Blog Yellek

I’ve been captivated of late with the art of earth surfing. The recipe goes something like this:

1. Download Google Earth
2. Find somewhere on earth that looks interesting and zoom in to about 10,000 feet or so. How far in you go depends on how high the terrain is but you want to be around 6000 to 8000 feet above the height of the pointer
3. Adjust the tilt control so that the horizon sits just between the search box and the text above it
4. Adjust the direction so that interesting things are in the direction that you are looking
5. Press F11. to go to full screen
6. This is the tricky part, get the pointer and whilst dragging it in the direction you want to go let go so that the scenery scrolls toward you. You may have to have a few goes to get the speed just right. You want it to be going slow enough that your internet connection can keep up with downloading the pictures but fast enough so that you are always seeing something interesting coming towards you

I’ve found it really interesting to slowly travel across places I’ve never been wondering who lives there and what they do and what their lives are like. We get such a fragmentary picture of different countries from the news. By the time it gets to us it has been drained of all it’s life, desiccated and jammed together with other fragments until it fits into the regulated minimum content requirements between the ad breaks in some sort of politically correct montage filtered by the prejudices of those who prepare and edit it.

Earth Surfing on the other hand allows me to capture not the dynamic bustle of daily life but the essence of the landforms that shape the lives of the people that live there. There is something about seeing, if only virtually, the mountains and the rivers, the roads and the towns, the seas and islands that are the setting of peoples lives, the cradle in which they live and die. Here they love and hate, struggle and celebrate, work and play, laugh and cry, totally oblivious that someone on the other side of the world is flying above their landscape looking at the things they have built and wondering why they built them and what their lives are like.

It’s humbling really to think that God created every fold in that landscape, designed it from scratch and then by his word brought it into being as a dynamically beautiful landscape, designed to change and grow over time. It brings to my mind the passage in The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis where Aslan calls the world into being through a beautiful song. I look at the earth and I see that song in action, the wonder of God’s creation. Not only did God create the landscape but he created the people that live there and everything that dwells in the places He created.

Just tonight I’ve been scrolling across Iran. I started south of Teheran amidst lush irrigation, scrolled across the city itself and then up into the barren high mountains with tiny patches of green in the valleys where the water runs. As I came to the edge of the mountains and went down toward the coastal plain there was an explosion of greenery as the north facing slopes received the rainfall from the prevailing winds off the ocean, an astounding contrast. I even found a place I wanted to build a house on a small plateau with magnificent views over the Caspian sea and the coastal plain. I wonder if I’ll ever visit there.

It was 2-0 then 2-1 then 4-2 then 6-3 then 8-4 at half time in favor of DiscIdiots. What was the final score line? 8-7 sigh

There’s something inherently relaxing about kitchen tables. There, is a place where you can sit and sip on a warm cup of tea or several cups of tea and while away the hours discussing anything or nothing with whoever happens to drop by. Lounge room tables are for proper dinners with guests where the kids have to behave but kitchen tables are where a family lives and builds community. Being invited to someone’s kitchen is like being invited to spend time in their family, a place of comfortable intimacy. Meals taken at a kitchen table don’t have to be fancy, they can be just what happens to be on the stove or in the fridge. Mismatched coffee cups aren’t out of place there and if the kids happen to spill their cordial then it doesn’t really matter. Kitchen tables are for friends who drop in unexpectedly for a chat and for late night talk fests that seem to solve the problems of the world, at least for a while. When I finally buy a house it is going to have a kitchen table but until then the friends that invite me to theirs are precious.

Well the score on Monday was 8 to 6 but we were on a comeback, honest. The Mojo Ninja’s played zone on us nearly all night but near the end they were too tired to do it effectively and we were gaining on them substantially.

I don’t know that I contributed that much. I had one of those nights where you feel like the Energizer Bunny is on the other team and your inferior quality battery just can’t cut it against the competition. I think it had something to do with the lack of sleep on the weekend

I’ve always had a wierd relationship with cats. To my mind they always seem to take themselves far too seriously. Even when they are playing they have a hunter’s focus on the prey at hand, whether that be a piece of paper, a shadow on a wall or someone’s unlucky finger. Not so dogs I think, they are always having fun!

Suffice to say when I saw stuff on my cat dot com I laughed. I laughed a lot. Out loud. In the office.

I’m wrestling in my head at the moment with a dilemma. You see I’ve become a firm believer in automated unit testing as a part of a quality development effort but I’ve run up against a situation that seems to preclude the very thing I’ve come to believe in.

I wasn’t always a believer. I remember I started at eBusiness Interactive (then Cortex eBusiness now Cenqua) with really no idea how to develop software but some idea of Java and EJB’s and there was this guy sitting next to me who used to do strange things with something called JUnit. Over time I came to appreciate his quiet persistence and the company did too so by the time I moved on I had become a convert.

Fast forward to today where the code base I find myself working with has some unique characteristics that make it hard to unit test. Firstly there are no automated unit tests for this code, it’s a legacy system that is being maintained and enhanced. Secondly the methods in the code tend to take large objects as parameters and then extract complex data structures from them. The standard approach to this sort of thing is to use mocks but the data is such that the mocks would contain other mocks which would contain other mocks… you get the picture. Constructing all of those mocks and getting the data right would be a time consuming and error prone process which would take a long time to get ROI (the system is already in production) and hence is unlikely to be adopted.

Testing now is performed by firing up all of the components together and then applying external stimuli manually to generate the right inter component messages.

My thinking is that we need a new type of test tool to help construct those mock objects. The tool I am thinking of is a cross between two types of existing tools: record and playback test tools and code coverage tools. Code coverage tools are built to register when methods are called in code under test. What I am proposing is a tool that records not only what methods are called but in which sequence and with what parameters. This information could then be used to generate the appropriate code to create the mock objects. This code in turn could be modified to generate the appropriate unit tests. It would be a better starting point than nothing certainly.

Does something like this exist already? I can’t believe that noone has thought of it.

I was reading my devotions this morning when I came across the following in John chapter 7:

18He who speaks on his own does so to gain honor for himself, but he who works for the honor of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him.

I had to think about that for a while. If what I write here is seeking to gain honour for myself then it is going to be less believable. Oh sure with clever words and creativity I might be able to gather some sort of notoriety but to what end? If at the end of the day what I am writing is not the truth then what value is it really?

On the other hand how can I seek always to bring honour to God in what I do (as He is the only one worthy of all honour)? I want to be perceived as a “man of truth” so, despite my imperfections, I need to try and honour God in what I do here.

It’s a challenge but I guess the Bible is like that

Well Masters of Spin finally won their first game of the season last night in front of a packed house of onlookers (well 1 spectator and a whole bunch of people waiting for their div 1 game) by defeating Monkey Pants (don’t ask, I don’t know why either). It must have something to do with my new team T Shirt. It was a still night so no Zones but lots of stacking. Now all we have to do is repeat it next week.