Adam White

Jazz music at the Diesel Playhouse? That’s an odd venue. I didn’t expect to see jazz there. When I first saw the advertisement in the Globe and Mail I thought it sounded interesting but I didn’t have high hopes. I was worried that Happy Fingers - A Tribute to the Piano would be $20 wasted. I was so pleasantly surprised by what I saw and heard that we went back for the 3rd show of the 4 part series.  You definitely don’t want to miss the 4th and final show on Sunday April 13 at 2:00 p.m..

Happy Fingers is hosted by Jamyz Bee from Jazz.FM91 and sponsored by Remenyi house of music who provided the pianos as well as Wild Horse Canyon who supplied the wines. It’s great to see a new generation of jazz lovers taking in such a wonderful line up of musicians. At the first show the under 30 crowd was non-existent but at the third show there were definitely a lot more young faces in the crowd.
The show begins with 4 or 5 performers doing 10 minute sets of their own music or their interpretations of other people’s songs. During the sets I found a few of the songs hard to follow. There didn’t see to be a rhythm I could tap my finger to. It must be my immature jazz palette. The interpretations of the songs can bring on really strong - Happy, Sad, Excited. Joe Sealy played a song that he had written for his mother. My fiance was so touched by the story he told and the song that tears started to stream down her cheeks. Robert Scott was another performer who told a few great stories before starting to play. It made me feel like I was getting to the know the artist a little bit better.
Diesel playhouse provides a great way to get up close and personal with the musicians.  During intermission patrons and musicians congregate in the hall, near the bar of course. By watching the musicians interact with the guests I got the sense that there was a “jazz crowd”. A group of people that know everyone in the jazz scene. I overheard stories of people who had travelled from the coasts of Canada to come see the show.  It was really great to see and hear. Have the musicians around made it feel like a intimate and private event. After the intermission improvisation starts. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Improv and piano? I thought improv was only for second city.
I’m not a jazz pro but I do know a thing or two about improv. The duets are an amazing display of improvisation applied to jazz piano. At the first Happy Fingers show John Sherwood and Thompson Egbo Egbo were the first to take the stage. What energy! What passion! They were definitely in tune with each other. They made strong eye contact through the whole set. A piece of wisdom I learned at the Second City about making successful improv scenes. They were definitely in the zone to the point that they switched pianos in the middle. The song never missed a beat. It was fun to watch their intensity and how they would watch each other all the while figuring out where to go next just by listening and watching. It was a great showing of giving and taking focus.

At The Second City you practice giving and taking focus through specifically designed exercises. Another improv key is to Yes And offers. This essentially means don’t block your partner. When they say “you have big tooth brush” you go with the tooth brush and don’t change it to “Well it’s actually a toothpick” I could see Yes And happening between the piano players. Even more interesting I could hear it when an offer was strong and someone applied the “Yes And” theory and then took the sound to a whole new level.  At the end of the show all the musicians went out to sign autographs and talk more with patrons. I had a chance to talk with John Sherwood about his duet. “Listening is key - you have to pay attention to what your partner is doing. If you stop listening they you both look bad”. That’s another lesson you learn in second city improv; you exist to make your partner look good. John also commented that “The scaffolding is already there - you know the chords - C minor, G, A -. All the work has been done for us before. We are just putting up new dry wall.”

Getting to talk to the musician after the show really showed their uniqueness. Everything about them is unique. The way they enter the stage, what they say before they start performing, how they bow after their set. Even the way they let you know song is done. Some put their hands down, some look to the crowd. The variety of movements, gestures and facial expressions made me wonder what they are thinking about when they are playing. Sometimes their faces looked as if they were in pain with every key they played.  Other times it looked like they were on top of the world.

I would highly recommend taking in the last show coming up on April 13. It is an awesome way to spend a cold winter sunday afternoon. My fiance and I left feeling relaxed, mellow and energized all at the same time. It’s a great first date spot or just something fun and different to do. The price is right at $20 a ticket.

“Official” Advertisement

April 13 2pm
Diesel Playhouse / 56 Blue Jays Way 416.971.5656
HAPPY FINGERS: A TRIBUTE TO THE PIANO ($20)
 
It’s the birthday of Happy Fingers host/creator Jaymz Bee, this piano tribute will also feature special guest vocalists such as Lyne Tremblay, Sonya Cote and Sophia Perlman. Six piano greats are featured: Adam Makowicz, Adrean Farrugia, David Restivo, Waylen Miki, Elizabeth Shepherd and Robert Scott will perform on a Steinway grand piano (courtesy of Remenyi House of Music).
Tickets are $20 at the door or in advance, but why risk it? GET YOUR TICKETS NOW: dieselplayhouse.com or toll free 1.877.971.5656 

 Links
www.egbo.ca
www.johnsherwood.ca
www.dieselplayhouse.com
www.jazz.fm
www.remenyi.com
www.wildhorsewinery.com
www.timelymanor.ca

Warning - 3/4 finished thought.

