Ordinary Day

In the ongoing process of doing my code work on my Github, I came across an idea that I’d actually encountered before. But it was one for which I’d never previously had an identifying term, and I was excited to learn about this.

Namely, Page Object Model testing. (Not to be confused with Project Object Model, which is what the POM in a pom.xml file stands for when you’re working with Maven.)

What this is: a way of writing a test framework that separates “code that represents the thing you’re testing” from “code that actually does the testing”. Turns out I’d learned about how to do this at Big Fish, when I picked up the idea and how to implement in Python.

Back in those days, it helped to do this because it let me have test cases that basically said “okay go get me the page I need to test, and stick all the data representing it into this object, which I will then do tests against”. It meant that in setup for tests, all I had to do was go grab an instance of the object that represented the page to be tested. And that meant in turn that the tests themselves were more tightly focused.

I found that it required a bit more organizational work to set up, but that once I had the idea in place, it meant writing future tests became easier. For example, if I had test script A that tested the homepage of the site, and then later needed to write test script B against the same page, I wouldn’t have to rewrite the code that loaded the homepage for testing. Likewise, if something about the structure of the homepage changed, I would only have to change the class that dictated that structure, with possibly only minor changes to any test scripts that needed to deal with it.

I liked this way of organizing code well enough that I have been implementing it on my Github repos. In the Python Selenium demo, specifically.

But, now that I’m done with the initial wave of Selenium tests and am looking at ways to expand the suite in both Java and Python, I started thinking of how to rearrange the organizational structure of both suites and seeing whether I could do a similar structure in Java. That led me to discovering that this whole concept had a name.

And it also led me to being able to implement Page Object Model testing in the Java Selenium repo, too.

What this means in practical terms is that I can think of pages on my test WordPress site in terms of “here is an object that represents an entire page, including child objects”. These child objects would be things that are shared across all pages, like a sidebar, or a footer, or a menu. Their various objects are things I have to implement only once in a Page Object Model system, and then use as necessary in tests that actually look at them on different pages.

So all in all this has been a satisfying area of research.

Some links I’ve used to read up about this:

Page Object Model (POM) | Design Pattern on Medium.com

Getting Started with Page Object Pattern for Your Selenium Tests on Pluralsight.com

On a previous job interview loop, one of the people I spoke with gave me good feedback about the work I’ve been putting up on my Github repos. He observed at the time that I had been hitting the low-hanging fruit: i.e., the test cases dealing with good, expected data.

He was right. So I’ve gone back and updated my repos for the WordPress REST API tests to also include negative test cases, i.e., known bad data, to test the error behavior of the endpoints. So here’s what I focused on to do that.

First, several of the endpoints ask for IDs of this, that, and the other thing: post IDs, category IDs, etc. For those sorts of cases, I did these negative tests:

• IDs that could be valid (i.e., were legit integers), but which did not actually exist as posts.
• IDs that were specifically not valid, i.e., things that were not integers. E.g., “aaaaaaa”.
• Using MAXINT as a post ID, just to use a GIGANTIC integer. Practically speaking I’d usually expect this to also be a “this post does not exist” scenario. But I’ve tested things in the past where throwing a thing a value slightly above a limit behaved, but throwing it a value WAY bigger than the limit did not. So I wanted to do this scenario too.
• Also using MININT as a post ID. This is not only to test using a gigantic thing, but ALSO to test using a gigantic thing that could not actually be a valid post ID (i.e., because it’s a negative number).

Secondly, several of the rest of the endpoints didn’t use IDs, but rather, slug/tags. So for those endpoints, I did negative test cases that were very similar.

• Slugs/tags that could be valid, i.e., strings, but which did not actually exist in the database (such as using “pancakes” for a category tag).
• Slugs/tags that could not be valid. E.g., using “pancakes” with additional non-alphabetic characters.
• Using MAXINT and MININT again.

