I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

Don’t Be Cute with Your Test Data

Exciting news to start my day. A piece I contributed to O’Reilly’s forthcoming 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know has been picked for inclusion in the book. I’m “published”!

Below is my piece. The opening example isn’t exactly historically accurate, but it’s pretty close to something that almost got me fired from my first job!

It was getting late. I was throwing in some placeholder data to test the page layout I’d been working on.

I appropriated the members of The Clash for the names of users. Company names? Song titles by the Sex Pistols would do. Now I needed some stock ticker symbols — just some four letter words in capital letters.

I used those four letter words.

It seemed harmless. Just something to amuse myself, and maybe the other developers the next day before I wired up the real data source.

The following morning, a project manager took some screenshots for a presentation.

Programming history is littered with these kinds of war stories. Things that developers and designers did “that no one else would see” which unexpectedly became visible.

The leak type can vary but, when it happens, it can be deadly to the person, team, or company responsible. Examples include:

• During a status meeting, a client clicks on an button which is as yet unimplemented. They are told: “Don’t click that again, you moron.”
• A programmer maintaining a legacy system has been told to add an error dialog, and decides to use the output of existing behind-the-scenes logging to power it. Users are suddenly faced with messages such as “Holy database commit failure, Batman!” when something breaks.
• Someone mixes up the test and live administration interfaces, and does some “funny” data entry. Customers spot a $1m “Bill Gates-shaped personal massager” on sale in your online store.

To appropriate the old saying that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” in this day and age a screw-up can be Dugg, Twittered, and Flibflarbed before anyone in the developer’s timezone is awake to do anything about it.

Even your source code isn’t necessarily free of scrutiny. In 2004, when a tarball of the Windows 2000 source code made its way onto file sharing networks, some folks merrily grepped through it for profanity, insults, and other funny content. (The comment // TERRIBLE HORRIBLE NO GOOD VERY BAD HACK has, I will admit, become appropriated by me from time to time since!)

In summary, when writing any text in your code — whether comments, logging, dialogs, or test data — always ask yourself how it will look if it becomes public. It will save some red faces all round.

Eulogy for the Clydester

A moments silence, if you will, for Horatio Clyde Begbie. 1996–2010.

Clyde joined our household in 2006 via the good folks at New England Basset Hound Rescue. His previous owners were moving and unable to take Clyde with them.

A friendlier, lazier, more perfect-for-the-Begbie-family dog you’d be hard-pressed to find.

Clyde quickly became “my” dog. Wherever I was in the house was where he wanted to hang out. When I moved to SF three months ahead of Joy and the dogs, he spent a lot of time in the front hall waiting for me to come home. Indeed, when I had iChat video conferences with Joy and he heard my voice, he’d go barreling to the front door to greet me.

Clyde was an old soul when we got him, so to some degree we were always semi-prepared for the time when be would no longer be with us. Every day he was in our lives was bonus time for a dog who had already lived a pretty full life before he became a Begbie.

I’m a fairly rational sort. I hold little truck for concepts like rainbow bridges. At this time, I am instead comforted by three-and-a-bit years of memories of one of the sweetest, most loving, and endearingly stubborn hounds ever to lounge around this planet.

RIP Clyde. You shall be missed.

MMX - XXL

I have never been svelte.

This much should be stated at the start. The closest I’ve come to a healthy weight was during my four years as a student. Deprived of the contents of my parents’ fridge, and not yet able to enjoy the slap-up dining that a salary would afford, I was never “skinny” or beerbellyless”.

But I am currently fatter than I’ve ever been. I’ve put on almost 30lbs in the last year. Something needs to change.

I chose January 1st for two reasons:

1. It’s traditional to make a new year resolution. The new beginning of a new year, and all that.
2. I could gorge during the Christmas period.

By luck, last week, Richard Wiseman posted a blog entry on how to keep your resolution. Some good solid advice in there. In particular, state and track your goal publicly, and keep it measurable.

This has worked for me in the past. I decided that my goal for 2008 was to move to San Francisco, was open about it, and by the end of March, I had a job all lined up.

So here is my official goal for 2010: Weigh 210lbs on December 31st 2010.

That’s a drop of almost 60lbs. I think I can probably shift about 5–10lbs this month (the start of a diet always sees a quick drop), then sustain losing 1lb a week for the rest of the year.

My expectation is that this will require experimentation and tweaking. So here is my plan for January:

• Using Lose It, a free iPhone app to keep track of calories. (Hat tip to Daniel Jalkut for mentioning Lose It on Twitter). I’m doing good old-fashioned calorie counting—no complex points calculation, no rules on what can and can’t be eaten. Your standard “Burn more than you consume, and you’ll lose weight” plan. This isn’t about changing what I eat; it’s about changing the quantity I eat.
• In the spirit of keeping it public, I purchased the Withings WiFi Body Scale, a sleek and sexy set of bathroom scales which upload your data to the web. My progress can now be tracked by anyone at @lardyarsedgit. Go on and follow it! One tweet a day, and it’ll make me feel a lot better!
• Regarding exercise, I’m starting off easy. Not going to join a gym or buy (another) treadmill. Instead, I’m going to try to take a smattering of small steps. For the beginning, I’m going to stop riding the elevator at work (taking the stairs to and from my team area on the 6th floor), and pledge to take Bacon for a 40-minute walk three times a week. If I can’t do these little things, there’s no point throwing $$$ at a gym.

At the end of each month, I’ll adjust the plan. But right now, it all feels very achievable.

My BHAG for the year? Next January, I’ll be able to sign up for The San Francisco Marathon Training Program and be able to run the SF Marathon in July 2011.

Keep your fingers crossed for me.