Dan Jones

One of the most important aspects of software QA is establishing a good working relationship with developers. If you want to get them to take your bug reports seriously, you have to approach them with the right attitude. If your bugs imply that their work is shoddy, they are likely to fight back on anything you submit. If you continuously submit trivial “bugs”, they will probably be returned right away with a “not an issue” or “works as designed” status. If you treat any bug like it’s a critical showstopper, they will think you’re crying wolf and not immediately jump on issues that actually are critical.

Then there’s people like Mr. Green, a former coworker of submitter Darren A., that give QA a bad name. The Mr. Greens of the QA world are so incompetent that their stupidity can cause project delays, rack up thousands of dollars in support costs, and cause a crapstorm between managers. Mr. Green once ran afoul of Darren’s subordinate Cathy, lead developer on the project Mr. Green was testing.

Cathy was en route to the United States from London for a customer visit when her phone exploded with voicemail notifications immediately upon disabling airplane mode. There were messages from Darren, Mr. Green, and anyone else remotely involved with the project. It seemed there was a crippling issue with the latest build that was preventing any further testing during an already tight timeline.

Instead of trying to determine the cause, Mr. Green just told everyone “Cathy must have checked something in without telling us.” The situation was dire enough that Cathy, lacking the ability to remotely debug anything, had to immediately return to London. Mr. Green submitted a critical bug report and waited for her to cross the Atlantic.

What happened next is perfectly preserved in the following actual bug report from this incident. Some developers are known for their rude and/or snarky responses to bug reports that offend them. What Cathy did here takes that above and beyond to a legendary level.

====
Raised:         14/May/2015
Time:           09:27
Priority:       Critical
Impact:         Severe
Raised By:      Mr. Green

Description
===========
No aspect of GODZILLA functions at present. All machines fail to connect with the server and we are unable to complete any further testing today.
All screens just give a funny message.
Loss of functionality severely impacts our testing timescales and we must now escalate to senior management to get a resolution.

15/May/2015 22:38
        User:   Cathy Scarlett
        Updated: Status
        New Value: Resolved - User Error
        Updated: Comment
        New Value:
                Thank you for this Mr. Green. I loved the fact that the entire SMT ordered me back to head office to fix
                this - 28 separate messages on my voicemail while I was waiting for my baggage.
                I was of course supposed to be fixing an issue our US customer has suffered for over a year but I
                appreciated having to turn around after I'd landed in New Jersey and jump back on the first return
                flight to Heathrow.

                Do you remember when you set up the Test room for GODZILLA Mr. Green?

                Do you remember hanging the WIFI router on a piece of string from the window handle because the
                cable wasn't long enough?

                Do you remember me telling you not to do this as it was likely to fall?

                Do you remember telling me that you sorted this out and got Networks to setup a proper WIFI router
                for all the test laptops?

                I remember this Mr. Green and I'm sure you'll remember when I show you the emails and messages.

                I walked into the test room at 10 o'clock tonight (not having slept properly for nearly
                3 days) to find the WIFI router on the floor with the network cable broken.
                        ROOT CAUSE: The string snapped

                There was a spare cable next to it so I plugged this one in instead.

                Then, because this was the correct cable, I put the WIFI unit into the mounting that was provided
                for you by networks.

                As if by magic, all the laptops started working and those 'funny messages' have now disappeared.
                GODZILLA can now carry on testing. I'm struggling to understand why I needed to fly thousands of
                miles to fix this given that you set this room up in the first place. I'm struggling to understand
                why you told the SMT that this was a software error. I'm struggling to understand why you bypassed my
                manager who would have told you all of this. I'm closing this as 'user error' because there
                isn't a category for 'F**king moron'

                72 hours of overtime to cover an aborted trip from London to New York and back:
                        £3,600

                1 emergency return flight:
                        £1,500

                1 wasted return flight
                        £300

                1 very nice unused hotel room that has no refund:
                        £400

                1 emergency taxi fare from Heathrow:
                        £200

                16 man days of testing lost
                        £6,000

                Passing my undisguised contempt for you onto SMT:
                        Priceless

Mr. Green was obviously offended by her response. He escalated it to his manager, who demanded that Cathy be fired. This left Darren in a precarious position as Cathy’s manager. Sure, it was unprofessional. But it was like getting a call from your child’s school saying they punched a bully in the nose and they want your child to be disciplined for defending themselves. Darren decided to push back at the QA manager and insist that Mr. Green is the one who should be fired.