In all of these cases, I threw the bad data at the endpoints and looked for specific error codes and error messages I was expecting to get in response. I also looked for 404 response codes.

I got the expected behavior by testing the various endpoints manually with bad data, in Postman, and seeing how they responded. That gave me the basic JSON response structure I would need to expect: that there would be both an error code and an error message, and an additional data object that would contain the response code within it. So my test cases looked for all three of these things.

As of this writing, I’ve implemented the negative test cases in Java, Python, and C#. Once I had them working in Java, it was reasonably easy to port them over to the other languages. In all three languages, this has now brought the test case count for the REST API suite from 20 up to 60.

In addition to learning the error behavior of the various endpoints, the most useful thing I’ve picked up on in this part of the project is how to get at MAXINT and MININT in the various languages.

In Java, it’s Integer.MAX_VALUE and Integer.MIN_VALUE. In Python, it’s sys.maxsize or -sys.maxsize–and this is Python 3, specifically. (Apparently, in Python 2, it was sys.maxint, but it changed; if I understand the change correctly, it was because Python 3 doesn’t have a hard and fast integer size limit, because it automatically recasts your number to a long on the fly if you go over the theoretical int limit.) And in C#, it’s int.MaxValue and int.MinValue.

Meanwhile, over in the Selenium test suites, there are fewer opportunities there for negative cases. But I did add some there that throw bad data at the search box, to verify that I get the appropriate messaging if there are no matching results. There’s some room for expansion there as well, to try to test the limits of what the search box can accept. So that’ll be the next place I add more negative cases.

I now have three active repositories up on my Github account. These are:

misc-configs: This one is for miscellaneous config files that are useful for the tests in the other repositories. What’s in here will mostly make sense to you if you are familiar with a) how to import data into a WordPress site, b) how to import Collections or Environment files into Postman, and/or c) how to use a YAML file to run Docker Compose to launch one or more containers.

wp-test-demo-java: This one is for my demo of testing the REST API endpoints made available by WordPress for any given site. Phase 1 of the work on this demo is complete, in which I test against the endpoints that handle publicly accessible data. I.e., the kinds of things you could find out about a WordPress site if you’re just a visitor to the site.

wp-test-demo-java-selenium: This demo is also using my test WordPress site, but here, I am doing front end testing rather than service testing. I’m using the Selenide Java library to run tests against the site via Selenium, a widely used automation framework for testing web pages. Selenide is a layer on top of Selenium that does the heavy lifting of Selenium setup for me, and frees me up to focus on the test cases I want to run.

This is a work in progress, but as of this post it has 27 test cases in it. There are more to come.

Other projects that’ll be showing up on my Github account include:

• Phase 2 of the REST API project, which would involve hitting service endpoints that specifically require authentication.
• Porting the Selenium tests over into Python, and structuring them in such a way as to be similar to the Python test framework we used on my former team at Big Fish. The intent here would be to demonstrate my ability to use Selenium in Python, and to write up a framework for it. (Which will require more work than the equivalent testing in Java!)
• The teeny WordPress plugin I want to do that’ll make nice Dreamwidth-style user and community name tags in a post or page for me. (This is the one I’ve mentioned before that would be an expansion on the very old plugin that does this for LJ user and community tags.) This would be written in PHP, and the intent HERE would be to show my comfort level with PHP. I haven’t used this language as much in a professional context, but I HAVE used it a lot over the years dealing with my websites, and I can demonstrate that here.

Stretch goals:

• Do something in JavaScript. What, I don’t know yet, but the obvious possibility would be to port some or all of the previously mentioned Selenium tests.
• Since I do have a locally running plugin on annathepiper.org that fuels my Roleplay Logs page, time permitting, I’d like to do a more solid version of that. Right now the plugin I’m running is a hack of the previous non-Wordpress-based code, and it talks to a database outside the WordPress structure. A cleaner version of this would actually be properly integrated with WordPress. If I get really fancy, I could do an entry form in the Admin UI for WordPress to allow the addition of new logs, and possibly even reading them in via the Media section of the site. This would, of course, also be written in PHP. More on this as events warrant!

