Katja Stokley

I just watched last night's SGA.

( Spoilers ahoy. )

I saw Mamma Mia this afternoon. ( Spoilers, if you can really spoil a movie like this. )

One of the trailers I saw was for some movie called House Bunny or something, and, just, this is why I generally refuse to watch comedies. I was horrifically offended by the trailer, and I am frustrated that this is the kind of movie that people are making and people are wanting to see (there was some laughter coming from the audience, alas). It's a movie about a Playboy bunny who, at 27, is too old to be a bunny anymore, so she goes to get a job as a den mother at a sorority or fraternity. And the one she ends up at is the one full of smart (and therefore unattractive) young women, who of course need her help to undergo makeovers and attract men.

Excuse me while I go puke. Why do we even still have Playboy bunnies, people? And the idea that smart women are ugly and need help attracting men? Why haven't we evolved past that yet?

Going back to Mamma Mia (a much more pleasant thought than that stupid bunny movie), now I'm finding myself wanting to have some ABBA to listen to, like I did after Muriel's Wedding, not that I ever did anything about it then either.

Odd number, that. I wonder if it started out 20 and someone added a couple? Anyway, this meme stolen from [Bad username: stellarmeadow"]

Was the first person you talked to today male or female?
Male. ( the rest behind the cut )

Did I tweet yesterday? I did!

• 19:30 www.zombieharmony.com/ -- ZombieHarmony - One of the Best Free Dating Sites for Zombies #

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Does anyone else think there's a marked resemblance between these two "Hamlet" promotional photos?

David Tennant Hamlet 2008

Paul Gross Hamlet 2000

And these are from the Captain Hammer Comic

(I did a little clumsy photoshopping to take the glove out of the second one. A delicate and patient hand is not among my virtues.)

(Yoink!)

(from the bit where Captain Hammer warns us not to trust science geeks.)

This is the image used for the Dr Horrible T-Shirt

Did I tweet yesterday? I did!

• 10:58 Costumers: Not a bad match for the Dr. Horrible goggles - tinyurl.com/6bacgj #
• 18:09 As I show up to babysit, my little niece comments "Is that your computer? You know... you have games on your computer..." #
• 18:09 (I have in the past let her play flash games on the Dora the Explorer website. She's not allowed to play on her Dad's computer) #
• 18:10 I know what my use as an aunt is... #

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If you get an email that appears to come from UPS about an package sent that couldn't be delivered:

DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENT.

No, REALLY. It is bad news.

Ah crap, my first post (hello anyway, great to see a group like this out here) is going to seem a little down and out, but it's something I really have to speak out about.
As a girl living in Perth, Australia with Spina Bifida worse enough to make one wheelchair bound for long distances and no other way to get around except bumming lifts of my parents or sister, or actually affording to buy an adapted car and affording lessons to boot, the only other way around it is to use the bus system they have given us out here.

The sad fact is, it's appalling.

I just recently moved to a new estate which is, I must admit, 10 minutes away by car from the most local shopping centre. There is 1 bus that passes by this new estate, the 519. Yesterday I decided to go into the city to try and get disability payments (another catasophe of the australian government, but a whole different story).

My mum dropped me off at a train station, so I had no idea that, when I came back home, there was absolutely no bus stop anywhere for this particular bus at any of the local shops around. I came to the fact that i would have to wheel my way home. It was fine at first, until I found that on a HUGE strip of road there was no pavement, and I had to wheel the whole way home in the emergency exit lane, along with morons honking their horns at me and screaming abuse.

When will the goverment learn that people with disabilities not only are somewhat to very independant people like everyone else, and give us the buses and pavements that we need to get around? (along with ramps. and the fact in perth city and northbridge, and fremantle there are stores we can't get into because of stairs, mostly with the alternative clothes I like?)

No wonder we are seen as different in this country. No wonder I am looked down upon and can't manage to find a friend or two. It's because of ignorance by the goverment, and passed down values that people with disabilities don't do anything for themselves, and are often seen without minds of our own.