This story might have ended with Mr. Green and Cathy forced into an uneasy truce as the company management decided that they were both too valuable to lose. But that isn’t how this story ended. Or, perhaps Darren's push-back back-fired, and he's the one who ends up getting fired. That also isn't how the story ended. We invite our readers to speculate, extrapolate and fabricate in the comments. Later this morning, we’ll reveal the true killer outcome…

And now, the conclusion to the story!

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Texts From Superheroes

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Michael Erard (of whom LH has long been a fan, and whose first appearance here in 2003 also concerned Unicode) has written a typically well-informed piece for the New York Times Magazine, “How the Appetite for Emojis Complicates the Effort to Standardize the World’s Alphabets.” He leads off with a timely reference to an obscure Rohingya alphabet that will soon be usable on computers or smartphones thanks to “a 26-year-old international industrial standard for text data called the Unicode standard, which prescribes the digital letters, numbers and punctuation marks of more than 100 different writing systems”: “The Rohingya will be able to communicate online with one another, using their own alphabet.” (Though as he points out they have more pressing problems at the moment.) He goes on to describe the history of emojis and the culture clash that ensued when the two phenomena collided:

At Emojicon, resentment toward Unicode was simmering amid the emoji karaoke, emoji improv and talks on emoji linguistics. “Such a 1980s sci-fi villain name [Unicode Consortium],” one participant grumbled. “Who put them in charge?” A student from Rice University, Mark Bramhill, complained that the requirements for the yoga-pose emoji he had proposed were off-puttingly specific, almost as if they were meant to deter him. A general antiestablishment frustration seemed to be directed at the ruling organization. One speaker, Latoya Peterson, the deputy editor of digital innovation for ESPN’s “The Undefeated,” urged people to submit proposals to Unicode for more diverse emojis. “We are the internet!” she said. “It is us!”

I have to confess I rolled my eyes, but I understand the reasons emoji-lovers want lots of emoji in Unicode; I thought Ken Whistler had a good take:

“Emoji has had a tendency to subtract attention from the other important things the consortium needs to be working on,” Ken Whistler says. He believes that Unicode was right to take responsibility for emoji, because it has the technical expertise to deal with character chaos (and has dealt with it before). But emoji is an unwanted distraction. “We can spend hours arguing for an emoji for chopsticks, and then have nobody in the room pay any attention to details for what’s required for Nepal, which the people in Nepal use to write their language. That’s my main concern: emoji eats the attention span both in the committee and for key people with other responsibilities.”

Anyway, it’s a good piece, and there’s a good discussion going on at the Log thanks to Victor Mair’s post.

The Archipod: It's not bigger on the inside, but it should be plenty big enough to get your creative and productive juices flowing as a backyard work dome. Plus, it looks pretty damn cool. If you're craving your own sphere of space cordoned off from co-workers and your gaggle of kids, or just want to own the biggest and best lawn ornament in the neighborhood, the Archipod is a freestanding, custom built, fully loaded garden office that will help you get your focus on from home. Top that, life-size Bigfoot statue!

The standard Archipod measures 9'6" in diameter internally at its widest point, and extends 8'3" to the top of the dome. A larger version, aptly named The Bigger Pod, has a 12'6" diameter and stands 8'5" tall.

All Archipods are built to buyer specifications, so think hard: what kind of big domed room in the backyard is going to get you pumped to go to work? To work hard? To make enough money to pay for the big domed room in the backyard?

A typical Archipod office is built as a curved plywood structural box with encapsulated fiberglass insulation and a plasterboard interior finish over foil insulation and a vapor barrier. All plastering and interior decorating are done post-installation, so your zen sphere won't show any jointing strips. Exterior siding shown in most of the gallery photos is western red cedar shingles, and the porthole skylight is a 3'4"-diameter dome designed to maximize natural light and ventilation.

Inside the Archipod you'll get an ergonomic semicircular desk, with drawers, shelves, and seating available by request. The work space is set up for full workstation integration, including power outlets, data outlets, and a complete lighting system of both dimmable spotlights and concealed background mood lighting.

If you don't have the space for an Archipod at home, but you really dig the idea of working in a sphere, check out the Emperor 1510 workstation.

Last night I was rooting around in the cellars of a particularly large codebase and stumbled upon our normalize.css which makes sure that all of our markup renders in a similar way across different browsers. I gave it a quick skim and found styles for a rather peculiar element called <output> that I'd never seen or even heard of before.

According to MDN, it "represents the result of a calculation or user action" typically used in forms. And rather embarrassingly for me, it isn't a new and fancy addition to the spec since Chris used it in a post all the way back in 2011.

But regardless! What does output do and how do we use it? Well, let's say we have an input with a type of range. Then we add an output element and correlate it to the input with its for attribute.

