Testing Times

So got back tonight from a day at the office. No trains for the week so had to feel sick on a bus. We live in Rural Wales and that means no road goes anywhere straight. Twists and turns everywhere and the bus bounces all over the place too. Bluuuurrrrggggg! Green is not a good colour for me.

Handed over my baby. An app I have been working on. Its been passed on for testing. Always a nerve wracking thing to pass your baby over to someone to poke, rip and destroy, but after 10 years of this I have started finally to not take it that personal. Its difficult, takes a long time to see bugs as things that just happen. You can't remember everything. No matter how careful you are it isn't possible to have 100% error free code. It also does not help that you sort of become blind to the errors. You just simply don't push the weak points that hard. Everyone does it, you need a fresh pair of eyes to look things over, to use it for a while to see the problems.

So I handed it over and paced the rooms and corridors awaiting the first bug reports. The first few things were easy to fix, mainly functional interface things. It is a programmer for micro controllers and supports about 60-70 devices. I made a few errors in their setting which I need to fix, but basically so far all is good. And the FW is only 2.5k, and I consider that bloatware, lol. Largest FW I every wrote was 4k. They do 128k devices but pah, who needs that much space. Oh and Atmel, 2313 = 2k 4313 = 4k? Please! Pin compatible and I will love you forever. Must be pin and package compatible with the 2313 remember ;)

So I wait for more reports, and on Friday will take the sick bus back to the office to get my next bunch of bug reports. Oh and a mention here to something I heard on John C Dvoraks Tech 5 podcast. I have a multi-threaded DLL addon for one of our kits that can run 8 programmers simultaneously, which DOES use multi-core processing. Thread based apps should use multi-cores easily, problem is that not enough people do threaded code, it is a pain to debug but makes a big performance gain over single process code.

Also had the thought that what I would love to see is a new OS. One that is not compatible with anything else written. Something that is small, HDD efficient, pretty, stylish, modern, memory efficient. Something completely new. Is there any alternative to Windows, Leopard or Linux, something out of the ordinary new bright and gleaming? Maybe that could be my next project. The MS, Apple killer OS ;) If you know of any projects along this line, leave a comment with a link and I will check it out. Remember though, not Linux, windows or Leopard, totally new and unique.

Right back on my head ;)