It pisses me off grandly, to tell you the truth. I'm no different from anyone else, so why don't I get the tools I need to express my ability?

Sorry for the angry first post. It's just some things need to be done.

So I've been watching a lot of Farscape lately, including commentary tracks and dvd extras. I don't think anything I have to say is particularly spoilery (I mostly complain about how full of herself Virginia Hey is), but just in case I'll ( do the lj cut thing. )

I waited until today to watch the first part of Generation Kill, and right now I'm not quite done with it.

( Spoilers for the first episode. )

In other news, I finally realized last night that what I was fighting was more one of my rare migraines than an ordinary headache, so I took half a Darvocet and went to bed early. I slept for over 10 hours, and the headache's better, although it's still there.

weather	:		mostly sunny
outside	:		23.0°C
mood	:		...

With any software, you'll have a set of parameters you need to use as input data or environment. If each of the different combinations of the input constitutes one test case or test scenario, having a lot of parameters quickly balloons into an unrealistic number of test cases that needs to be run.

It's completely unfeasible to exhaustively test every single possible combination. I think we've done quick calculations where even simpler parts of our system would take on the order of YEARS to test if you really did every single combination of everything you can change on the screen.

Given that we can't do every single combination, we cut the test suite down to the things that really matter. Yes, we can get it wrong and problems can get past us because we didn't look at it, but it's an risk analysis exercise - what is the risk of the defect occurring? and what is the impact of its occurrence?

One of the strategies we can use is called Pairwise Testing.

Pairwise testing (or "all-pairs") means you choose the set of test cases that covers all combinations of 2 parameters and each value of all other parameters at least once. Defects that involve interactions between three or more parameters have been shown to be progressively less common.

I don't think it's a new technique, but it's a relatively new topic of discussion in the software community. There aren't a lot of statistics on it yet, but what is available seems to support this.

I've been doing it since I started my first job in Quality Assurance. But I do it manually and based on intuition. I don't use third party software tools to generate my test cases. I thought this was a cool idea and I was curious to see how the tools compared to my intuition-based choices for test cases.

Because we're a Windoze shop, I chose to use a small free tool called jenny (thanks, Bob Jenkins =).

jenny takes a "tuple" parameter to indicate that it should do pairs, triples, quads or whatever other dimension of combinations you want. Then you list the number of values for each parameter. Your parameters are labelled with integers and your values are labelled with letters. The upper limit is every single combination of every single dimension.

I have a Payments module to test. There are six main parameters I'm dealing with:

• 3 incoming payment methods
• 5 outgoing payment methods
• 4 types of customers
• 3 contract types
• 25 of the most commonly used currencies for both incoming and outgoing payments (there are actually just over 100 possible currencies that we support)

All possible combinations of those 6 input parameters means 112500 test cases. If I estimate that each one takes on average 5 minutes each to execute, that's 562500 minutes which is 9375 hours or 390.625 days.

We usually have two QA staff per project team. There are about 260 business days in a year. This comes out to 10 months. If all goes well.

Oh, HELL, no.

So, anyway, I set up the parameters and possible values in an Excel spreadsheet, numbered/lettered them off. I plugged numbers into jenny with all my exclusion rules, made the output comma delimited and sed'ed the output to get something that could be pulled into Excel.

In the 625 test cases that jenny gave me, each parameter value will be used at least once. If all goes well, two QA staff testing for 3 business days (8 hours per work day) will complete all 625 test cases.

Keep in mind that I haven't included some of the other parameters. I haven't included other modules that also have to be tested. I haven't included a few other types of customers for reasons that I didn't want to get into for this public example. I haven't included troubleshooting time when something does go wrong. I haven't included the time it takes to log bugs, argue about them with developers or verify fixed bugs.

We usually schedule 2-3 weeks (10-15 business days) for Regression, depending on the complexity of the features and we're still cutting corners where we can.

Side Note: Automation is not always the answer. This is another post altogether, but the short story is: you're not making a hard problem easier by automating testing. You're making a hard problem equally as hard, but in a different way.