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Spent most of today (very roughly during ‘work’ hours, just to try to keep to the whole idea of coding to a schedule) working on the WordPress testing demo project I talked about in my last post. As of this writing, I have some actual working things checked in up on Github. There’s only one functional test case so far, but it’s a start!

What I accomplished today:

• Creating a Github repo for this work
• Read about the API endpoints that WordPress makes available for any given site, some of which are publicly viewable, others of which require you to log in as a valid user
• Started a Postman Collection to keep track of the endpoints I’ll be playing with for my test site, and checked an initial version of this in on Github
• Refreshed my memory about how Unirest works, as this was the library we used at Big Fish to talk to various services; maybe not the most current library to use, but it’s the one I know, so I’m going with this for demo purposes
• Got IntelliJ on the Linux partition of my dev laptop updated to the latest version
• Built the actual project in IntelliJ, as a Maven project, so it’d have the correct file structure and a pom.xml file I could add dependencies to
• Started building a client class that will use Unirest to hit those endpoints for my local test site
• Built a BaseTest class in charge of doing setup used by all the test classes I’ll be making
• Built a TestPosts class to start the test cases for the “Posts” endpoints in the aforementioned API, and now it even has an initial functional test case!

Now that I have an actual working (if tiny) framework here, I should be able to fill in some test cases reasonably quickly.

Note also that the test suite assumes I am running the WordPress test site locally. For bonus usefulness I should make some sort of healthcheck test case that verifies that the test site is in fact UP.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

So one of the things I want to do during my between-jobs downtime is practice my coding. And in particular, since I thought it’d be nice to a) start small and b) play with something I’m actually interested in coding (as opposed to, say, just focusing on random interview-type questions which will eventually bore me to tears), I decided I’d try to play with making a small WordPress plugin.

I’ve already done one that I’m running locally on Annathepiper.org: namely, to show y’all my archive of roleplay logs. Eventually I want to do a newer version of that, something that might let me actually practice setting up a simple web service.

For now though I’m going to do something less complicated. There’s a very old plugin called “lj-tag-parser”. This thing has a very simple job: allowing the LJ-style syntax for usernames and communities in your WordPress posts and comments. I’m using it right here on annathepiper.org, which is why you can actually see LJ-style usernames and tags if I write something like, say, annathepiper.

However, this thing hasn’t been updated in ages. And I thought it’d be nice to expand it to allow Dreamwidth-style syntax in addition to LJ-style, and possibly also allow generation of such tags via shortcodes.

But before I do all of that, I wanted to make sure I could set up a clean WordPress dev install.

In the past, when I’ve played around with dev-type WordPress stuff, I just did this on a separate blog on my annathepiper.org network. But coming at this with my SDET hat on, I thought it’d be cleaner and more appropriate to developing my coding experience if I set it up the way I’d do it in a work environment.

Which means a brand new, clean WordPress dev install. And in particular, using official WordPress and MySQL images from Docker.

For those of you who aren’t in the tech industry, suffice to say that Docker is a tool that lets you do exactly this kind of thing. You can set up a thing you want to play with in its own little container on your system, without having to worry about it interfering with anything else you might be doing. Docker lets you go about this in a few different ways. You can go get official images for things (like, say, the latest WordPress install) and do a single run using that image.

Or, if you want to do something a bit more complicated (like, say, running the official WordPress image AND a MySQL image that you’ll need to actually power the WordPress install), you can chain them together using a thing called Docker Compose.

Docker Compose works by you setting up all the config data you need in a file called docker-compose.yml. I’m still fairly new to the syntax this thing requires, but fortunately, I learned a bit about it while I was still at my previous day job at Big Fish. So I was able to utilize that knowledge to build a file that’d let me set up that clean WordPress dev install I want.