In the event of an unknown or unexpected system behavior in the software world - the test plan documents mean nothing.

When we develop our testing strategy we do two things - outline what we WILL  test AND what we are NOT going to test. The latter is always one of the hardest to figure out, explain and do effectively.  A close relationship with development is required. Trust from both sides is crucial. Expert knowledge of the system and how changes affect it is required. 95% of the time this process works but other times it backfires. It is usually the unknowns that screw us.

For project X a lead tester wrote a test plan document to satisfy project stakeholders. The document brought up lots of good questions and discussion. The one section that got a fair amount of discussion was the “Not going to test” section. We explicitly stated that PERFFORMANCE would NOT be TESTED. We would eyeball the performance (web based UI connected to our 4 year old core server technology) and not provide a formal analysis of request/response times. Why take this approach? We had done load testing with a shipping release build 1 month prior. We got benchmarks, provided this info to development and discussed the risks. Everything looked good. There was no reason for any of us to suspect performance problems.  Everyone agreed “There should be no reason we would have performance problems”. All project stakeholders “signed off” on the test plan. 

What do you think the single biggest problem found while testing?

Read the rest…

Michael Hunter, of Braidy Tester fame, posted a challenge on his blog. He showed a parking sign photo and asked how many different ways it could be interpreted. I decided to take 45 minutes during one of our weekly test team meetings and try it out. What the hell does this have to do with testing you might ask? Well - thanks for asking. Here is how it relates for me

• Idea generation - we always need to generate new ideas for testing
• Clarification - requirements are mostly ambiguous and this was practice at clarifying them.
• Sharing and discussion of ideas - “It could be interpreted this way” which lead to someone else saying “Yes and this way too” - Team work, supportive attitude with a focus on sharing.
• Time boxing so we don’t get carried away - Important in testing and just about anything else
• Coming up with alternate solutions/problem solving - It’s good to be seen as a problem solver instead of “Bearer of Bad News”

Needless to say we had a great time doing this activity. I time boxed the idea generation to 15 minutes and then had about 15 minutes of discussion.  We used index cards to write down our ideas. We went around the room and each person read an idea from their card. We ran into some duplicate ideas but that was ok - we weren’t focused on having every idea be unique. The puprose was to put on our “thinking caps”

Now it’s easy to take an idea and tear it to shreds.  To quote Edward De Bono in The Thinking Course “..critical destuction of one hypothesis has never produced a better one. It is creativity that produce the better hypothesis.” As a follow up challenge I asked the team to come with a sign that wasn’t ambigous. We explored some great ideas and had a great discussion. A few of the ideas and designs came out to be really clear and (mostly) unambiguous (I’ll have to get them and post it with this article.) The discussion was going so well that it actually went over time and into lunch.

Here are the results which were summarized by Aqiqul Hoda and Michael Hetmanczuk. The participants were Adam White, Alan Walker, Ali Khan, Aqiqul Hoda, Christy Gnanapragasam, Herb Bal, Joseph Kubik, Michael Hetmanczuk, Mortaza Abhari, Thomas Yook and Zhe Chen

