Technology finally catches up with Dick Tracy

Introducing the two-way wrist radio phone.

Whither laptop

My laptop is busted. The two-year-old hard drive failed, probably in protest for having to dogfood pre-release Vista in 2006. The old girl served me well since way back in... early 2004? Can that be right? I think it is... I'm pretty sure I constructed this blog on that laptop.

I don't mind telling you that this has made me, ostensibly a supposed "computer scientist," somewhat cranky. I no longer have my own laptop to open and search for websites, and I have to use Kimberly's iSomething instead. Excuse me, "MacBook." Don't tell Ballmer.

Meanwhile, the Dell laptop I just ordered apparently won't be ready for about three weeks. Three weeks! What am I, some kind of caveman? How am I supposed to deal with this injustice? Plus, I attended Microsoft's Techfest today, which is our Research & Development department's yearly show and tell, and all the cool projects they show off made me jealous. I want a Surface computer in my living room! And a World Wide Telescope!

OK, so even if those things were on the market I couldn't afford them. I'm having enough trouble deciding whether to send the busted hard drive in for a $400 data recovery job... do I spend the money, or spend all summer trying to re-rip my CDs? Not to mention the cost of buying a brand new laptop. Blehhh.

OK, it will be all right. At least I have Alex, and he, in turn, enjoys my cow noises.

You will believe Albert from Little House is a computing genius

Read all about a show that had a profound influence on 7-year-old Jamie Furdell: Whiz Kids.

(Posted on a work blog I'm maintaining out of my commitment to community service.)

For the record, ESPN still has at least two problems

...with its fantasy baseball, which I just stumbled upon tonight.

I will label these bugs "A" and "2", and supplement them with bad-design-decision "iii".

A) I can move players around on my roster (make them active/inactive or change position slots), no problem. But when I go to add a new player from free agency, and it brings up the screen asking me to drop a player to make room, the players are back in their old slots, as if I hadn't made the changes. When I select a player to drop and submit the changes, the players I had moved for tomorrow are back in their old slots, and I have to move them again.

2) When I go to add a player from free agency, the screen that pops up asking me to drop a player to make room for him lists all my current players with a checkbox besides each. This would ordinarily not pose a problem, except that the particular move I need to make requires moving my current players around. I have three starting pitchers who are injured and eligible for the DL (disabled list) slot, a bonus slot in addition to your active players that allows you to replace an injured player without having to drop him. To add the free agent I want, I need to be able to drop the pitcher on the DL (Josh Johnson) to waivers, and move another injured pitcher (Chris Carpenter) to that slot. I can check the checkbox besides Josh Johnson's name and click Submit, but the transaction can't be completed because the system tries to add the new player to my non-DL roster, and there isn't any room.

iii) Making the "drop a player" screen based on check boxes is a poor design decision, exactly because of this type of scenario. In previous versions of the game, this screen instead gave you a pull-down list beside each player on your roster, allowing you to drop players OR move them around in various slots to make room for the new guy. The new design takes away this functionality and adds a step to add-drop operations, which is bad.

By themselves, these aren't serious bugs, because I could work around both of them separately. If the roster changes I made got undone by adding a player, I can re-do the changes. If a player I want to drop is on the DL, I can first swap him with another injured player, then check his checkbox on the drop screen and pick up my new player.

But put together, they create a synergy of badness that is impossible to work around. Even if I swap Josh Johnson with Chris Carpenter on the DL, those changes aren't reflected on the drop-a-player checkbox screen, because of bug A. After the swap, Johnson appears back in the DL slot on the drop screen, meaning I can't drop him because of bug 2 (and indirectly because of poor-design-decision iii.) There is literally no way to add the starting pitcher I need.

Wow. Those are problems I managed to stumble on in about 30 minutes, doing fairly standard roster maintenance. It's becoming more and more obvious that the testing on ESPN's Fantasy Baseball was either ignored, non-existent, or completely misguided. There's an important lesson to be learned from all this; good software testing is very important. Do not ignore it, even with your pretty, postmodern Web 2.0 apps.

It's free, but it does not rock

The problems ESPN has been having with its 2007 incarnation of fantasy baseball may go down in the software testing hall of infamy.