I did have to jump through a few hoops to get all the info I needed, though. Here are some pages that proved useful:

• Local WordPress Development with Docker: 3 Easy Steps on Medium (for initial tips on what images I needed, as well as a handy note in the comments re: adding PHPMyAdmin)
• WordPress Dockered Environment on Github (where I looked at that user’s example docker-compose.yml)
• docker-compose wordpress mysql connection refused on Stack Overflow, to solve an issue I was seeing in my Compose logs
• How Do I Set Hostname in Docker Compose?, also on Stack Overflow, to see what settings I needed to allow for a friendly hostname, vs. just having to say “localhost” in my dev URL
• Install WordPress with Docker Compose on Linode.com, which helped me solve an issue with the dev site not properly loading its assets

So now, as of this writing, I have a nice little set of Docker containers running on my dev box on Linux. And the nice thing about doing this via Docker, especially, is that I could take this exact same docker-compose.yml, reboot my box into Windows, and use it there too. All I need to be running locally is Docker and Docker Compose. The rest of it comes in with the images I specify!

And for the interested, I have checked in my final docker-compose.yml up on my personal Github account, and you can see it right here.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

If you follow me on Facebook you’ll possibly have seen me periodically posting about how my neighborhood in Kenmore is overrun by wild bunnies in the summer, and this year is no exception. One of the things I quite enjoy about the walk up and down our hill when I’m doing my daily commute is looking for bunnies–whether they’re hanging out openly in someone’s yard, or ducking under bushes, or what have you.

I take pictures of them when I can. Like, say, this one!

You might notice, though, that this picture is kind of soft and fuzzy, and I mean that in a “not just because it involves a bunny” kind of way. The reason for this, I have discovered, is because the iPhone (at least up through the 6’s, as well as the non-Plus 7, according to specs on apple.com) uses digital zoom. And digital zoom gets problematic the closer in you try to zoom.

The common wisdom I’ve seen is that if you want to take a pic with an iPhone, you need to not zoom at all, and crop to get what you want. This is fine if what you’re taking a pic of is pretty close to you. Like this bunny! (This remains my very favorite bunny pic I’ve taken to date.)

But if a bunny is more than two or three feet away from you, you kinda have to zoom to shoot it. Because if you try to get closer, it will very likely sense your presence and bolt.

Which brings me to how I saw Dreamwidth friend cruisedirector posting her own bunny pics! She’s got some nice ones here and here and here, and in general, I’m rather jealous of her zooming abilities! She informed me that Samsung rather gets the credit for this, and if I google zoom specs for Samsung phones, I see things like “10x optical zoom” for the Galaxy S4 and yeah, that’d be why she’s taking better bunny pics than I am. ;D

So then I got all “so what can I do to solve this problem?”

Googling around led me to learning that there are assorted third-party lenses that have been made for the iPhone. The top two contenders I saw in my research were the Olloclip and the Moment, and of the two, camera nerds I read up on have been saying that the Moment is the superior lens.

The problem for me though is that the way the Moment works, they expect you to glue a mounting plate onto the back of your device, and screw the lens into that. I was rather dubious about this–and moreover, decided that I didn’t want to go hunting for one of these, even though I’d read in an article I found posted on the Seattle Times from 2016 that indicated that these lenses would be on sale at the Apple Store in Bellevue.

So instead I opted for the Olloclip. And specifically, I bought this thing, which gives me a telephoto lens and a wide angle one. The telephoto one is the one I’m interested in, since it gives me some optical zoom capability… 2x optical zoom as well as a shallower depth of field. It’s super-easy to pop onto the phone, and I can flip it around to use the wide angle lens. Both lenses can line up with the front and back cameras.

The one drawback here is that I do have to take the phone’s case off, but I’m okay with that.

And so far, the one thing I’m not entirely happy with is that test shots I’ve done with notable amounts of sky in them have caused there to be a bit of a dark halo effect in the corners. So to account for this, I will need to practice aiming and then cropping to get rid of that.