<input type="range" name="quantity" id="quantity" min="0" max="100">
<output for="quantity"></output>

See the Pen Input Output #2 by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks) on CodePen.

It... doesn't really do anything. By default, output doesn't have any styles and doesn't render a box or anything in the browser. Also, nothing happens when we change the value of our input.

We'll have to tie everything together with JavaScript. No problem! First we need to find our input in the DOM with JavaScript, like so:

const rangeInput = document.querySelector('input');

Now we can append an event listener onto it so that whenever we edit the value (by sliding left or right on our input) we can detect a change:

const rangeInput = document.querySelector('input');

rangeInput.addEventListener('change', function() {
  console.log(this.value);
});

this.value will always refer to the value of the rangeInput because we're using it inside our event handler and we can then return that value to the console to make sure everything works. After that we can then find our output element in the DOM:

const rangeInput = document.querySelector('input');
const output = document.querySelector('output');

rangeInput.addEventListener('change', function() {
  console.log(this.value);
});

And then we edit our event listener to set the value of that output to change whenever we edit the value of the input:

const rangeInput = document.querySelector('input');
const output = document.querySelector('output');

rangeInput.addEventListener('change', function() {
  output.value = this.value;
});

And voilá! There we have it, well mostly anyway. Once you change the value of the input our output will now reflect that:

See the Pen Input Output #3 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

We should probably improve this a bit by settting a default value to our output so that it's visible as soon as you load the page. We could do that with the HTML itself and set the value inside the output:

<output for="quantity">50</output>

But I reckon that's not particularly bulletproof. What happens when we want to change the min or max of our input? We'd always have to change our output, too. Let's set the state of our output in our script. Here's a new function called setDefaultState:

function setDefaultState() {
  output.value = rangeInput.value;
}

When the DOM has finished loading and then fire that function:

document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){
  setDefaultState();
});

See the Pen Input Output #4 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

Now we can style everything! But there's one more thing. The event listener change is great and all but it doesn't update the text immediately as you swipe left or right. Thankfully there's a new type of event listener called input with fairly decent browser support that we can use instead. Here's all our code with that addition in place:

const rangeInput = document.querySelector('input');
const output = document.querySelector('output');

function setDefaultState() {
  output.value = rangeInput.value;
}

rangeInput.addEventListener('input', function() {
  output.value = this.value;
});

document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function() {
  setDefaultState();
});

See the Pen Input Output #5 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

And there we have it! An input, with an output.

The Output Element is a post from CSS-Tricks

IRONATE doesn't just cook brick oven pizza without a brick oven, it cooks it without any oven at all. The IRONATE is a dish of intense heat conduction that needs only 3 minutes and a stovetop - even the glass flattop electric and induction kinds will work - to turn raw dough and cold toppings into a disc of pure crispy-chewy-cheesy-crust love.

No stovetop in the backyard, the weekend cabin, or the middle of the woods? Throw the IRONATE on your grill or secure it over a campfire for some brick oven love and killer pizza pies from anywhere.

The IRONATE is a carbon steel piece of cookware designed to get as hot as commercial pizza ovens in less than 10 minutes. And then cook your homemade pizza from scratch in 3 minutes more. Once pre-heated (it can reach 800+ degrees F) the IRONATE dish and cover radiate their energy into both crust and toppings for fast, even cooking. The bottom of the IRONATE acts like the floor of a wood-fired brick oven, holding as much heat as a few inches of bricks in its 1/4" special steel design.

Each IRONATE is sized to hold a 10" pizza, but can also nestle in veggies, shrimp, and fish for fast, flat-top-style grilling. And if you don't have time to press and toss your own dough, you can use the cooker to crisp up a 10" frozen pizza from the grocery store.

IRONATE orders come with the carbon steel dish and cover, a pair of wooden handles for picking up and transferring the cookware when hot, and a user manual with pizza recipes. Click here to read more about the IRONATE stovetop pizza oven, and to buy one of your own.

In De pueris instituendis (On the education of children, 1529), the great Renaissance humanist, borrowing from the classical rhetoricians Horace and Quintillian, helped reintroduce an important idea:

I have now come to the stage of my argument where I shall briefly explain how love of study may be instilled in children - a subject which I have already touched upon in part. As I have said, through practice we acquire painlessly the ability to speak. The art of reading and writing comes next; this involves some tedium, which can be relieved, however, by an expert teacher who spices his instruction with pleasant inducements. One encounters children who toil and sweat endlessly before they can recognize and combine into words the letters of the alphabet and learn even the bare rudiments of grammar, yet who can readily grasp the higher forms of knowledge. As the ancients have demonstrated, there are artful means to overcome this slowness. Teachers of antiquity, for instance, would bake cookies of the sort that children like into the shape of letters, so that their pupils might, so to speak, hungrily eat their letters; for any student who could correctly indentify a letter would be rewarded with it.