I've been playing in ESPN leagues since college with my collegiate buddies, and up until this year it had been a pay service. We stuck with it out of habit, despite free offerings from Yahoo and CBS Sportsline; despite the cost, it was always fairly reliable. Their player listings were up to date, and the website always behaved the way I expected it to.

In an apparent bid to complete with the free games, ESPN decided to jump on the free bandwagon, while at the same time giving their system a major overhaul. There was a whole lot of publicity and ballyhoo, including a funny and expensive-looking ad campaign featuring, among other things, Peter Gammons in a wig. And the look of the new site is great; it's well-designed and sleek, it largely makes sense, and it takes advantage of modern browser technologies, with real-time updates and a tab-based user interface. I had a couple issues with selecting the wrong player during the draft, but the interface is only partially to blame there.

Other than that it all looked pretty solid, until the season rolled around. Some of the bugs I noticed (and I'm sure I didn't hit them all):

- On opening day, roster changes were locked; there was no way to activate players for the following day(s). As a result there was no way to pick up free agents.
- Players who were dropped from a roster are supposed put on waivers for a couple days; if nobody else claims them, they become free agents. In our league, dropped players were never clearing waivers; days after they were supposed to be free agents, they were still marked as being on waivers.

Other issues reported here and there on the intertubes: there were persistent problems with roster moves, live scoring updates, and general site accessibility throughout the first week of the season. Some leagues were not seeing the players they drafted appear on their rosters. There may have even been other problems that haven't been publicized (ESPN hasn't provided a detailed description of all the bugs they've fixed since the start of the season, just that there are "problems").

Earlier this week, ESPN decided it had to take a nuclear bug-fix option: it rolled everyone's roster back to opening day, and made all scoring retroactive to that active roster only. In other words, all transactions were wiped out, so any points gained or lost by roster moves that players had made between the start of the season and April 12 were erased. Which really hurts if you're the kind of player who spends a lot of time adjusting his team (like, um, me... sometimes). I had made a few moves to shore up weak spots in my roster, and they've been wiped out by ESPN's time traveling shenanigans.

Supposedly it wasn't the increased user traffic that caused the problems. ESPN hasn't said how many more players it has had to accommodate since going gratis, but traffic to the site never seemed to slow it down. The problems instead appear to stem from data processing glitches. Which begs the question: what kind of testing did they do before the season?

A fantasy baseball game on the scale of ESPN's has quite a few data processing hurdles to overcome:
- There are 8-12 teams per league, which adds up to thousands of different teams and roster combinations
- There are hundreds of baseball players available to choose from, and the pool of available players changes during the season due to injuries, call-ups from the minors, etc.
- The system has to keep up with all baseball players' statistics, (in real time)
- Relevant fantasy team statistical totals are calculated (in real time)
- League standings are updated based on these statistical totals (in real time)

It was the real-time stuff that was new to ESPN this year, but I don't think that's what was causing the issues, either. In previous years, you could get a real-time box score for your team, but the league standings were not updated live; they were processed late at night after all the day's action had completed. This year, with the addition of real-time updates, the standings appeared to be updating accurately during the day; you could even leave the standings or team box-score page up, and it would update without having the refresh the page.

Instead, the bulk of their processing problems appeared to come from a simple lack of good functional testing. I can only speculate without any details or some kind of public post-mortem on what went wrong, but it sure looks like they didn't bother or just didn't have time to simulate a real season. When nobody can even make a roster move on the first day of the season, and players never clear waivers on the date they're supposed to, that's a pretty good sign to me that they didn't adequately test the system using simulated data and players.

And so you see why my chosen profession, software tester, is something like the red-headed stepchild of software engineering. It's important, because you can catch high-publicity problems like these before an angry public encounters them. But it's often ignored or blown off; after all, you could work as a tester on a big system like ESPN's fantasy baseball, have an infinite amount of time to work on it, and still never catch all the bugs. That makes scheduling time and resources for testing difficult, especially when you're trying to push out a flashy, highly publicized new system under a tight deadline.

