Automated Testing and the Mayan Apocalypse

Odd idea that popped out of a conversation yesterday. What if the trend towards test driven development and behavior driven development is a harbinger of the apocalypse? Automated testing could be a first step toward machine self-awareness if it were married with self-modifying code. Genetic algoritms could optimize themselves towards the specified tests and behavior, but what happens when the self-modifying code creeps into the tests (which are, after all, just more code)?

I think you get an increasing rate of accelerated change leading to Skynet launching the nukes in 2012, just in time for the Mayan calendar to be right about the end of the world.

Dr. Horrible is Fantastic

Thank goodness that Saturday on the east coast starts around 9pm on the west coast. Didn't have to wait until tomorrow to see Act III of Dr. Horrible. Recommended is not strong enough of a word. Go watch one, two and three RIGHT NOW BEFORE THEY DISAPPEAR ON SUNDAY AND YOU MIGHT HAVE TO PAY FOR IT!!! (even though paying for it would probably be a good thing because it would encourage more things like it through the action of the free market blah blah blah)

All My Hate Is Washed Away

I was kind of miffed at Yahoo last time I wrote here. Then I found this:



I laughed uproariously. Can't wait until tomorrow. Must remember to watch part III tomorrow!

Many many thanks to the folks at io9 for passing along this gem.

Yahoo has made me angry

Well, maybe not out-and-out angry, but seriously peeved. They've been periodically threatening me with switching my MyYahoo account to some newfangled ajaxy home page. My experience with it so far is that it's slower and shinier at the expense of just putting the text I want on the page in front of me.

The latest assault of trying to force me to use it happened this morning. I tried to go to the /switch URL that has worked in the past, and that failed. I did go to the 'switch back?' page, but when I clicked on the button to switch back, I still had the new UI. I noticed a link at the bottom of the new home page for switching back, and even when I clicked on that, it still failed and left me with the new home page.

Very Annoying(tm).

It's getting to the point where I'm about to switch everything over to gmail and igoogle. Google's creeping me out a little, lately, though. It's all free to use, but maybe the price is too high <backgroundmusic type='ominous'/>.

New Widget and A Shout Out

The new widget on the left is a thingy that shows where people come from when they come in a look at my ramblings. I found it on Joel Mier's blog, Think For A Moment.

He'd posted a commentary about Netflix's recent reversal on the 'kill profiles' issue. As always, well reasoned and articulately stated commentary. Miss ya, Joel. Hope all's well.

Puppet Sex

I was just watching "Team America: World Police" on the Roku box. Didn't get all the way through it, because the kids came home and that movie is FILTHY! Can't say that I wasn't chuckling along like some kind of adolescent. However, there's a reasonably explict sex scene that had me rolling. You haven't seen anything until you've seen marionettes... er... 'engaged'.

Otherwise, the movie is reasonably entertaining. Not a classic, by any means, but the irreverence, inappropriateness and general bad-boy-ness you'd expect from Parker & Stone is all there in spades.

Ongoing Changes

Minor milestones this morning.

1. Eloise rode without a carseat (she's not > 60 pounds, but she is six, and the shoulder strap doesn't cut into her neck)
2. Talked with the swim class people about how old Isaac needs to be for baby-and-me classes (3 months, get on the waitlist one month ahead)
3. ummm. Had a third one but forgot it (I blame sleep dep)

Anyway, feeling the flow of the currents of life today. Seems like the pace has picked up even as the length of days seems longer (for this I also assign some blame to sleep dep...)

exploring wirelessness

So as you can see on the left, I've been dumping occasional tidbits onto Twitter via my blackberry I have from work.

I'm also writing this post from said blackberry. I guess in addition to a new baby around the house, I'm getting in touch with my inner blogger.

That said, I don't generally see the attraction of leaving behind a constant stream of sound bites. It's been a cool novelty, but I don't think I have a strong enough itch for self-expression to need to scratch it that way.

Twittering a birth

I didn't think I was being particularly clever by jotting notes down about Isaac's birth via twitter. I'd just joined and was messing around.

Now I know I wasn't even being that original. Googling 'twitter pitocin' led me to finding this oldest account of twitlivery of a baby on July 15, 2007. I'm a year late to the party, it seems. Also, she's a bit hard-core. Of the other dozen odd accounts, we were all husbands, and Carmen's account was the only account from the driver's seat, so to speak.

