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.
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!!!
Aren’t you smart enough to tell me which of the two problems has happened?
Lesson Learned for programmers, testers, product managers, writers, and anybody who looks at software – Don’t put the word “OR” in an error message!!!
Youtube doesn’t handle my video files very well. I’m recording videos with BBTest assistant, exporting them as WMV and then uploading them to you tube. The quality of the video on youtube after this process is really low so I’m experimenting with flash videos. If you have troubles viewing this I’d love to know. Here is an example of how videos are looking on youtube after this process.
I’ve got a problem I’m trying to solve and I need your input. We have a lab of 150 servers and are about to double the size. We need a tool to help with the scheduling of the servers to projects and people. We can’t seem to locate such a tool even though I’m sure we aren’t the first ones with this problem.
We haven’t been able to find any tool that solves this problem. Do you know of something handles this? Maybe there is an existing tool that is used for project management that could be adapted to this use? I just don’t know of any.
Perhaps my Google searches need refining “hardware resource scheduling”, “hardware tracking” turned up nothing of use.
Do you know of anyone who might know someone who has experience with solving this type of problem? If you do – I’d love to hear from you
My fiance gave me a 3rd generation ipod for christmas. Its pretty sweet. I like the coverflow feature. I spent waaaay too much time download covers and updating album names.
Today was the first day I took the ipod out for a run. One thing I love about the old is one hand navigation. I had no reason to believe this one would be different. But….it is.
Let’s do a little usability experiment. If you have a new ipod then hold it in your right hand and toggle the position of the lock.
Now switch it to you left hand and toggle the position of the lock.
Is there a difference? Yup.
Is it harder to do with your left hand than your right? Definitely
Does it make one handed operation of the ipod impossible? Yes – unless you employ both hands or do some fancy manipulating with your left hand.
You might have guessed that I’m left-handed. I can hear all the right handers saying in their sympathetic tone – suck it up.
Normally I do but this little quirk seems silly coming from a company that is supposed to be leading edge in design and usability.
From my vantage point this is a huge usability bug. I can no longer operate my nano with one hand.
I wonder if apple has any left handers on their design/usability/test team
I like to do testing exercises with my team. Below is a list of links to various activities I have done with the team at some point in time. I usually turn these things into an interactive session. I thought I would share my list with you in case you want to do some of them with your team (or by yourself)
Observation skills
Which way is she spinning?
Cartoon
Powers of Observation
Activity – watch videos and answer questions at the end
New TV Show
Observation – General Link
http://www.smart-kit.com/scategory/brain-art/>Brain Art
Are the two blocks different colors?
How many differences can you find?
Spot the Differences
Activity for Team
How many F’s?
Activity
Optical Illusion
Cartoon
Perception
Video
The Amazing Color Changing Card trick
Where possible with these exercises I get the team write out their observations before we go into discussions about what they see. This is to help prevent certain biases from showing up – mainly confirmation and hindsight biases
Confirmation bias, according to wikipedia, is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and avoid information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs.
Hindsight bias, sometimes called the I-knew-it-all-along effect, is the inclination to see events that have occurred as more predictable than they in fact were before they took place. Hindsight bias has been demonstrated experimentally in a variety of settings, including politics, games and medicine. In psychological experiments of hindsight bias, subjects also tend to remember their predictions of future events as having been stronger than they actually were, in those cases where those predictions turn out correct.”
When we did these exercises it made for some really interesting discussions – especiallly the spinning dancer and the different color blocks. Doing these exercises can help you become aware of (and possibly manage) confirmation and hindsight bias.
Places you might find more information and exercises
Inattentional Blindness
Selective Attention
