May 2004 Entries

• According to news reports in April of 2004, a software bug was determined to be a   major contributor to the 2003 Northeast blackout, the worst power system failure in North American history. The failure involved loss of electrical power to 50 million customers, forced shutdown of 100 power plants, and economic losses estimated at $6 billion. The bug was reportedly in one utility company's vendor-supplied power monitoring and management system, which was unable to correctly handle and report on an unusual confluence of initially localized events. The error was found and corrected after examining millions of lines of code.
• In April of 2003 it was announced that the largest student loan company in the U.S. made a software error in calculating the monthly payments on 800,000 loans. Although borrowers were to be notified of an increase in their required payments, the company will still reportedly lose $8 million in interest. The error was uncovered when borrowers began reporting inconsistencies in their bills.

I had to as well.... So apparently I am...

Which OS are You?

What do you think?

I finally found a coop! It's great... I'm working in QA at a small company in Victoria. It's definately been an interesting first week, it's my first experience in QA and I have to say I've learned a fair bit.

The first thing that I would like to point out though.... Developers need to learn to write Error Messages! For all of you who haven't taken SENG310 at UVic you need to think about your user! Especially when the users are not developers themselves. They have no idea what a “Null pointer reference error” is.... and they don't care that the error came from “someNewClass.System.SomethingElse()”. 

Shneiderman’s  guidelines for error messages

So just to get everyone up to speed... We won the Imagine Cup Canada! See below for an abstract of our entry and the team members:

Game.Set.Match. – Tournament Planner

Wouldn’t it be great if all the hassles of organizing, participating and following an amateur sporting event such as a tennis tournament disappeared?  Game.Set.Match enables tournament data to be administered via a cell phone and available in real time to participants and fans through either the web or msn-style alerts.  Did the weather suddenly change and the schedule now needs adjusting?  Is the tournament running on schedule?  What is the score of my son or daughters match?  Game.Set.Match allows tournament administrators to distribute this type of information which until now was only available in professional tournaments.  Game.Set.Match. aids tournament administrators in creating a tournament schedule based on online registration and attempts to learn the game styles of the participants for faster future administration of tournaments. 

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As the winners of the Canadian Imagine Cup, our team travelled to Toronto last week for VSLive and Mobile Dev Con. We arrived in Toronto Tuesday, where we practiced our application demo and had a great dinner with MS Canada.

Wednsday we were given the opportunity to demo our application during Jay Roxe Keynote presentation on, before being awarded the Imagine Cup. The remainder of the day was spent talking to media, exploring the exhibits hall, and attending Midnight Madness. Oh yeah and I got to see downtown Toronto for the first time when myself and Mike appeared on CP24's Homepage technology show. 

Thursday saw us attend many smaller tech talks and explore VSLive. After heading over to the radisson to meet up with the guys from Object Sharp , we were also taken on an amazing pub crawl. (21 computer geeks on a huge Limo Bus, Lots of beer, Three pubs including the hard rock cafe that over looks the sky dome field, oh... and Long Island Iced Tea.) Throughout the night I had the pleasure of chatting with Microsft MVPs, Microsoft PMs, employees and owners of Object Sharp and DataGrid  girl. A huge thank you to the people of Object Sharp, and I have to say a special thank you to Paul for convincing me to drink a few too many of those Long Island Iced Teas. (It was a fun flight home) 

 Check out our picture gallery for all our imagine cup and pub crawl pictures:

http://www.flasko.com/ngallery

The next phase in our Imagine Cup journey will consist of many long programming nights to get our app ready for the Worlds... In Brazil!

Well, it's getting late and I have an interview tomorrow morning so wish me luck...

Ok so I've finally got my blog up.... I'm all settled in my new apartment and