investigating software

A long time ago, in a country far away, a cunning politician suggested a way to reduce crime. He stated that a simple test that could be used to catch all the criminals. When tested, all the criminals would fail the test and be locked up. There’d be no need for expensive courts, crooked lawyers or long drawn out trials. The politician failed to give details of the test when pressed by journalists, stating that the test was very sensitive and they wouldn’t understand it. His supporters soon had their way and the politician was elected to office. On his first day in office, he deployed his national program of criminality-testing. Inevitably the details of the test leaked out. The test was simple and was indeed capable of ensuring 100% of criminals were detected. The test was: If the person is alive, find them guilty and lock them up. The test had a sensitivity of 100%, every single actual... real... bonafide criminal would fail the test and find themselves in prison. Unfo...

I've written about the joys of Unicode and software development before . Using unexpected data in your testing is usually a good way to test for text encoding issues. Finding and fixing these those bugs early could save your team from a host of other related issues and hackery. Even if you don't expect to have unusual text content, this type of testing can help indicate if all your systems are configured consistently. Failure to do so can result in users seeing the dreaded Mojibake . Mojibake, when encoding goes bad I've recently created a python package for generating random Unicode codepoints so they can be incorporated easily into your automated tests and tools. It's called Unicode Babel , and can be used to create a simple iterator for supplying 'international' text to your app: from unicode_babel import tools, filters genny = tools.CodePointGenerator() for point in genny.random_codepoints( 10 , filters.filter_out_if_no_name) pr...

It's 1982 and there's a bull market in the western stock exchanges. After being in the doldrums for 6 years the Dow Jones Industrial Average index is climbing steeply. In London, the FTSE 100  index is also witnessing a steady climb, despite the ongoing war in the South Atlantic. The rise in share prices also leads to an increase in the popularity and prominence of these stock 'indices', the algorithmically derived snapshots of leading stock prices, frequently, used as an indicator of overall market health. At that time a relatively small North American exchange decides to institute its own new index, allowing investors to discern, at a glance, the state of the market. The Vancouver Stock Exchange creates its index at an arbitrary 1000.0 starting value. The index value is then recalculated thousands of times a day as transactions are processed through the exchange. Fast forward to late 1983, western markets have continued to boom, stimulating sustained increa...