It doesn't help that one of the Web 2.0-type philosophies toward testing seems to be, "let the users do it." The teams that create web-based applications tend to not devote a ton of resources to dedicated testers; this is perhaps one of the reasons why GMail, which was originally introduced three years ago, is still marked as being in "Beta" (implying there's still more testing to do).

I'm really curious about what kind of testing ESPN did. Hopefully we'll find out in some kind of ugly, public tell-all. Those are the best kinds. In the meantime, I can't believe I'm stuck with Jorge Julio, AGAIN. I keep trying to drop Jorge Julio, but THEY KEEP PULLING HIM BACK IN.

Windows Mobile 6 announced

Here are more details about that thing I'm working on now.

Reason #8,429 why I love the Internet

I bought a new Toyota Corolla last spring, and it happily got me through football season without any trouble, as I knew it would. I had the oil changed at 3,000 miles like a good car owner (well... more like 4,200 miles), and everything seemed fine. Until that one fateful night when I was driving on the Interstate, when the automotive gods decided to switch on the amber "MAINT REQ'D" light.

Dismayed, but also puzzled, I pressed the odometer button and realized that it had just hit 5,000 miles exactly. Being an engineer (sort of), I knew this could not be a coincidence. Clearly the car was designed to turn on this light when I hit 5,000 miles, even though it was highly unlikely the car needed any maintenance (outside of maybe rotating the tires, if you wanted to be super-careful). This dismayed be even further, because it meant...

My new car has an Idiot Light.

"But I am not an idiot!" I protested. "I don't need this light, fool!" I had changed the oil already; my car clearly did not REQ MAINT. But how to switch off the light without taking the car to the dealer, who would surely try to upsell me on rotating the tires, changing the transmission fluid, checking the brakes, replacing the washer fluid with Goldschlager, etc.? My workmanlike, do-it-yourself ethic (cough) demanded that I find a better solution.

Enter the Internet! I had my answer within five minutes of searching:

• Turn ignition key to 'ON' and press the odometer button until the display reads actual mileage... not Trip A or B.
• Turn ignition key to OFF.
• Hold in the same button you used in step 1.
• While holding the button in, turn ignition key to 'ON'.
• The 'Maint Reqd' light should blink and go out.

Sure enough, that vanquished the idiot light. My car's destiny was once again in my hands. The balance of nature had been restored.

So... take that, Mr. Toyota! Take it and LIKE IT!

I've got a new job

I'm still at Microsoft, but I've moved over to the Windows Mobile team. This is the operating system that runs on handheld devices, like Smartphones and Pocket PCs. (Check it out here and here.) Version 6 is coming out soon, and I'll be working on testing the release after that.

It should be fun to work on, and at the very least I'll be getting a cool handheld device out of the deal. Swag!

Your OS is writing checks your computer can't cash!

I cracked up so very hard when I first saw this promotional website for the operating system I'm working on. The two beers I had at the Windows "Informational" Meeting that day probably contributed.

(Easter egg: don't click on anything for a while, and your host gets impatient.)

Why this week was crappy for me, personally

Reason 1: Arrested Development was cancelled today. Nobody watched it like I told you to. Taste the sad.

Reason 2: Microsoft doesn't want to hire me. Damn you Billy Gates!

Yes, I had an interview out there in Redmond, Wash. a couple weeks ago.

I knew it wasn't going to be easy. And, in the past, I've sometimes felt unprepared for the pop-quiz portion of software engineering interviews. This time, I was determined to be prepared.

Microsoft's interviews are notoriously difficult; they fly an army of people into Seattle every day, but make offers to only a small fraction of those people. A day of interviews at Microsoft is like running the gauntlet. They schedule you to talk to three or four different people, and if those people all like you enough, you eventually get passed on to the hiring manager... the big boss. (Come to think of it, it's kind of like a video game.)

Microsoft's philosophy is to look at as many people as possible, and try to find the ones who have the best potential, and they would much rather score someone as a false negative than a false positive. As a result, you can get weeded out in a hurry; if they send you home after only a couple interviews, that's a bad sign. So my mission was to do my best to stay alive and not get voted off the proverbial island. (Has Survivor been turned into a proverb yet?)

