LateNightHacking Louis Journal

Auth

Cool, I got permission to post my code samples. I'm going to put everything in yesterday's jounal page (including a description of today's activities) to keep everything together, since I wrote most of it yesterday anyway.

˜ ™

Well, today I started out by diagnosing a lose network cable at one of our remote sites and helping them get up and running again. I finished coding my current work item (see yesterday). I exercised, and participated in a document review conference call. Calls like that can drag on and on, but I think the results can be important so I don't ming.

I did laundry and various errands - it's sheets and towels day! Actually, I changed to a new set of sheets - the nice new purple ones Michelle got, in honor of February and Valentines day. She liked 'em too. I got a kiss when she saw what I had done. :)

I also did computer maintenance, which takes a long time and involves a lot of running around to different computers. Michelle's computer has been doing this weird thing where it makes her re-enter her Hotmail password all the time, which apparently it didn't used to do. I checked the cache and the cookies and everything I could think of, and it just seems that a login has an expiration of about ten seconds. I'm stumped. As a work around, I showed her the link from Messenger, which doesn't seem to have that problem. :)

Tim and his mom are in town so we took them out to Ruggles. (Mmm Ruggles...) Yes, we had dessert. :D

˜ ™

I got the code samples posted. I don't know. I hope someone finds them interesting. I mean, I made the effort to post it because I found it interesting when I was working on it and I wanted to make my experience available to anyone who wanted to learn from it. However, looking at it, it doesn't seem to clearly teach anything. I'm afrain my diagram probably doesn't convey much to anyone who is not already very familiar with the problem. If I'm not communicating, what's the point of doing all the work to post it? I mean, I probably put in at least five hours to type all that up, photo and clean up the whiteboard images, and add the source (Idea did most of the formatting - I'm not that crazy). That's a lot of hours to waste on something valueless. I think there's value there, but I'm not sure I exposed it well. <Sigh> Comments?

OK, scratch that somewhat. I just spent a couple more hours to expand the text and make it a real experience report. I still can't say that it teaches anything exactly, but at least it's clear what my intentions are. I don't think it looks like pointless babbling any more.

On another note, while doing my exercise today I pondered the question of the proper number of test cases. As I said yesterday, I came up with a set of 12 states, but only had four distinct output sets. How many cases are there really? According to my accounting (with the caveat that I have only done it in my head) I come up with 15 cases. I only missed three, and the ones I missed are not that significant. I was thinking it would be interesting to draw a diagram of all the cases. It would demonstrate quite clearly why we use the term corner case. :) Of course, some of the cases produce the same behavior and are treated the same. It would be interesting to count those and show them on the diagram as well. Maybe tomorrow. :)

˜ ™

There is a very good reason why I like reading Ursula's journal. I almost did a spit take on paragraph three here.