Testing is for wimps.

During the preliminary Meetings:

"You're running [insert ERP name here]? Our product can talk to that already. We won't even need to do any testing."

Come 'Go live' Day:

"Oh shit! It doesn't work!"

Three weeks Later:

"We found the problem. You never told us that your implementation of [insert ERP name here] uses [insert any standard feature of the ERP here]"

Post Mortem:

"Sorry guys. I guess the technology has not yet matured to a point where Business 2 Business integration can operate seamlessly WITHOUT ANY TESTING WHATSOEVER. We'll have to keep shrinking the budget until you eggheads get it right."

Quick reviews of Lovers by The Sleepy Jackson and Get Born by Jet

Lovers

I'm going to jump in a month or two early and declare this is my albunm of the year. Their sound and mood change completely from one song to the next - but maintain a very entertaining feel throughout.

Get Born

Bought this before I bought The Sleepy Jackson's album. It's a good album - but not great. Very little contrast throughout the album. If you think 'Are you gonna be my girl' is only a half decent song, then you'll get bored with this album very quickly. If you *really* *really* love 'Are you gonna be my girl' then you'll be happy getting 45 minutes of the same. Apparently there were millions of dollars spent producing this album, but I'm wondering where the money went? It can't cost much to get this dirty/raw kind of feeling.

Jet are playing at the next Big Day Out - so i'm going to listen to this while i sleep for the next few weeks to try and subliminially turn myself into a diehard fan by then.

According to Microsoft's Paul Vick, Refactoring support in VB.net will differ from that in C#. Terminology and structure of available features will be simplified to cater for the less rigorous intellect of the VB developer.

I cannot confirm that this image is legitimate. But it is reputedly the first screen shot of the context menu available to VB programmers in the Whidbey IDE.

Related articles:
The complete software Lifecycle
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The good lady and I have just returned from a holiday on Fraser Island at a resort that boasted bird watching tours with the close personal help of a qualified Forest Ranger

However, when the allotted time for our twitching session arrived, the weather turned crook and the ranger took one look at the sky before canceling the excursion and returning to the bar.

Thus we were left without any formal lessons on the naming of the local wildlife and over the course of the next few days were forced to invent our own names for any feathered creatures we encountered.

Although there are over three hundred and fifty native species of bird that frequent the island, I was shocked and fascinated to see the high number of exotic birds which have made their way onto the island. They are particularly numerous in the vicinity of the resort where they may have been attracted by the abundance of food scraps and cool watering places. As the native bird species are already well catalogued elsewhere, I have put together a brief field guide detailing the Exotic Birds of Fraser Island, and relying on our own nomenclature.

The area surrounding the resort's swimming pools was primarily inhabited by the following species:

• The Noisy Twat (English and German varieties)
• The Imported Hops Guzzler
• The Grumpy Grey Belcher
• The Purple-Crested Finicky Nit-Picker
• A number of Juvenile French shriekers

The beach areas abounded in exotic birdlife. A number of Mullet Crested Cod Fishers spent most of the day perched on the end of the jetty. At sunset a flock of Yappy Jap Snappers landed on the sand near me. And during the day great flocks of other creatures splashed about in the shallows of the nudist beach. Amongst them I catalogued the following:

• The Great Black Cock
• The Red Scrubby Thrush (relative of The Sandy Wet Jock)
• The Floppy Tit Wine Sipper
• The Large Breasted Prick Teaser
• The Woody Swallow Tit

And in the dunes behind a private section of the nudist beach we found evidence of a very secretive animal, but luckily we did not happen upon him in person, for he can be quite frightening if confronted, the Secluded Knob Whacker.

There are a number of birds that I did not see, but whose melodious calls filled the night. Their calls were too numerous to catalogue, but one in particular caught my ear. As I listened from the small swamp beside the main hotel block I heard the distinctive rumbling sounds of a Nutty Butt Splutter.

In several of the most secluded spots on the island I found a distant relative of the endangered Bald American Eagle, the rather more common Bald American Dickhead. The male is distinguished by his loud cry of "ISN'T IT PEACEFUL HERE!" which frightens away all native wildlife within a large radius.

As our journey drew to a close, and it was time to be escorted to the ferry, I saw another strange and interesting bird darting in and out of the driver's seat of the little passenger train. Unmistakable in its majesty, the hearty boom of its desperate call revealed it to be a Fat Fuckin Twit.

Thus ended the holiday - a time well spent, my love of nature grows ever stronger.

Are humans becoming cyborgs? Here is a list of software applications that I for one might actually die without.

1. Crazy Browser.

What is it?