1. Can park for 2 hrs from Mon to Sat between 7AM to 6PM.
2. If you have Zone 4 Permit you could park as long as you want.
3. No Limits of parking on Sundays and Holidays.
4. No Parking for Zone 4 permit vehicles.
5. No parking on Sun and holidays.
6. No parking in the Night.
7. Zone 4 permit vehicles parking only between 6 PM to 7 AM and Sun and
holidays.
8. 2 hr parking this side of street.
9. 2 hr parking both side of street.
10. 2 hr parking from this sign onward.
11. Parking at 6PM allowed can go past 6 PM for 2 hrs.
12. Parking once a day only.
13. Zone permits vehicles parking only after hrs but not on sun and
holidays.
14. Zone permit sign maynot be related to parking.
15. 2 hours limit parking between 7am and 6pm on days except Sunday and
Holiday.  Above has exception by Zone 4 permit means Zone 4 permit could
park at anytime
16. Board number 2: hour parking
17. Is the #2 the sign ID or does it indicate 2 hours?
18. Can we park during other ours or only 7 AM - 6 PM
19. Where is the sign?
20. Does it mean I can park from 6 AM - 7 PM?
21. Hol?  What qualifies as a holiday?
22. Does this apply to bikes?
23. Except sun/holiday means on Sunday and holidays - no parking at all
24. On sunday/holiday you can park all day
25. On sunday/holiday the 2 hour limit is lifted, but parking is only
allowed from 7 AM to 6 PM.
26. Zone 4 permit means you can park all the time.
27. Zone 4 permit means you can park 7 AM - 6 PM.
28. Except Zone 4 permit means you can’t park at all if you have a zone
4 permit.
29. Except Sun/Holiday: means only those with a zone 4 permit can park
on sun/holiday.
30. Could be interpreted as 1 hour parking.  The #2 could be something
else, i.e. street number, parking spot.
31. Except sun-holiday: starts on sunday, ends on a holiday.
32. What is a zone 4 permit?  Do I automatically get one?
33. Does that mean I can park long on sunday-holiday?
34.  Maximum of 2 hour parking allowed between 7 AM and 6 PM except
sunday or holiday.
35. If you have zone 4 permit pass you can park the car anytime.
36. Within this zone, a maximum of 4 vehicles are permitted to park.
37. The #2 indicates it is a second sign that indicates “hour parking”
zone between 7 AM and 6 PM except on sundays, holidays.

I mentioned that I would post more about the acquisition of PlateSpin by Novell. I’ve been delayed in doing tihs because there isn’t that much to report. We are being told that it’s business as usual and that’s what it’s turning out to be. Novell hasn’t had a strong presence in the development area - although this isn’t true for other areas like sales and professional services (from what I can see). There hasn’t been any fall-out or mass exodus of employees. 

I’ve heard people talk about acquisitions like the exodus is the “norm” either because it’s a technology acquisition and the acquirer doesn’t keep the employees or because they are scared that will happen. There have been little rumors going around about this person or that person leaving but nothing can directly link to the acquisition.

Read the rest…

Alan Page pointed out a page that he found to related to my previous bug. He found this using Live search instead of google. 

The good news -it worked in the sense that the stupid error messages are gone. Interestingly enough 3 feeds that worked previously now don’t work. And I discovered this neat duplicate error message bug.

Read the rest…

What do I do with this information as a user? I don’t know how to troubleshoot this - nor do I have time to. Why can’t it tell me what RSS feeds it’s having a problem with.Of course I searched for the error message using google. I searched for “outlook RSS feeds error” and “RSS feeds error 8004010F” neither of which yeilded a link to a solution.

Novell announced today that it would be aquiring PlateSpin for a little over $200 Million.

PlateSpin has been around for about 5 years now. It started off as 10 employees, of which I was one, and is now 200+ people.

 I will post more on this later…..just wanted to get the word out

I was playing around with a visual method of designing test - classification trees. I was bored of the same ole’ same ole’ you know. RazorCat is the only software that I know of that visually depicts classification trees. (although I haven’t looked that hard)

As I was signing up I got this error message. What would you do in this case?

There is no hardware id in the form - ahhhh - I’m going insane It’s almost like the error message that said “Press the any key”

Here is a bug that didn’t impact me very much but I can easily think of a situation when it might.

I was looking for job descriptions to use as an example for a task I was doing. My search of QA had returned 504 results which was fine….until I couldn’t see them all.

In this context that’s fine - but what if I was filtering resumes here. The last 4 candidates wouldn’t get seen. They might be my ideal candidates!!

Video here

As I was writing this post I decided to see if I could reproduce this. I couldn’t get it with the “QA” query as it appears that there are only 495 postings related to that.

I tried another generic term “Analyst” - it returned 1821 hits and I could only get to 1000 of these. I used the go to page function - page 40 is the final page and there is no next button so now i’m either missing 821 potential jobs or the stats being displayed are wrong. Take your pick

I was featured in a Globe and Mail article last week on surviving the tech meltdown.

Check it out here

The print edition had a picture of me as well.

In retrospective - if I hadn’t been laid off in 2001 - I probably wouldn’t have become a software tester or if I did it would have been a very different path.

It’s pretty cool to be in a national newspaper. I’ve already had a linked in request and a friend from university, who resides in Bermuda, get in touch with me. I didn’t expect either of these things to happen. It’s all about the network!!!