JavaScript Pacman

Kris over at digitalinsane.com has written an all JavaScript Pacman using the YUI toolkit. Its not perfect, everything moves too fast on my MacPro with Firefox 3. But it is impressive nonetheless.

Featured gadget: Pipes

Name: Pipes
Author: Paul Unger
Description: A join-the-pipes time waster

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Each week this blog features a recently added Google Desktop gadget that looks promising. If you'd like to see all new Desktop gadgets as they're published, subscribe to the RSS feed.

Posted by Kathy Walrath, Technical Writer

PHP Changes on the Web Site

Over the weekend I had a brainstorm and made quite a few changes to this web site. I have been using a Ruby script and regular expressions to generate all my non blog pages. Basically, the script reads an XHTML source file, wraps it with headers, footers, and a nav bar, and writes out a fully formatted HTML file. Now this script has evolved from earlier simple CMS systems. On my old web site, I did the same sort of thing using XSLT. I even wrote my own Atom and RSS feeds for that system.

But of late, I have been on a simplicity kick. For example, this blog is created and hosted on Blogger. Now I used Wordpress for a couple of years. It is a great piece of software and works great. But I really got tired of the software patches and updates I kept having to make. Backing up the data. Migrating the data to a new version. Yuck! I'd rather be doing something else.

So I realized there was no point to maintaining the script. Sure the pages will load slightly faster if its static HTML. But, if I convert the pages to PHP, I get the same output without a build step. Plus the actual source pages are cleaner and easier to maintain. So I've converted the whole site to PHP. If you have any links to content pages, you will need to change the .html to a .php.

I have been holding off on any migration of pages from my old site to this one until I was sure I had things like I want them. I think I have reached that point. So hopefully in the next few months I will be post links to new content as well as some migrated content.

JQuery Examples

When I start learning a new language or api or whatever, I like to write short little test programs. I've started to do that with JQuery and my first examples page can be found here.

I'm exploring Form interactions. It is surprising how few simple examples there seems to be on the subject. But, once you learn about the JQuery val() function it is pretty easy. More to come on that page.

400 years of QA - not much has changed

In a recent ACM Communications article George V. Neville-Neil describes the QA process involved when the Swedish Navy tested the (now infamous) Vasa battle ship:

In 1628 the ship was finally ready for quality assurance (QA) testing. Seventeenth-century QA of ships was a bit different from what might happen today. Thirty sailors were picked and asked to run back and forth, port to starboard, across the deck of the ship. If the ship didn't tip over and sink, then the ship passed the test. You did not want to be on the QA team in 1628. After only three runs across the deck the Vasa began to tilt wildly and the test was canceled. The test may have been canceled, but not the project. On August 10, 1628, in a light breeze, the Vasa set sail. She was less than a mile from dock when a stiff breeze knocked her sideways. She took on water, and sank ... killing 30 to 50 sailors. In response to the catastrophe, the King wrote a letter insisting that incompetence had been the reason for the disaster (even though the King was the project manager and chief architect). Of course, the King could not be held at fault, so the final verdict was an "act of God."

Some personal footnotes:

• QA still using antiquated methods for testing
• Projects continue along blindly believing nothing is wrong even after QA flags serious errors
  
• 'acts of God' still being invoked by managers to explain defects

Google Chrome Rocks!

Today, Google released their new Chrome web browser! Immediately I downloaded it and am now creating this entry using it. First impressions are:

Cleaner interface when compared to Firefox and certainly IE: which could also be taken to mean fewer bells and whistles.

Consumes less vertical real estate: no status bar and no toolbars which is a big plus when using a smaller netbook with a 12 inch monitor.

Only available for Windows XP/Vista OS: certainly since Chrome is the child of Apple's Webkit and Mozilla's Firefox the Linux and Mac OS versions will be release soon.

Auto-magically imports Firefox bookmarks and passwords and allows for viewing and editing of passwords.

Dynamic tabbing allows one to pull the tab into its own window and back onto the tab bar.

A right-click in the Tabs Section allows one to start a mini-Windows Task manager. A great feature to see, on a tab by tab basis, how certain tabs are behaving or misbehaving; allows for termination of a tab if so desired.

Incognito mode: The pages viewed in the incognito window won't appear in browser or search and no cookies!

When maximized it prevents with the Windows toolbar from auto-hiding/showing. Oh well - something to fix in version 2.

Featured gadget: Desktop Calendar

Name: Desktop Calendar
Author: rivus.jp
Description: Simple desktop calendar

More information | Download gadget

Each week this blog features a recently added Google Desktop gadget that looks promising. If you'd like to see all new Desktop gadgets as they're published, subscribe to the RSS feed.

Posted by Kathy Walrath, Technical Writer