Also, if I change phones and want to continue to have an external lens, I’ll need a different one because this one is specifically designed for the iPhone 6. So far though I’m okay with that, too! My current phone is still perfectly lovely and I won’t be updating it in the near future.

So for now this little toy should be perfectly lovely for my bunny-photographing needs, and I will also be taking it to Quebec with me–because I’m hoping the improved zoom will let me do better at taking pics of musical performances, too. 😀

Here are a bunch of test pics I’ve done with the lens clip so far (and if the thumbnails aren’t coming through for some reason, you can find them directly on flickr here):

Happy with the purchase so far. Playing with this is already fun! Looking forward to learning more!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

As y’all know, I’m an Apple user of many years at this point. I’m on my second Macbook computer since 2007, and my third iPhone since 2009. And since fairly tech-savvy, I tend to jump on OS upgrades as they happen. This week, with the release of iOS 10, was no exception.

And, as I’ve posted both here and on my social media accounts, by and large I’m happy with it. With the one big glaring exception that the redesigned Music app is an unholy mess and I would now like to shoot it into the sun. Go see that post for details on that, as well as a few initial observations on a couple of alternative apps I am exploring.

This post is about everything else, assorted observations I made through the process of installing the update on my phone and my iPad, and while using it today on the phone on my commute.

Dara’s best reaction to my live updates:

https://twitter.com/annathepiper/status/775894787694002176

I do indeed figure that any OS update that does not result in my device exploding is probably a win.

During Setup

iOS apparently has two-factor authentication now for logging into your iCloud account. This is a good thing. I approve.

I also noticed that it offered to add the credit card I already had on file with Apple for buying music and such to Apple Pay. I have no fucks to give about Apple Pay but went ahead and let it do this anyway. I may want to test this at some point.

No More Sliding to Unlock

I may be one of the few iOS users on the planet that doesn’t really care about the widgets on the lockscreen. I’m a little sad that “slide to unlock” has become extinct now, because iOS 10 wants you to swipe left to get to widgets, and swipe right to get to the camera. Both of which seem fine to me from a usability standpoint, but I’m tellin’ ya, it’s going to take me a while to get over the muscle memory of needing to swipe left to unlock the phone.

I have an iPhone 6, not a 6s or later, so I don’t get to have the shiny new Raise to Wake functionality. But it is pretty nifty to be able to unlock the phone via Touch ID. Which, come to think of it, I was able to do in iOS 9, I think. I just never ever actually realized that before.

Still, though, this is what it looks like if I swipe left now from my lockscreen.

Widgets! Yay?

Overall Design

A bunch of font changes all over the place, but aside from the ones in the Music app, so far I’m not seeing anything to annoy me. All of my various apps still look pretty much the same, and none of them appear to have broken. So at least from a design perspective, iOS 10 doesn’t look particularly different from iOS 9 except in the Music app. Nothing here for me to hate, but nothing to get excited over either.

And I’m a little surprised to have found only one new system wallpaper I didn’t recognize. Apparently wallpapers are not something about which iOS 10 concerns itself. I’m a little sad about that, too, because sometimes I do use the system wallpapers. They tend to be a bit better at not making it too hard to read the labels on my apps.

Performance

There does appear to have been a noticeable boost in performance on my devices. Uploading a photo to Facebook and Twitter over the house wifi was smokin’ fast, and even pretty speedy over phone connectivity as well.

Bluetooth

My Jabra Move headphones seem like they’re connecting faster to the phone now, and during the course of today as I played music and podcasts, they held up pretty well. But they started flaking out on me partway through the afternoon, and I’m not sure yet whether that’s the fault of the new OS, or the fault of the headphones maybe running low on battery. I didn’t hear them fire off a low battery warning, so I’ll have to keep an eye on that over the next few days and see if the problem recurs.