A Multiple Document Interface Browser. Bad name - brilliant software. I've been browsing with this for the last year and a half. It's basically just a wrapper that sits on top of IE, turning it into an MDI. (You need to have IE installed)

Best Features:

• Leaves your task bar uncluttered
• Middle click to 'open in new window'
• use F2/F3 to move through the open windows
• Kills pop up windows automatically.
• Items in favourites open in new window (unless you change your settings)

2. TextPad

Best features:

• Excellent macro support
• Syntax highlighting for any language - easily customisable/extensible.
• support for both types of end of line char.
• block select mode
• regular expression support

3. Microsoft Visual Studio .Net

Best features:

• todo list

Wanted: a very lightweight version of VS.net, which is little more than an immediate window in run mode - so you can quickly test new lines of code against it. (And which supports intellisense as in version of VS.net > 1.0).

4. Microsoft Excel

If you only had one application on your 'business' computer then it would be a web browser. Next inline would be a spreadsheet.

Best feature:

• text to columns

Most of the time if I open excel I am probably not going to use its graphing capabilities, or use it for accounting, timesheeting or any of your other typical business uses.

I'm probably going to paste in some raw data and use the text-to-columns feature, plus insert column, to turn that data into something more useable (maybe HTML, a DOS batch file, a big sql command, a piece of generated code). Then I copy the information out, close down excel and start using the generated text.

The first noticeable drawback of text to columns is that you can't save your settings. (Unless you record a macro, which is like using a bazooka to open a door). The biggest drawback with using Excel to crunch your data (as many people have learnt the hard way) - is that Excel will autoformat your text, screwing up everything from dates to leading zeros.

I'm imagining a great new developer tool that would only allow text-to-columns and other data manipulation functions (ie. regular expression search/replace), and allow me to do them superfast and repeatably.

5. HTML-Kit

What is it?

A very extensible html editor. Lots of capabilities, but still fast, intuitive and non-instrusive.

Best feature:

• Plug-in support (and range of plug-ins)
• HTML-Tidy in particular
• It doesn't fiddle with your html

Also has nice integration with FTP, though I haven't had the opportunity to use that feature in some while.

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In 1995, Dr P Makuba, of the University of New Mexico, broadcast an email out across the universe, hoping for a reply from an intelligent, computer-aware lifeform.

After eight years of anticipation, the waiting is over and it appears we are not alone in the universe.

Scientists wasted no time deciphering the pan-galactic message:

Dr P believes that use of the word 'Ping' may have been a little too ripe for the outer galaxian mail server, and intends to tone down his salutations in future attempts at conversation.

Although he doesn't take their threat of termination seriously, he is at a loss to explain why his home village was yesterday wiped off the face of the earth by a gigantic thunder bolt.

"Maybe I could forward the outer galaxians a few jokes," said Dr P. "There's one about comparing Microsoft to Ford - it's bound to tickle their funny bone."

The mailing list is not yet ready. You can neither subscribe nor unsubscribe.

So far 1.0 people have been dissappointed.

I instead recommend that you subscribe to this site's RSS feed

RSS is an excellent method of keeping up to date with your favourite web sites. Read more about it at google.

I suspect that in the near future our email clients or our internet browsers will have RSS readers built into them. In the meanwhile, I recommend RSS Bandit. comments

People with goods ideas about Web Site Quality

• Jakob Nielsen's Usability Site
• American Gov Usability Guidelines
• The Usability Methods Toolkit
• Fixing your website (from the mind that brought you 'Web Pages that suck')
• W3C Web Accessibility Initiative

Validation Services

• W3C's Markup Validator
• W3C's CSS Validator
• W3C's Link Validator
• Bobby Accessibility Monitor
• Doctor HTML

You know you've been spending too much time thinking about website usability when:

While repainting your house, you insist that your wife only show you colour swatches based on the 216 web safe colours.

Here they are...

The basic scheme is that all colours have hex values for R G B that are either 00, 33, 66, 99, AA or CC.

Archaeologists digging at a site in France have discovered the earliest known web page, first written some 53 000 years ago.

Written in a primitive form of HTML 0.1 the page predates the use of CSS or DHTML and has a very rudimentary navigational structure consisting of animal bones and dirt, with no discernable back button.

A message from the past?

There is very little content on the page apart from a legal disclaimer, a very rudimentary privacy policy, and the remains of an ancient animated picture, showing the silhouette of a small caveman using a whale bone to shovel dirt, on a yellow background. The main message of the site is written in a language which has no equivalent in modern English but has been roughly translated as 'All your base are belong to us."

Early HTTP Request Process

Originally constructed on the side of a large boulder, the page was transferred from site to site by cavemen carrying a carved schematic representation of the page's content. Using the schematic, they would reproduce the page on a small browser rock, whenever requested by regional tribesmen.

Examination of skeletal remains found nearby has suggested that viewers of the page would show their veneration for the page by hitting the travelling caveman on the head with the branch of a tree. It is reasoned that the page author would then check for bruises on the head of these early HTTP messengers (HTTP is newspeak for 'Head Trauma Travelling People').

How far have we come?

Although these early 'hit counters' have been replaced by less violent means of monitoring traffic, little else has changed since.