Isaac Lorenzo Gilbert-Fagen

We settled on a middle name: Lorenzo

For those of you not following along at home, that would make the following updated thusly....
Tale of the tape:

• Name: Isaac Lorenzo Gilbert-Fagen


• Born: June 2, 2008 18:37 PDT


• Weight: 7lb 8oz


• Height: 20 1/4"


• Mom & baby: happy & healthy


• Dad: ditto

Netflix Player by Roku

I was really thrilled to hear today that people buying Roku's new set-top box for the Netflix Watch Instantly service is backordered by 10 days. Well, not so thrilled since I just ordered mine, but happy that the device is so popular.

Bacterially Generated Buckytubes

I'm a fan of the concept of a space elevator. I'd love to be able to see this technology envisioned by Arthur Clarke in the 70's become reality some time before I die. One of the biggest obstacles to the creation of the a space elevator is a breakthrough in the material science necessary to build a tether.

There are some promising bits of work being done on carbon fiber and buckytubes, but the last I heard, there were scaling problems. Sure, we can generate a fiber a few millimeters long that's strong enough, but getting from there to 100,000km is still a really big leap.

What if someone genetically engineered a bacteria that had some chlorophyll in it and had a predilection for growing a buckytube tail? Now you stick a vat in the sunlight and start pulling the thread... Voila! space elevator tether!

Did I mention that I was hiring?

I'm currently looking for three different people to fill three different jobs here at Netflix?. The first is a QA engineer for our Instant Viewing on the PC client. The second is a QA Engineer for the Netflix API team. The third is a QA Engineer for the Customer Account team.

While each of those job descriptions has a list of technical requirements, I need someone (three someones) who can understand the why of testing just as much as they understand the how of testing. A particular tool in your toolbox isn't as important as knowing how to select the right tool for the job (or even learn a new one). Likewise, having demonstrated prior experience in knowing where to apply your tools for the greatest effect is more important than any particular bit of prior experience with a particular technology.

I've been toying with a mission statement for my group:

Economically review changes in order to prevent, detect and mitigate impaired customer experiences.

If this somehow speaks to you, I'd love to hear from you what you think it means. I might want you to apply yourself to that mission.

Software Plasticity and Risk: The Search

After writing yesterday's post, I decided that it might be a good idea to take a look and see if anyone else was using plasticity in the sense that I was trying to use it, or if there was an already established notion of plasticity that I'd be swimming upstream against.

Again, my notion of plasticity is: how changeable is the system in question balanced against the cumulative risk to the business of the change itself and the risk to the business of actually making the changes.

I found a couple links via Google. The first was from a paper submitted to a 2004 conference in Hamburg, Germany. It discussed the concept of a new widget type, "the comet", that would adapt its function based on the execution context. Not exactly what I was after. The second was a link to the same paper from a different source. Then, surprisingly, the third entry was my blog post from yesterday.

In the fourth position, was a blog page that was just a click through to the real article which was actually discussing the use of aspect oriented programming (AOP) and the concept of software plasticity. In reviewing it, this appeared to be more of a discussion of how to apply AOP as a debugging tool, rather than how to build and maintain a system in the context of keeping a business running and satisfying customers.

After that it seemed to get a little random, except for a link to a PDF on UI plasticity. The article referenced by the top link continued to show up an awful lot from a bunch of different sources as well. I took a look at Yahoo search and Dogpile. Came up with the same set of stuff.

From this survey, it seems like there hasn't really been a lot of thinking published on the web about the development effects of the plastic nature of software, and especially when evaluating plasticity within the context of business risk.

I guess I'll keep flogging it and see if anything useful comes of it.

Software Plasticity and Risk

I've been toying with the concept of plasticity with respect to software. I've also been thinking about the software development process and how plasticity relates to the risks introduced by making changes to software.

Think about using a scale from 1 to 10 to describe how plastic a software product is. A one (the least plastic software product) would be a consumer electronics device where the software is embedded and it's impossible to update the software. Examples would include a portable DVD player or a digital clock radio. A ten would be something like a website (perhaps like the Netflix website or Instant Viewing PC client -- and I happen to be hiring one or two QA Engineers), where if there are defects discovered, they can be fixed quickly by pushing new code to the servers, and instantly, all users get the new code.

Then, think about the risks you run by making changes. My canonical examples to contrast the risk of changes usually go something like this:

1. We're updating the encryption key that we use to encrypt the credit cards for our members. We test this very thoroughly. The risks to the business are very large if there's a screwup and the benefits of avoiding screwups are equally large. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to invest a lot in testing.

2. We're modifying how we format the pages for different genres of movies so that boxshots are right aligned instead of left aligned. Not a lot of risk for damaging the business there. We may not even do any formal QA and leave it up to the UI engineers to make sure they get that one right.

