Wes Maldonado: Data Junkie

From the Braidy Tester I found a link to this article titled Rigorous Exploratory Testing. I liked the formalization of Exploratory Testing it provides:

Two key things distinguish good Exploratory Testing as a disciplined form of testing:
1. Using a wide variety of analysis/testing techniques to target vulnerabilities from multiple perspectives.
2. Using charters to focus effort on those vulnerabilities that are of most interest to stakeholders.

Hopefully I’ll find time to update this post with examples of the types of exploratory tests I find myself doing routinely.

Google has another tool, spreadsheets. Checkout Inside Google Spreadsheets for more info or go take a tour.

MySQL: Workers in 25 countries with no HQ This open-source software maker has figured out how to manage a world-wide workforce that rarely meets. Is MySQL the model 21st-century company? http://money.cnn.com/

I posted this hastily yesterday, just a bit of tidying up today (2006-06-03).

I updated to Wordpress 2.0.3 to address security problems. It seems that it doesn’t play well with Markdown syntax so some rendering might be a little bit off.

The specific problem is yet to be determined but I’ve see the following two things so far:

Markdown angle bracket linking is broken.

Any http followed by a colon is being turned into http<space>: meanin that <link goes here> breaks.

Bulleted lists

They are somehow getting munged when they are saved/rendered. Not sure the root cause of this this one yet.

Sorry for the horrible formatting, I’ll hopefully get this fixed today or tomorrow.

Answer? You already have a Windows environment and an IT staff that can work in it. Retraining your staff to manage a new OS or configure dedicated hardware/infrastructure for your computing needs is unreasonable for most IT departments. This is where the Digipede network shines.

My friend Matt Michie is a big fan of all things open source, has far more experience than I when it comes to writing MPI code and I believe he has actually worked with large scale clusters for parallel processing. All considered, I don’t think he understands the business decisions that drive my recommendations for the Digipede Network.

It would be a lot nicer if I could do Grid Computing on an OS that didn’t require a GUI and a video card. Matt

Matt, how does ‘nicer’ compare to cost effective?

Matt mentions energy:

Electricity is one of the biggest economic factors in large grids…. Matt

Why not use the wasted cycles on all those existing machines in your corporate network rather than increasing the total amount of energy used? If you want to install N computers in a data center, cool them all, power the switches and all the new hardware to save energy, go for it. Or you can just use your existing computers in what Digipede calls the “Desktop Grid Configuration”. How say you sir?

Oh, would you like a transitional solution? You should check out Hadoop which implements MapReduce in Java.

Ok, I’m picking on Matt here. He knows I’m not a big fan of working on Windows, but he should also be aware that there are good reasons behind most of my recommendations. :)

I think a friend of mine ran across an autoboxing gotcha in Java 1.5 and didn’t realize it today… I’ve been reading the Java 5.0 Tiger: A Developer’s Notebook which talks about autoboxing, but these links explain it in some good detail.

• http://brian.pontarelli.com/2004/07/15/jdk-5-auto-boxing-best-practices
• http://brian.pontarelli.com/2004/07/14/jdk-5-auto-boxing/

Today, we made it even easier to try out. Today we announced our free Digipede Network Developer Edition. What is the developer edition? It’s a fully-functional, full-featured version of our product. It lets any developer working on a Microsoft platform check out the Digipede Network up close and personal. Run our samples. Run your own code. Play with it. We want more developers to experience what our customers already have: Grid computing doesn’t have to be hard. West Coast Grid

Digipede has a very interesting grid computing product and today released a free developers edition. If you’re on Windows and have longed for Google’s MapReduce then Digipede is a product you should check out.