In grad school, I worked with a British literary historian who expertly broke this down into a post-psychoanalytic framework. Biscuits, like speech and writing, form a circuit between the eyes, hand, and mouth. The regulation of desire clears the way for the discipline of discourse. Like Plato, we move from the immanent and particular to the abstract and universal, but this is always mediated by the body, whose conflicting drives trouble these ideal categories.

I responded: “It’s Cookie Monster.” Growing up in England, he’d never heard of him.

Cookie’s idiosyncratic pronouns and truncated consonant clusters are a ruse. He’s easily the most verbally adept, best-educated character on Sesame Street. He teaches children the alphabet and vocabulary, and of course doubles as Alistaire Cookie on Monsterpiece Theatre. The growly voice, googly eyes, and outsized yearnings mask the heart of a scholar.

I bet he used to be a graduate student. You can’t show any of us free food without us reacting like this.

He even loves absurdist metafiction:

Cookie is all of us who always get underestimated, just because we refused to always change how we talk and how we act because we went to school. But we love those sweet leatherbound books, too.

NOTE: Cookie Monster was invited and was originally slated to collaborate on this post. He was excited; I was excited. Unfortunately, due to a scheduling conflict, he wasn’t able to appear. You have his and my regrets. (I swear on Mr. Snuffleupagus: All of this is 100 percent true.)

That's Dunking Buddy, not Drunking Buddy, Cornelius. Don't worry, I'm not replacing you. In fact, you could say that I'm making our Scotch Sundays, Tequila Tuesdays, Whiskey Wednesdays even better. This cup and magnetic clip set makes cookie dunking shallower. Foolproof. All risk of fumbling our Oreos and having to fish out drowned cookie mush from the bottom eliminated!

Dunking Buddy describes itself as the ultimate wingman for the "Big-Time" cookie dunker. Unlike this Cookie Dipper, the Dunking Buddy is a 2-piece magnetic tool that latches onto the inside / outside of your special Buddy cup (i.e., a plastic concession stand one) partially submerged beneath the milk's surface. Its interior piece is a slot shelf sized for holstering your cookie in place until it's saturated to your liking.

While not nearly as cool as milk & cookie shots, the Dunking Buddy has a much faster turnaround time and, according to its makers, helps kiddos practice hand-eye coordination as they learn about magnetic attraction. Ha! Hand-eye coordination and a science lesson? Please. Dunking Buddy is as shameless and conniving about persuading you to let your kids gorge on milk and cookies as they are themselves!

Surprise, hi!

It’s tempting to treat Prince’s “If I Was Your Girlfriend” as a genderscrambled version of Gladys Knight & The Pips’ “If I Were Your Woman” or Janet Jackson’s “If.” It’s really not. All three songs are great, but thematically and grammatically, “If I Was Your Girlfriend” is way more complicated than the others, and more intricate than almost any other song Prince wrote.

Prince is not just saying you’d be better off with him; he is not just saying that he wants to get in your pants. He’s not not saying those things, but Prince has written dozens if not hundreds of songs with that as his theme, and none of those songs are “If I Was Your Girlfriend.”

Prince is up to something. Even the usual interpretive trick for Prince’s songs — imagine that he is singing them to and about himself — doesn’t get you very far here.

Prince even mentioned how he wrote Cream in his own liner notes for his first greatest hits collection. https://t.co/7PGaO0snSv pic.twitter.com/vyJl5uuWmn

— Anil Dash (@anildash) September 23, 2017

Let’s start with that “Was.” We use the simple past “was” instead of the subjunctive mood “were” all the time, mostly because the subjunctive in English almost only shows up for a few irregular verbs like “were.” But there’s a songwriting tradition here; Prince knows it; every word is carefully chosen; we should take that “Was” seriously.

If I was your girlfriend, would U remember

To tell me all the things U forgot when I was your man?

The song is built on a series of conditional clauses, all of which are firmly set in the past. Was, would, could, sometime. Over and over again. Even when the singer lapses into something that seems like a present or present continuous tense, we get a counterpoint placing it in the past conditional again.

Sugar
Sugar, do you know what I’m saying 2 U this evening?
(If I was your girlfriend)
Maybe U think I’m being a little self-centered
But I, I said I want to be all of the things U are to me
(if I was your girlfriend)
Surely, surely you can see

That “this evening” is deixis — it’s pointing to say, “I am speaking these words HERE and NOW.” And it gets completely wiped away by the conditional past “If I was your girlfriend” and the conditional future “I want to be” and “surely you can see.”

