Category: Revelation

On a mailing list somewhere I was musing about why I, as a developer, always find myself annoyed at QA. And that’s not good, because QA and development are partners in making sure that what we develop comes to the customer as good as we can make it. But the problem is that development never has time to properly document what we’re doing to QA, and QA only communicates to development in the form of bug reports.

As far as I can tell, there are only N types of bug reports:

1. annoying because you already knew about what they are reporting.
2. annoying because you thought you were done that bit and now you have to go back to it.
3. annoying because you know that part works and now you’ll have to drop everything to go show them how they are using it wrong.
4. annoying because you thought that part works and now you’ll have to drop everything to have them show you how they are using it right.
5. annoying because their bug report doesn’t give you enough detail.
6. annoying because it goes into excruciating detail when you could tell what is wrong from the first sentence.
7. annoying because it goes into excruciating detail about stuff you already knew, but glosses over the bit that tells you if it’s a known bug or something new.
8. annoying because they are describing something that’s working the way it’s documented to work.
9. annoying because they are describing something that’s working the way you want it to work, but you haven’t had time to document that behaviour yet.
10. annoying because it’s the same bug they already logged a week ago.
11. annoying because it’s so poorly written that you can’t tell if it’s the same problem as the one they already logged a week ago.
12. annoying because you thought you’d fixed that last week but it’s obvious from the report that you missed something.
13. annoying because you thought you’d fixed that last week and it’s not obvious from the report if they’re testing the new code or not.

But what it all comes down to is that QA is annoying because they’re a constant reminder that you’re not as good as you wish you were. I don’t want to be “only human”, I want to be perfect.

I’ve gotten a few steps closer to moving everything that was on my Linode virtual private server over to my colocation box. Basically, the only thing left there is the hardest one to move, and that’s the navaid.com waypoint generator. Part of the problem is that the new site has FCGI instead of FastCGI, and part of the problem is that I’m going to be converting from MySQL to PostgreSQL, and of course the version of MySQL in Debian Sarge doesn’t have the “compatibility” option in mysqldump. Oh well, I’ll get there.

Today I moved my Mailman mailing lists over. Since the versions of Mailman and Postfix were the same on both places, it was a pretty simple matter of copying the files over. The hard part was managing the cut-over so that no mail got lost. That meant getting everything set up on the new site, using rsync to make sure the files were absolutely up to date, checking out the permissions, and once I’d tested the setup using forced fake DNS entries, cutting over the real DNS entry. I think it’s all working right.

Next up, I’m considering moving my Gallery installation over. I’ve also got to get out and install a new hard disk that was given to me.

Tell me, is it a bit weird that on one of my few days off from a stressful software development project I spend the whole day futzing around with computers?

I’ve mentioned already that I put a system on a local rack, and in order to cut costs I divided it up into three sections using Xen. Well, I had this annoying little problem that the “domU” (user domains – ie. the shares) weren’t able to use iptables. So I’ve gone back to the drawing board by slapping a couple of drives I have kicking around into my Windows box and trying various experiments.

First, I went back to the “step-by-step” how-tos that I’ve been using so far. They’ve updated it for Xen 3.0.3 (I actually installed Xen 3.0.2 using a how-to written for 3.0.1). So I ran through it – no joy. The domU boots, but mounts the ext3 file system as ext2 and won’t do iptables.

Tried again with their instructions on how to compile a kernel, except the instructions say to compile in iptables support, but don’t tell you how to compile in appropriate device driver support so I ended up with no network in my dom0 (the controller domain).

Then I found another “how-to”, this based on the fact that Xen is in the Debian “sid” (aka “unstable”) branch. Updated the test machine to “sid”, then went through the how-to. Initially, couldn’t get xend to start up, but then it turns out that I’d installed xen-hypervisor-3.0-unstable instead of xen-hypervisor-3.0.3. Got that installed, got the domU up and running, but DAMMIT, still the same problem. When I tried to do an “iptables -L”, it would tell me that “QM_MODULES: Function not supported”. Same if I did a “depmod -a” or “lsmod”.

While I was working this angle, I discovered that the Debian Backports project had backported Xen to “sarge”. Hmmm, I thought, if this works out I’ll have to try the Backport to see if I can do this on the rack with minimal hassle and without having to run “unstable” on a “production” server.

That’s when I discovered something interesting – modutils is old, and if you’re going to be using 2.6+ kernels only, people recommend you install module-init-tools instead. Since I’ve been installing Debian “sarge” (aka “stable”) in the domUs, and “sarge” is designed to support 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, it installs modutils instead. I installed module-init-tools, and suddenly everything worked.

Hey, I thought, maybe I don’t have to go through all this pain. I went to my real xen system, installed module-init-tools on the domU, and everything works! No need to go for the Backport. Maybe I will later, but for now I’ve got what I want, and I can install ssh-blacklist on my domU.

Ok, I’m going to sound like a total Apple fan-boy with this, but I have to say it. Yesterday, my iPod fell out of it’s case. I picked it up and suddenly without the extra bulk of the case, I was once again struck by how utterly perfect it is. It’s small, it’s light, it’s beautiful, and the user interface is great. It feels good in your hand.

Ok, the screen is a bit scratched up, and so is the shiny back surface. But it’s still a wonder of modern industrial design.

And I look at the Zune, and I see an ugly brown brick, and I think “what the hell were they thinking?”

And before you write me off as a total Apple geek, I had the same feeling with my Treo when I used it for a day without the heavy magnesium innopocket.com case. Not as perfect as an iPod, but definitely smaller and sleeker than I normally think of it because I normally have it in that case.

Today, in spite of how busy we are we got the word from our new boss Nancy that we all had to go to the monthly division meeting. (Ok, here’s where I prove how little attention I pay to the heirarchy: I don’t know if Nancy is Dave’s boss, or Mike’s boss, and I don’t know what slice of the company that meeting is really for, but let’s just call it ‘division’ for now.) I never go to these things, but first we got a message from Nancy saying she expected everybody there, and then another message from Dave saying he’d gotten the word that no matter how busy we were, we should make every effort to get there.

It was the typical boring monthly meeting – announcing all the anniversaries and stuff. But then they started handing out these enormous plaques to people who’d recently gotten patents. I’ve seen these plaques on people’s desks before, but I’ve never seen them handed out. And I’ve only ever seen them on pretty senior people’s desks. I wasn’t expecting one – my patent was awarded months and months ago, and besides I’m a lowly contractor. But I got one, and it had little tags for both of my patents. My boss, Dave, got one as well, with the same two tags.

Afterwards, Nancy told me that the whole reason she’d made the meeting mandatory was to make sure that Dave and I went, because neither of us were prone to going to these meetings.

Getting the plaque was surprising enough, but even more surprising was for the rest of the day people were coming up and congratulating me. Now, I’m not thrilled about the concept of software patents at all, so I didn’t really know what to say. At first, I was saying stuff like “Oh, it wasn’t such a big deal” or “I’m not too proud of it”. But then I thought that probably isn’t very gracious of me, and might be insulting to other people who’ve gotten patents or who want them and haven’t gotten them yet. So then I started just saying “Thanks” and leaving it at that. But still later, some fellow software developers came up to to congratulate/razz me, and I decided the best response was that it was a team effort and I feel sad that we couldn’t credit everybody on the patent. I also told one of the developers that one of the things she did, an automatic “matcher” algorithm, was definitely worth a patent and she should apply for one herself.