I haven't worked out the details yet for measuring risk vs. plasticity, but I imagine some kind of matrix with plasticity across the top and different software components down the side. The intersection of each row and column would have some metric that boils down the cost to fix, the cost to deploy, the risk of change and the risk to the business. Then, during the course of normal development, or in the case of an emergency, evaluate the proposed change on those four dimensions to come up the metric for that change and compare to the matrix for where the change lies. If there's a net positive risk/reward, do the change immediately in the case of a fix to production. Likewise, if it's part of the normal development cycle, then if there's a positive risk/reward, allocate the QA resources to fully test. If there's not adequate reward for testing, or the risk to the business is low enough, dedicate the limited QA resources elsewhere in that push cycle.

Comments?

OLPC Laptops Delivered Today

I ordered two of the OLPC via the Give One Get One program. They just got delivered today.

I think that perhaps I'm more excited about them than the girls will be when I give them to them for Christmas.

I'm going to unpack and boot them up after the girls go to bed tonight to... um... make sure they work! Yeah, that's it!

More news as I have it.

----

So now, it's tomorrow morning, and I took a look at the laptops last night. They're pretty cool. They work as expected. They're not quite as peppy as I'd have hoped, but they're certainly not sluggish.

I still have to figure out how to get the wi-fi to connect to our secured WAP. I guess the answer might be in the support forum. Duh.

Well the boxes are wrapped, so I guess I'll play with wi-fi after Christmas Day.

I didn't play too much with the apps. I recorded a short video of myself. I played with the 'measure the distance between two laptops' widget. That last one made a sound that was really annoying to my wife. Might have to restrict usage of that app to outside or downstairs.

The video was kind of grainy, but sort of cool to see.

It will be interesting to see how intuitive the interface is for a relatively computer-naive child.

I guess I'll post those impressions after Eloise (6) and Lucy (4) get ahold of the machines in a couple days.

Give One Get One for "One Laptop Per Child" is in Effect

I just put in my order earlier yesterday for two laptops under the OLPC "Give One Get One" program.

I got one for each of my daughters, and I feel a little warm and fuzzy that two children I'll probably never meet will have an opportunity to explore the digital world.

Providing my own children with that opportunity for discovery made the expenditure of a couple days wages seem like a pretty good deal.

Pokerstars Blogger Tourney

I played in that this afternoon. Got about an hour into it before getting busted. I actually feel that I played fairly well. I was patient until I played my first hand that turned into the nut flush, and I managed to extract 3k where if I'd just jammed with the nuts I don't think I would have gotten the call. I also managed to get away from a hand where I'd semi-bluffed on the flop and followed through on the turn to lay it down to a big re-raise. Final hand was A8o vs A9o who was in the big blind. Couldn't think of a way that I could have gotten away from it, and am kind of surprised the other guy called. He was fond of saying 'donkey', so I expect he's a "hardened professional" and goes looking for marginal hands that he can "get sucked out on" with.

Anyway, I had a good time. Since I busted out so quickly, I was able to substitute for my wife on taking the kids to see "Ratatouille".

Side note. Firefox spell-check thinks I misspelled ratatouille. The suggested correction is "bouillabaisse". Very freaky.

Anyway, Jen was going to take care of the kids so I could play in the tourney, and part of it was to take them to this animated feature (which is her absolute least favorite genre of cinema). Since I busted out, I took the kids instead. We get about 85% of the way through. We see the false happy ending and start heading down into the reversal and Lucy starts crying that she doesn't want to watch any more. I ask Eloise if she's ok to watch the end alone if I take Lucy out into the hall to wait, and she says ok. Big mistake on my part. I take Lucy outside and get her calmed down. We start to go down the hall to the bathroom, and all of a sudden, Eloise comes screaming out of the theatre and down the hall. She's scared, doesn't want to watch any more. She's in full on screaming tears mode. She forgot her water bottle in the theater. I calm her down, everyone uses the bathroom. I go back in the theater to get the water bottle. We head home.

One good thing is that as we walk back towards the car, we discover Beard Papa's Sweet Shop. Verrrrrry tasty cream puffs. I'd heard of them from a parent at a birthday party that Eloise had gone too. Worth the trip.

It's that time of the year again

Pokerstars.com is having their annual blogger's tournament. I might as well give it a try (assuming I can talk Jen into giving me some time at noon on Oct 14).

Here's the verification stuff:

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 6402628

Another Prosper Listing

I haven't plugged anyone on Prosper for a while, but I think this listing deserves some attention. He seems like he's got his plan together and just needs a little help digging out from underneath high interest credit card debt.

As a little reminder, if you sign up through the link above and help fund his loan, both you and I will get $25.