This is an amazing song about intimacy, fantasy, the limits of gender roles, the limits of gender flexibility, a man’s full catalog of shortcomings and possibilities. This is also a breakup song, about heartbreak and desperation. It’s a song about a man putting the pieces of the past together and hoping they can add up to something more than they were.

Breakup songs are not exactly plentiful in the Prince catalog, although the ones he wrote were amazing. He wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U” for The Family because it didn’t fit the brand of progressive party pop he’d established for Prince and the Revolution. Sinead O’Connor covered it in 1989, after Prince had shifted his image with Sign O’ The Times, and everyone marveled (again) at his songwriting.

“If I Was Your Girlfriend” gets smuggled in as a Prince song at the right place and time. (Principle: every song on “Sign O’ The Times” is doing something other than what it seems to be doing.) The song is sexy because Prince is sexy. But the singer is losing the thread between past, present, and future. All those nesting dolls are collapsing. Even the marvelous, sensual come-on at the end, a desperate throw of the dice that pulls the song into the full future tense for the first time, gets framed as a dream:

And would you, would you let me kiss you there You know, down there where it counts I’ll do it so good, I swear I’ll drink every ounce And then I’ll hold you tight and hold you long And together we’ll stare into silence

And we’ll try to imagine what it looks like Yeah, we’ll try to imagine what, what silence looks like Yeah, we’ll, we’ll try to imagine what silence looks like Yeah, we’ll try

The song seemed to evolve for Prince himself. In early live shows and the song’s official video above, Prince is the sexy seducer. Of course he talks his ex into bed. He’s Prince — the one and only — and his fans came to see a Prince show.

Later, he can’t do the splits any more. He’s sitting at the piano. The BPM is slowed down to about 80 percent. His eyes are closed. It’s a Joni Mitchell ballad.

Anil Dash, CEO of Fog Creek software, blogging pioneer, and Prince superfan, told me about these late performances of “If I Was Your Girlfriend”:

In his final shows, Prince would do the song in medley with Bob Marley’s “Waiting In Vain”, a song he only started playing very late in life, that seemed to have a lot of meaning for him.

[“Wait(ing) In Vain is one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard, even in Bob Marley’s bouncey version. Prince’s cover on solo piano is devastating.]

In his last set of concerts, he’d pause the song to bring up a still of Streisand and Redford in “The Way We Were”, after the part where he says “if somebody hurt u, even if that somebody was me.”

One of the #PianoAndAMicrophone backdrop pics is from "The Way We Were", during #Prince's cover of "Waiting In Vain" pic.twitter.com/8JHGaMSNgk

— SERPAN99 (@serpan99) April 15, 2016

[This was at Prince’s second-to-last show, in Atlanta.]

It was one of the most honest and unexpected and sincere and heartbreaking things I think I ever heard him do. I was listening to audio of that in an airport in Tokyo a few months before he passed, and it brought me to tears, and it was one of the first things I returned to after I heard about his death. Was just as purely empathetic as I’d ever heard a straight man be in pop culture, and taught me a lot.

For me, losing Lou Reed was like losing a great teacher; losing Bowie was losing a hero; losing Phife was losing a best friend. But losing Prince, for many of us, was like losing the love of your life.

Texts From Superheroes

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From Coolest Cooler to cooler coffee table. And like its portable predecessor, Sobro has plenty of gadgety bells (dual speakers on the sides) and whistles (tabletop touch controls for all built-in systems) to complement its central refrigerator door.

The Sobro's cooler drawer keeps food and, more importantly, tasty beverages within easy reach. And rather than bags of ice, the table uses a compressor to ensure continuous, even, ice cold cooling of wine and beer. Touch temperature controls allow you to set the fridge at your precise preferred degrees Fahrenheit.

Along with the sound system, which you can connect to play TV audio with a smart TV or included Bluetooth dongle, the Sobro has LED underlighting to create ambience during parties, movies, or nights of Netflix with a side of chill.

Capping off the Sobro's implements of mass relaxation are a set of charging ports and a pair of 110v outlets on the side of the table, and two storage drawers to stash your cables and controls. Here's a GIF of the Sobro from above.

Also like the Coolest Cooler, the Sobro cooler coffee table enjoyed a wildly successful crowdfunding campaign. Its makers continue to sell discounted pre-orders via IndieGoGo, and at printing, it looked like the first couple batches of Sobros were going to reach their pledgers this month.