So, 625 is much more do-able than eleventy-frazillion. And I can be reasonably confident that most of the bugs that are there will be found.

However, knowing the system as I do, I can get it down to 32 test cases and still be fairly confident that I've covered the major functionality with that one module.

So, this is fairly consistent with most things in life. A software tool can save you a lot if you don't have any extra knowledge.

But it won't replace human knowledge altogether.

A love story for crip culture! By turns playful, unsettling, raw and moving, Cripple Poetics: A Love Story is an immersive and sensual correspondence that builds and heats by accretion—one keystroke at a time. Cripple Poetics is e-mails, IMs and letters between lovers; poetic rumination/invigoration; and disability arts manifesto. Reader Ann Fox (Davidson College) writes: “As lovers/poets/performance artists Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus court each other, they woo us as well. We are seduced by their great love of each other, crip culture, and a fierce, revolutionary dynamism that makes us want to whirl with them, through pleasure and pain, into the maelstrom of the possibilities for joy and expression the body—and this life—offer.”

The dance of courtship is reflected in language that alternately snakes and darts, declares and obfuscates, reminisces and forges—finding freedom within its limitations. “Cripple Poetics preserves and unfolds the artifacts of an original and timely love story that might otherwise have remained shrouded in a small, forgotten corner of cyberspace,” says publisher Jay Sennett.

“The dance and the eighth notes got loose: segued, went Rhumba, found poetry and got dolled up with Neil Marcus and Petra Kuppers. A crippled poetics is a perfect harmony with flesh and music and tongues.” Stephen Kuusisto, The University of Iowa.

Visit Homofactus Press for more information. 

We have open calls for submissions for other anthologies and Crippple Poetics is now on sale.

In case anyone reading this happens to live in CT (or MA/RI/etc. and willing to drive) I'm starting a chronic illness support group for people in their twenties and thirties. Our introductory meeting will be held Saturday, July 26 at noon, and run probably around two hours.

I've gotten interest from people with all sorts of issues, but by far, it seems we'll have folks with autoimmune issues like lupus (including myself).

Anyways, if you're interested, or know someone else who might be, just comment here or message me.

(Sorry for x-posting, but I'm trying to spread the word to as many people as possible)

Did I tweet yesterday? I did!

• 08:39 There's a good start to the morning. The cereal 'bowl' from the cafe had a hole in it. Now I have a milky desk and no breakfast. #

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I have a vegetarian* friend coming out to visit in a couple of weeks, and I'm looking for some 'tried and true' vegetarian entree recipes since kidunit and I are in main carnivores and most of my entree recipes contain meat. I could go look up vegetarian entrees on foodnetwork.com or epicurious.com but what I want are your recipes, ones you've made a zillion times and love and would like to share. So please comment to this post with your favorite vegetarian recipe.

Thank you all!

*ETA: Specifically looking for ovo-lacto style recipes-- eggs and dairy are okay but not meat or seafood.

Did I tweet yesterday? I did!

• 13:56 *beats head against wall* #

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I just placed an order for a couple of boxes of checks from Checks In The Mail. I did this using the company's webforms (at mycitm.com). That went smoothly until I reached the last step. The step after the payment step. That would be the identity verification step, which required my birthdate (no problem), social security number (again, easy), and driver's license number. You know, the number printed on that little slip of plastic that a lot of people with disabilities don't have. There was no option for using another state-issued form of ID, such as a U.S. passport.

They did offer the alternative of my faxing a cancelled check, which the site said would add at least two extra days of fax order processing time before my order would be shipped. Extra work for us gimps, and we get our checks later on top of it.

They did have a webform where users could explain why they feel uneasy with giving any of the three required bits of identifying information, which I used to explain why their identification process was discriminatory. It will be interesting to see if I get an answer.

98°F (nearly 37°C) for a high today, really? And 93°F at 8pm at night? Can we cut this out now, please?

Sincerely,
Sandra