Mail

There’s a new filter icon in the Mail app, down in the lower left hand corner, that lets you zoom in on just the unread messages in the mailbox you’re looking at. I don’t know if I’ll find this useful yet, but it seems like something that might be useful to me at some point.

App Deletion

I’m a little vexed that the touted ability to delete the stock apps you don’t find useful is deletion in name only–you can just blow away the icons off the home screen, vs. actually deleting them off the device and therefore freeing up space. But still, I’ll take it. Fewer icons to have to keep track of is nice.

All in All

This doesn’t feel like a particularly revolutionary upgrade to me, and the only thing that’s blatantly different amongst the stuff I actually use and care about, i.e., the Music app, is a significant step downward.

I do not care at all about the new emojis, or the added functionality in the messages app. I certainly don’t care about app functionality within messages. And as I mentioned up at the top of this post, I don’t particularly care about the widgets on the lockscreen either. Since I have a 6, I don’t have the 3D Touch capability that’s supposed to be what makes these widgets so awesome. Y’all will have to look to reviews written by people with newer devices than mine, I think, to get more deets on that. (Try Ars Technica’s comprehensive review, maybe?)

On the other hand, my phone’s general performance does feel faster. I’m seriously disgruntled about the Music app being a dumpster fire now, enough that I’m looking for alternative music apps. But that’s not enough to make me sad that I did the update in general. As Ars Technica says in the headline of their review, if you’ve got a reasonably new device, there’s no particular reason not to update.

(If you’ve got an older device, note also that Ars Technica has an entirely separate post about iOS 10 on the iPhone 5 and 5c, so that might be worth a read to you.)

So if you’re a technophile like me and willing to dive in headfirst to a new OS upgrade, go for it; just be aware of the issues with the Music app. If you’re more conservative though and prefer that a new OS release go through a few cycles of bugfixes, there’s nothing hugely groundbreaking here that I see to argue you out of that.

Final rough grade in general: B+
Final rough grade for the Music app in particular: D-

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

As I announced yesterday, I have now have a minimal backup version of my author site up on angelahighland.wordpress.com. I’m disgruntled that I have had to do this, and only somewhat reassured by having seen our city council put up this statement pertaining to our ongoing chronic outage problem.

But this does at least mean that now I’ve had a bit of direct experience setting up a site on WordPress.com. Which is useful experience to have, since it tells me things I can share with fellow authors who need to set up a site for their books.

Setting up the site is really easy

All you really need is an account on WordPress.com, to start with. Once you have one of those, when you’re logged in, there’s a “My Site” button up in the upper left part of their site. Clicking on that leads you to the setup wizard you can step through to get a site going. They ask you some basic questions about what your site will be about, so that they can give you a bit of guidance as to what default themes they will suggest for you.

This process includes choosing a theme, and choosing what level of site plan you want. Your options for the latter do include ‘free’, with varying tiers above that that cost different amounts of money depending on what level of service you want from them.

Assuming you quickly choose one of the offered default themes and you choose the ‘free’ plan, setting up your site is only a matter of a couple of minutes. This is even easier than setting up your own site with the code from WordPress.org.

Your site will however be limited in available functionality

If you’ve got any experience setting up your own self-hosted WordPress site at all, you will probably find the limitations on a WordPress.com site annoying. Specifically, you will not be able to install your own plugins. I get why this is the case–they are a commercial site, and accordingly, they need to lock down what they’ll let users install and what they won’t, for security purposes. But if you’re accustomed to the fine-grained level of control hosting your own site will provide you, this will likely be a step down for you.

You do get a small range of plugins available to you, though. You can find those on the My Site sidebar, under Plugins. What’s of immediate interest to me is that they do have a “Publicize” plugin that lets you crosspost out to various social media sites. And there’s a Stats plugin that can show you some basic site stats, along with an extended Google Analytics plugin that you can purchase if you want more data than what the basic plugin will provide you.

