On Software Testing

At my current workplace I was recently presented with the following dumbfounding argument:

Since we can always test our software by hand, we do not need to implement software testing.

In its more complete form, the argument goes like this:

Software testing represents a big investment for the company, where all the programmers in the house will be doing nothing but writing software tests for months, but these tests will not yield any visible benefit to the customers. Instead, the programmers should ensure that the software works by spending only a fraction of that time doing manual testing, and then we can take all the remaining time that we save this way and invest it in developing new functionality and fixing existing issues. 

To put it more concisely:

Software testing does not seem to have business value.

At the time that I was hearing this argument it sounded disarmingly self evident and beautiful in its simplicity, but of course anyone who has been anywhere even near the software industry in the last 20 years or so knows that it is patently false from pretty much every single angle that you might choose to look at it, so I now need to explain why.

Red Heart Stickers

In this post I am documenting sightings of these red heart stickers.

If anyone knows what these are, who sticks them, what for, please do let me know.

Bypassing the blocks to The Pirate Bay

If you try visiting The Pirate Bay from Holland nowadays, you are very likely to be disappointed. Your internet provider will most probably block your access with a page like this: https://blocked.t-mobilethuis.nl/

This is, of course, completely unacceptable. 

But while we are sitting around wondering when the revolution will start so that we can round up all those responsible for this situation and send them to the forced labor camps, it would be nice if we had some means of bypassing the block. 

Here is how:

Samba (SMB) on Ubuntu

Right out of the box, an Ubuntu 18.04 machine will not see any Microsoft Windows machines on the network, and Windows machines will not see it.  Unfortunately, there is an incredible amount of work necessary to get it to work properly.  So, here are my notes on setting up an Ubuntu 18.04 Linux workstation to act both as a Samba server and as a Samba client in a Windows Workgroup.

Server

Clipboard Managers for Ubuntu as of April 2019

I have been researching clipboard managers for Linux, (Ubuntu with Gnome,) and I am recording my findings here for the benefit of others.

Medium.com: Psychology of Code Readability by Egon Elbre

This is an article I enjoyed reading.  I am in full agreement with every claim made therein. It was very nice to see certain conclusions that I have arrived at in the past being spelled out and illustrated with nice explanations.

https://medium.com/@egonelbre/psychology-of-code-readability-d23b1ff1258a

Ferolli BlueSense Boiler User's Manual in English

My apartment is equipped with a Ferroli BlueSense boiler, which I needed to troubleshoot today, but the manual is in dutch, so I had to find the manual in electronic form on the interwebz, and have it machine-translated to english.

I am posting both the original and the machine-translated version here, in case others find it useful. Click on the pictures below for the documents.

 

  

The machine translation from PDF to PDF was very nicely done via https://www.onlinedoctranslator.com.  By very nicely I mean that the images have been preserved, and the formatting has been preserved as much as is reasonable to expect.  Of course, if you have a Ferroli boiler, then you are probably in Holland, and if you are reading this text then you are probably an expat living in Holland, so you probably already know that the state of the art today in machine translation from dutch to english sucks, so do not expect it to make perfect sense, or even to make sense. Still, it is better than nothing.

Researching mp3 cover art downloaders

So, I have this huge mp3 collection that is mostly missing cover art.  I embarked on a quest to add cover art to each mp3 file, and before long I realized that I need some software to help me with it.  Here I am documenting my findings.

Rooting my Android Phone

In this post I am documenting the process of rooting my Samsung Galaxy Note 4. It should work on the majority of Android phones out there.

Solved: Windows Explorer shows generic thumbnails instead of embedded album art for music (mp3) files

I have a large number of mp3 files, all of them with embedded album art, but when viewing them via  Windows Explorer, I see generic music file icons instead of album art thumbnails.

Generic music icons.  Ugh.

I spent a good couple of hours troubleshooting this problem, so I would like to document the solution for anyone who happens to go through the same pain.