Before I left, I prepared myself as best I possibly could. I researched the coding questions I was most likely to be asked, and practiced them in C. I brushed up on C++ and object-oriented programming, and did my best to study up on testing procedures. I even picked up a copy of How Would You Move Mount Fuji?, which is full of famous logic questions (even though Microsoft has moved away from such questions).

I was nervous the day of the interview, as usual. This would be an even longer and arduous process than normal interviews, but it would also be a good test of how well I had prepared. One by one, I talked to members of the Office Business Application team, who were looking for a "Software Development Engineer in Test" (that's a diplomatic way of making "software tester" sound almost as cool as "software developer", even though it's clearly not).

My first interview was with "Altaf", who asked me a question I had prepared for: reverse a string (of words) in place. Mysteriously, I knew how to code it up quickly on the whiteboard. Later, when "Hamesh" asked me to eliminate the duplicate elements of an array, and "Brett" asked me to find missing element in an (n-1)-element array of distinct integers from 1 to n, I was again mysteriously able to come up with solutions (ahem... had some practice on those too). After answering some hypothetical questions from "Clodagh", I made it to the Big Boss... "Anu". I was excited about getting that far... I made it all the way to the end!

It felt like a miracle. Altaf, Hamesh, Brett, Clodagh and Anu. (Heh... "Brett.") I felt like I had set them up and knocked them down. Getting past the technical quizzes is the tough part; I can talk about myself in an interesting and engaging fashion for hours if I can just get past the damn tests.

Sadly, it wasn't meant to be. Getting turned down for a job is tough in any case, but this one really hurt because the degree of difficulty was so high, and I really thought I had nailed it. Microsoft told me they would "move quickly" on a decision, but wound up taking two weeks before giving me the bad news. Maybe that means I was close to landing it; I really have no idea why, in the end, they didn't want me. And that's the most frustrating thing of all; I'd really like to know whether I did some to screw it up in the end, or if there were just other candidates who were better qualified.

Not that it's all bad that I won't be working there. The primary benefits were obvious; they would cover relocation, and I would gain experience in Windows programming and testing, two areas where I really haven't had much experience at all (which also could have been a factor). There were some major red flags going up as I researched employment at Microsoft. Most troubling is the stack-ranking system they have for employee reviews; they grade on a curve, which means somebody always has to get the shaft (and it's usually the new guy). It makes for a less-than-comfortable work environment. Plus, lately, a lot of their smartest employees have jumped ship, worried that the software behemoth is focusing too much of "defense" (i.e. protecting its monopolies) and not enough on "offense" (i.e. innovation and promoting new ideas). Not that I think I would have been one of their smartest people if they had hired me, but I still found it interesting that former long-time employees feel like Microsoft's best (and most interesting) days are behind it.

So anyway, I'm disappointed that it's back to the drawing board on the job search. That's the other reason getting an offer would have rocked... because looking for a job SUPER-SUCKS. It's especially hard in my field, because it's not enough that you have x years of experience or attended y university... you're expected to prove yourself anew to each potential employer. Over the past several weeks I've worked on practice problems, programming quizzes, sample projects, and even an I.Q. test (really!) to prove my worth to various hiring managers. I've done nearly as much coding over the past month as I did all year while having a programming job (sadly, they didn't really give me a whole lot of work to do).

For example: this was a project I did while applying for this job. They said it should take two-three hours; it took me about 10 hours to get it right. After sending it to them, they almost immediately rejected me. Here's another piece of code I worked on for another company's programming test; it was so difficult I wasn't even able to finish in time. This is annoying, not only because it reinforces my low self-esteem, but because doing this work eats up a lot of time, and it's just demoralizing when all that work turns out to have been fruitless. My latest opus is this tic-tac-toe program, which I can only hope will impress the company I wrote it for: "Tic Tac Toe Industries." Hopefully they'll be impressed that my computer player always tries to select the center square first; Andrew calls that the "James gambit."

(OK, that last part was a lie; he actually called it the "Picard manuever." Damn you, Jean-Luc! Always outshining me!)

At any rate, it was great hanging out with Andrew, and it was great being in Seattle. It really reiterated to me how much I love it there... I would love, love, love to move there. Here's hoping somebody will be willing to hire me long-distance.