A similar level of lockdown is in place on selecting themes. But unless you’re a techie like me, with enough HTML and CSS experience that you can fine-tune a theme to get it the way you want it, this probably won’t be an issue. There do appear to be a wide variety of themes available, both free ones and ones you can purchase. What I don’t see upon initial investigation is whether you can install your own theme–which is why I haven’t ported over the one I’m using here on angelahighland.com. I suspect they won’t let you do that unless you pony up for one of the paid tiers of service.

The My Site sidebar is actually kind of annoying

Again, this is a matter of my being a techie and also used to what I have available via the standard wp-admin sidebar in my self-hosted WordPress site. The My Site sidebar WordPress.com provides you is simplified from that–which I think would probably be a plus for less technically inclined users.

For me, though, it’s an annoying step down. And matters are not improved by how that sidebar seems to perform very badly in Safari, my browser of choice when I’m working on my Macbook at home. I can still get to the standard wp-admin sidebar, but it’s extra clicks to get to, and I don’t get to it by default if I try to edit any of the pages on the site. I have yet to find any way to make this my default sidebar via the UI that WordPress.com provides.

All in all

Despite my being vexed by the difference in available functionality between the WordPress.com UI and what I’m used to with my own self-hosted site, I did appreciate the quickness with which I was able to fire up a site there. And I do know that a lot of authors have their presences there and have found it very useful. John Scalzi, for example, has repeatedly posted on his blog at Whatever that he’s very satisfied with the service they provide him; he’s paying for the upper tier of service and he’s finding it very worth his money.

Anybody got any questions about how the WordPress.com site works, that would help you decide if you want to make a site there yourself? Got any experience of your own with WordPress.com sites that you’d like to share? Drop a comment and let me know!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Over on James Nicoll’s LJ, this past weekend, I saw this post wherein James was asking for help on an OpenOffice feature–and folks in the comments were advising that he should consider switching over to LibreOffice instead.

The basis for this is that apparently the code base for OpenOffice is not getting actively updated. The last release was back in October of 2015, and there is a known security issue now that hasn’t been fixed in any release of the suite yet. That issue is described here, where it is noted that there is a hotfix patch available, if you’re comfortable with trying to install that.

But more tellingly, also in the comments on James’ thread, I saw a link off to this Ars Technica article that discusses an active possibility that OpenOffice just might be shut down. Apparently Apache’s OO team doesn’t have enough active developers to support the code.

So if you’re an OpenOffice user, you might want to keep an eye on this. At minimum, you should go install the patch discussed on the security bulletin I link to above. And you should think about whether you want to continue to use OpenOffice, or maybe make the switch to LibreOffice instead, since that’s still being actively developed.

Whatever you decide to do, good luck!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

This blog post link is going around today, in which the writer describes how he signed up for the Apple Music subscription service–and it promptly torched all local music files on his hard drive, including stuff he’d downloaded directly from artists’ websites, and stuff he’d recorded himself.

And I’m seeing a bunch of people on my social media feeds instantly leaping to the conclusion that iTunes and Apple must suck in general, and that OHNOEZ APPLE IS EVIL!!!! Which, no. That’s not a justified conclusion.

Because this isn’t an iTunes issue–I know a bunch of people who’ve told me that iTunes has caused them a bunch of headaches, but this isn’t actually iTunes’ fault. This is Apple Music’s fault.

For those of you who aren’t Apple users, Apple Music is not the same thing as iTunes. It’s their music streaming subscription service, akin to Pandora or Rhapsody. The entire idea here is supposed to be that it can give you access to all of your music on all your computers and devices. Nice idea in theory, but in actual practice, it’s an implementation nightmare–if you’re one of the people falling into the edge case that that blog post describes. A whole bunch of users of the service are never going to have this problem, since they’re probably buying their music from the iTunes store regardless, and that’s the userbase Apple’s trying to target here.

But if you do fall into that set of edge case users, if you’re somebody who frequently buys your music from other sources (say, directly from artists on Bandcamp), and even rarer, if you’re somebody who records your own music and you’ve got that on your computer along with stuff you’ve bought commercially… then yes, this is a huge problem.

