Rhonabwy

Courtesy of a link from Digg - a lovely cartoon from the geeks at UserFriendly:

Geek Gift prediction flowchart

While scanning my RSS feeds this afternoon, I caught the headline Traffic Shaping in Mac OS X. Very cool. I knew Dummynet support couldn’t be super far away from the Mac, but frankly I’d never looked.

When I wanted to drive a network connection down the 28.8k modem speeds, I found a POS intel box and slapped FreeBSD on it. This was all for testing purposes - it’s a lot easier to “make” a 56k modem connection than to purchase a landline these days. In fact, I wrote a fair bit about it back in June.

One of the things that came to me when I was reading Clark’s article was that making a little shell script for your Mac could make for a really quick and easy test setup if you’re developing or testing websites. You can slim down your own network connections and either host the site from your laptop, or you can do the reverse and see how your site looks from Safari or Firefox. Just remember to make a script to underdo the traffic bandwidth restrictions, or you’ll be hollering in no time.

At my last job, there were several times when I was doing some crazy network connection testing in the field and needed a backchannel. Fortunately, an iBook with a bluetooth telephone nearby made it all work when we couldn’t get the satellite link to establish.

It’s the end of saturday, and I can happily report that I haven’t done much of anything today. I shipped out a pile of Christmas packages, had some lovely green tea, and ate an awesome dinner with friends. And that is what counts as an incredible “not much of anything” day for me.

Ran across a link to Jim Getty’s blog where he’s talking about the hardware specifics associated with the OLPC project. Pretty cool - and definitely a blog to watch.

Tonight was a night to get out of the house. When I came home, Karen had clearly come down with a cold and wasn’t feeling well, which I thought would kill those plans for the night. But she sacked out really early and told me to go out anyway, so I spent most of the evening down at El Diablo, ensconced in a comfy chair and reading a science fiction book I bought next door instead of doing the journal writing I thought I might do. Not exactly what I intended, but it worked out well.

I just got home a little bit ago, and Karen has been back up and looks like she might have a little insomnia to top it all off. I think its really just a big stress relief thing from her finals and finishing up classes. She took it well, but she was pretty cranked up over the whole “finals thing”.

While I was walking home, I noticed one thing for sure - there wasn’t ANY fog. In fact, it was a crystal clear night. Yeah - in that midwest sense, it was also pretty darn chilly out there. Not mid-winter-missouri chilly, but below freezing - which is really pretty uncommon for up here.

So no journal writing (or at least not much), but it’s been a nice evening, and the stars were pretty on the walk home.

“How do you tell if someone learned a topic” was the dinner-time question tonight. Karen finished her classes for the quarter (I keep wanting to call them semesters), and one of her finals left her really depressed and kinda wigged out. The instructor (who I shall not name) was “ok” by all repute, but not awesome - and seemed to have a flair for showing off how much he knew more than focusing on making sure his students added to their knowledge. At least, this is my (somewhat brutal) synopsis based on hearing many evenings of “I can’t believe he…” things.

So it wasn’t really unexpected that the final in the class was equally baroque and difficult to comprehend. And I’ll get a little more specific, because for those of you in the “know” about programming languages - this’ll just top it off. The class was about Perl. To my mind, there’s only one language that can be more viscously obtuse than perl - and that’s C++. So after a quarter, giving students a final where the questions included some of the finer points of this or that function call seemed a little more like “Cool Perl Trivia” quiz than actually attempting to determine if the students learned anything. And just to pour on the praise - if my sweetie had a hard time with this final, I expect the remaining students would have darn near guaranteed to bomb it. (yeah - she’s a pretty smart lady - and she had the benefit of having done perl in the past!)

So how would you determine if someone’s really learned the language? Or enough to use it? Do you think it’d be a fair test if they knew and could quickly look up the answers to the questions? At this point, I think that’s a pretty fair way to deal with similiar things in an interview (albeit not a class test) situation - I want to hear when someone doesn’t know exactly, what their guess might be, but most importantly how they’d solve the problem - where to look or what to do.

Having taught a little previously, I know the challenge of determining “how much someone has learned” and “how much they know” of a language. Frankly, it’s often really tough doing that even with coworkers that you’re around all the time! Getting a gradation of knowledge through a test - well, it’s damn tricky to do that reasonably well. And when it comes right down to it - I don’t know what I would have written as a test of someone having learned perl. I think I probably would have gone into debugging questions and tried to get the students to explain why the code generated the results that it did, and what they would need to do to make it work “correctly”. Yeah - essay test. A pain to grade, but I think you need more granularity and detail than you can get off a multiple choice…

I wandered about the house sort of aimlessly this evening - Karen’s out at a holiday party. It wasn’t until recently that I actually looked outside though - and saw that it was a “dark and foggy night”. It immediately put my in mind of some lovecraftian horror story. Heh - yeah, perfect when you’re wondering when your sweetie is going to be home.

It’s definitely a thick pea soup out there this evening. I walked outside a bit - and it has the weird echo-y sort of feel the air too. It’s that time of year in Seattle where fog is common, but this year seems to be having a bit more of it than I recall from earlier years.

More geekstuff…

If you’re into screencasts (typically of a demo of how to use some technology) - then you should hear about the Django Screencast. It’s nothin’ official like from the Django maker folks, but it is pretty slick. 7Mb, H264 codec (meaning you’ll need Quicktime 7 or VLC to view it).

A little evening geektalk from the testing world.

I was determined to play with Selenium a bit tonight, and while I was wandering around in FAQ land, I stumbled upon SeleniumRecorder - a firefox extension that records sessions and generates Selenium test scripts (or at least the basis for them). How freakin’ awesome is that! Yeah, yeah - I can hear it now: This guy is excited about a TESTING TOOL!?!?

Well, let me tell you - its a place where the tools cost a freakin’ fortune, so getting things you can really use on a budget (like, er, working in a startup) is damn difficult! And Selenium has rolled out and made the whole testing process for web pages just about 100 times better than it had been previously. I mean, sure - you can still write the automation pieces that drive HttpUnit, or take advantage of Pamie or Watir and drive IE through it’s COM interface - but this just trumps the lot as far as I’m concerned - because now you can let javascript driver SEVERAL DIFFERENT BROWSERS actually through the site to help identify cross-browser compatibility problems and functionally test the lot.

Its not a completely “do everything” for you tool set, but it is really very complete.

Its monday - just barely. Hi Monday!

Time for bed.