer that I can think of to why this is a good idea.  So to everyone out there with slow machines at startup, please please check what you have on your desktop!

Slightly off topic from my usual posts about computer science and technology but I saw this in my BBC Focus Magazine and just had to post about it!  Turns out that having a beer a day is actually good for you.  The study carried out at the University of California found that the amount of Beer in silicon was good for the bones.  An average pint contains 15mg of silicon which helps to build bones and connective tissues.

So cheers to the pint I say

So the election for the UK was finally announced this week, probably the worse unannounced date!  All the media outlets have been jumping on the bandwagon with some fantastic but probably useless election tools.

The BBC for example has the election calculator where you can spend all of, well lets be honest a minute or so.  Dragging bars around to find out what could happen at the election and how much percentage each party would need to get a majority.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8609989.stm

The Guardian has something very similar plus also a daily poll that they report on with great flash graphics

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/interactive/2010/apr/06/general-election-2010-polling

The times also has the daily poll on there site as well as well as an interactive map of what could happen

http://generalelection2010.timesonline.co.uk/#/Election05/Seats_Won

Then you land on the Suns webpage and what do you get a lovely text written these are the current poll percentages!

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/election2010/2925402/Suns-daily-YouGov-election-poll-April-10.html

Bad form from the The Sun I think!

Finally probably the best of them all, are you sick of the media outlets, borrowed hearing about expenses, cannot make up your mind which one to vote for because they all sound the same.  Well votematch.org.uk is the way to decide how your votes match with the major parties.

http://www.votematch.org.uk/

Its been a heck of a week for the iPad, released just under one week ago and what a week its been.  Starting out with the hype of new videos being added to the apple website showing what the new iPad can do.  I have to admit that it does look a really good product from the videos.

Within 24 hours of its release the security had been break and online was pictures of a jail broken iPad!  Which is pretty good going to create a hack that quickly and display the iPad being connected to through telnet / ssh.  Have a look at theregister.co.uk review of this break and the pictures.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/06/ipad_security/

Following the jailbreak a couple of days later came the full information about what was under the hood of the iPad thanks to iFixit and there iPad Teardown.  I would highly recommend reading the article that they have published because its really interesting how apple manage to fit everything inside such a small case.

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-Teardown/2183/1

The CPU was also xray’d after ifixit managed to get it out of the ipad.

Sadly the week ended with alot of complaints coming in from the leading edge users with them having problems connecting to there wireless networks.  Unfortunately that was the end of the complaints, there was rumours that the ipad if left on running would run ok but over time slow down to a complete stop which does not sound good.  The final reported problems were problems sync with iTunes.

As a software tester by day its amazing that some of these faults have got out, but I can certainly understand how it happens.  Fingers crossed Apple will be on the ball and get all these problems sorted out, because the iPad does look like a great product.  Do I want one…. I think the jury is still out yet.  Will have to go to an apple store and have a play with one and see how good it is.  The iPhone has been a great product and just gets better with more apps, however there are still some things that I do not like about the way apple have stopped non-apple auth’d apps onto it.

After implementing a spam filter on my blogs a few months ago in an attempt to stop the spam comments, it seems to have worked really well in stopping all comments from everyone.  The idea of the first plugin was it asked a simple maths question of the user to ensure its a person rather than a human being.  I’m pretty sure that it was working ok, but we got an email the other day saying they couldnt post on the blog.  So after a quick check (I’m not sure what happened) but the plugin was no longer working as I would have expected.  The only thing that I can think of is that an update on wordpress itself caused it too stop working.

After a few searches on the wordpress plugin site I found a new comment spam protector and installed that and it was really simple to get it up and running.  Unfortunately for some reason when this was added to the comments forms they were put in an odd place, underneath the submit button.

So the simple install turned into updating all of the themes that I was using to ensure that it was being placed above the submit button.  I also did a quick hack on the php to remove the label that was being displayed.

Regular Expressions can be abit of a black art, I remember doing them at university many moons ago and remember being really confused by them.  I eventually got into them alot when constructing scripts for a desktop program called Samurize (probably the best program in the world).  Its been awhile since I’ve touched them (talking about 3 / 4 years! wow time really does fly!), unfortunately I needed to construct a new one for work to help us with doing some work.  It was turning into a really pain to test because it meant check-in the code to the code repository and then running the build, which would take about 10 minutes and then fail.

So after a quick google and a few tries of expression tests I found this one from RegexPlant, which was really simple to use and gave great output to understand what was going on and within a few minutes I’d found the regression expression that worked.  So thanks to regexplant for a great testing tooling.

http://www.regexplanet.com/simple/index.html

A couple of weeks back I was struggling to fix a problem with a computer network interface (that I mentioned about).  I believe it turns out that I did fix it by adding another network card.  Unfortunately it turns out my testing was not working because my DHCP server was not working correctly on my  Netgear router.

I found out the problem out when I was trying to connect a friends laptop onto my local network.  Quick reboot and low and behold the DHCP server was back up and running and dynamic IP address allocation was back working .

I was in Cambridge a couple of weeks ago and I went to the Cambridge University Press Shop.  Like a good geek I thought I would look at the Computer Science books that were available and see if there was anything of interest.  I was surprised that the shelf was so small, but then I thought most information is now more up-to-date on the Internet which kind of makes sense.  The thing that really did surprise me was that there was no books about Software processes or Testing!

By trade I’m a tester and since university I’ve had to learn quick about testing both Functional and System Testing.  Testing is always seen as the poor mans development but I really enjoy getting new functionality and seeing if its possible to break it and making the quality of the final Product the best it can be.  But surely universities should be teaching about testing in more detail and explaining to undergraduates and post graduates what its all about.  I remember my university days and I think we touched on Black box and white box testing but it was only for a couple of lectures if that!

Maybe over the coming weeks I might right about my experience of testing and about how to become a better tester.  But I would love to encourage universities to look at testing as a main part of the course.

Doing a quick google and there are loads of website with some really interesting information, here are just a couple that I spotted with a quick look:

• http://www.testingbrain.com/
• http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.6942
• http://www.softwareqatest.com/
• http://www.softwaretestingclub.com/