What’s happened here is that this particular guy fell into that edge case, and it revealed that Apple’s failure to gracefully handle the problem is a spectacular failure indeed.

But at the end of the day this is still just a spectacular functionality failure, not a sign that OHNOEZ APPLE IS EVIL AND IS GOING TO STEAL MY MUSIC. And I’m not saying this just because I’m a generally loyal Apple user who thinks Apple can do no wrong. This is a spectacular failure and I’m absolutely willing to call it out as such–in no small part because I’m also a QA engineer in my day job, and I am now cringing at the thought of how their QA people must have reacted to this edge case before the service shipped.

What is an edge case? Let me explain by telling you a bit about how a software development cycle works. It goes kind of like this.

1. The Powers that Be in a software company says to their engineers, “we want a feature that does X”.
2. The engineering team goes “okay, we’ll do X!” They start doing some designs as to what the feature will look like, and drawing up a specification for the details of how the feature should work.
3. There’s often some debate between designers, developers, and QA (quality assurance) as to what can and cannot be implemented to make the feature work as requested.
4. A schedule is worked out as to how long it will take to do the work. A target release date is settled upon.
5. Developers build the feature and start handing pieces of it off to QA so QA can test it and make sure it actually works as requested, according to the designs and specs.
6. QA files a bunch of bugs about anything that’s broken.
7. Development fixes those bugs.
8. QA verifies that the reported bugs have been fixed.
9. Repeat until the release date is achieved.

Now, sometimes QA will find issues with a feature that are problematic, but only for a small likely percentage of users. This is called an edge case.

When that happens, the team as a whole has to decide whether it’s appropriate to spend time fixing that edge case, even if QA has already said that this is going to be a problem for X number of users. Even if it’s a serious problem. If the problem only affects a small number of people, then some decisions have to get made as to how the team will proceed.

Sometimes they’ll say, “We can’t code a solution for this edge case because if we do, it’ll keep us from shipping on time and we’ll have to swing back around and fix it later”. And sometimes they do just that. But sometimes “later” never happens. Sometimes teams decide that they just can’t spare the time to fix that edge case, because they have other higher priority work they have to be doing and they don’t have enough people on the team to do everything.

Problem is, sometimes that edge case they didn’t fix will come back to bite its creators in the ass. This is one of those times.

Remember, folks: computer software is written by people. People are fallible. Therefore your software is, every so often, going to fuck up. Sometimes it’s going to fuck up spectacularly. This does not mean that the creators of that software are evil. It just means they’re people.

But at the same time, if a spectacular failure like this happens to you, you’re totally justified in being upset. It’s absolutely frustrating when you lose a bunch of your personal data like that. Certainly if I’d been in the shoes of the blogger I’m linking to above, I’d have been equally pissed off.

Just try to remember if you can that the people who made that software on your computer are still people just like you. They’re really, really not out to destroy your data personally. “Let’s destroy all our users’ data” really doesn’t work as a successful business plan, after all.

Also remember: for gods’ sakes, do backups. If you’re a Mac owner, Time Machine should already be doing this for you. If you’re a PC or Linux user, and you’re not already running regular backups, find out NOW how you can do so. And regardless of what kind of computer you use, if you have super-critical data like personal creative output you’ve done, do extra backups of that stuff.

For example, all of my writing work, in addition to getting backed up by Time Machine, lives on my Dropbox account so that I have backup copies of that not only separate from my computer, but also separate to my house network. If you’re a creative person of any stripe–artist, writer, musician, whatever–I strongly encourage you to consider similar strategies for your creative output.

For more on this, I direct y’all over to Dara’s post on this topic, too. She’s got some in-depth analysis of why Apple chose to implement the Music service this way, and how she and others at the time it rolled out complained about this very edge case. Worth reading if you want a more technical look at how this all works.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.