Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

As a QA tester, this blog post at O’Reilly’s Radar is interesting:

Remarking on new companies like Spikesource and SourceLabs, he said: “It seems to me that the tester rather than the coder is becoming the new hero of the open source community.”

I think he’s onto something.

Hmm… if both designers and testers are the new heroes, is this further evidence of my oft-argued “open source paradigm shift”, where open source is leading to the commodification of many forms of infrastructure software, making testing and integration more important as an industry competency. Meanwhile, the new web applications “up the stack” are driven by a whole new class of “infoware design patterns”.

The decentralized nature of Open Source demands a need for rigorous, process-based testing of software before businesses can be expected to adopt it as part of their infrastructure.

Have you ever needed to send someone information from a program you know they don’t have installed? A lot of times you could just print something out and send a hard-copy, but there’s also a better way. I came across the free program called Primo PDF that installs a virtual printer on your machine that can output anything you could print into a PDF form. For example, if you had Microsoft Money 2005, it has the ability to create and print out invoices, but no way to save the invoices
in any other format than text. Why not just print the invoice to PDF and email it to your customer exactly as it appears? This has come in handy a lot.

Google released another awesome tool today. A personalized Google search history. You just login and it tracks all your searches, and the results you clicked. It is wicked.

• Marketing: All Marketers Are Liars
• Drawing / Illustration: Drawn!
• Defense / Military: DefenseTech, Global Guerrillas
• Tips: Tricks of the Trade
• Human Resources: HR For the Leader in You
• T-shirts: Preshrunk

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All you gaming geeks will appreciate this graphic. It shows all the games that have been based on id software’s various 3D rendering engines including Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, and Doom 3. Unfortunately, past success does not guarantee future success, so it will be interesting to see which games use the Doom 3 engine other than Quake 4. Many new games are based on Epic Games’ Unreal / Unreal 2 engine and presumably Valve Software will license their incredible Half Life 2 engine to developers. For a shape of things to come check out some of the screenshots from the Unreal 3 engine.

Last night some guys from work and I grouped up for World of Warcraft. Before I quit for the night we did a bit of dueling and I actually did pretty well, especially considering my heals (healing spells) are pretty weak. Here’s a few good strategies when dueling with an affliction-specced warlock character:

Against warriors:

1. Summon your succubus prior to PvP. When duel countdown begins set her to Seduce the target. She will wind-up Seduction before duel actually begins, which is most likely a bug. When Seduction hits the warrior will be mezzed preventing him from rushing you.
2. Cast a couple of your DoT’s (damage over time spells) like Corruption or Curse of Agony, both of which are instacast (no casting time) with an affliction specification.
3. Before Seduction interrupts from the damage cast Fear, making the warrior run off out of control.



4. Cast any remaining DoT’s like Immolation or Siphon Life while the warrior is Feared.
5. If warrior comes out of Fear, you can fear him again up to a total of three times per duel. This buys you a lot of time. In the mean time, you can also continue to Seduce. It’s all about preventing him from hitting you with a melee attack. Just keep applying the DoT’s while he runs around Feared. Any spells with more damage will interrupt the Fear effect.
6. When the opponent’s hit points get low enough start using Drain Life, which drain the target’s life while adding to your own. By this time you will also need some heals, so use your Health Stone and healing potions or bandages.
7. Eventually, once all the DoT’s stack you will start doing some serious damage. Just keep him out of melee range and under siege the entire time and you will eventually eat through all his armor and hitpoints. This same strategy works pretty well if you summon your Imp, except he will be unable to Seduce.