Archive for July 11, 2007

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July 11, 2007 at 10:16 pm · Filed under legacy, seattle, running

If you’re like me, when you read this weather alert:

   THE HEAT WAVE WILL CONTINUE TODAY WITH WARMER CONDITIONS EXPECTED
   COMPARED TO YESTERDAY. AFTERNOON HIGH TEMPERATURES WILL REACH
   INTO THE MID 90S TO NEAR 100 DEGREES. THIS IS 20 TO 25 DEGREES
   ABOVE NORMAL. THE COMBINATION OF HIGHER TEMPERATURES AND HIGHER
   RELATIVE HUMIDITY WILL CREATE VERY UNCOMFORTABLE AND DANGEROUS
   CONDITIONS ACROSS THE AREA.

You think “time to go heat up some coffee and think about the afternoon run.”

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Why I would slit my wrists if I worked on open source

July 11, 2007 at 1:14 am · Filed under legacy, tech

Maybe this example is exaggerated but one thing that frequently drove me nuts while working at Microsoft was poor bug management. A high quality bug should have a number of characteristics:

  • terse - the bug should contain the necessary information for the reported issue, any further investigation or clarification of the issue, progress of the investigation into resolving the bug, and little else
  • completeness - a bug should be a complete picture of the reported issue. It should reproduce and have the required information to reproduce the problem
  • steps, expected behavior, and actual behavior - always should be included even if the expected/actual behavior are “no crash/crash” or some buggy actual behavior and the bug reporter doesn’t know what the expected behavior should be.

That’s not a comprehensive list but it’s a decent start for productive software creation.

Compare that with this Mozilla bug that was reported last November dealing with a cross-site scripting bug leaving part of the Firefox password manager vulnerable. This led me to not use Firefox’s password manager for the past 9 months. I’d like to use it again but not if every myspace user (or user of other, similar sites) could snarf my own account password. Today I thought “Hey, I wonder if that’s fixed yet and I can start using this feature again?” so I checked the bug.

Holy christ. Almost 400 comments with the vast, vast majority having nothing to do with the actual content of the issue reported. And it looks like it’s resolved fixed but in Firefox 3 alpha 5. I’m sure this is a corner case since most bugs in open source probably go unnoticed by most of the blowhards who’ve chimed in on this one, but what an impossible context to actually get anything done in.

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