Book Review:
I recently read Ari Takanen's Fuzzing for Software Security Testing and Quality Assurance. This is a valuable book on fuzz testing, and timely.
Five Reasons for Software Certifications
Several people I respect (notably Gary McGraw) as well as others that I don't really know (e.g., the author of this blog post "5 reasons why software certs suck"), have argued vehemently against certifications recently. I am a subject matter expert for the new Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional (CSSLP) certification. I help write the exam questions. Obviously I wouldn't do it if I didn't believe it had some value. So I'm going to try to write a few reasons why they are worthwhile.
New Test Automation book
Some colleagues of mine have recently published a book Implementing Automated Software Testing.
Elfriede and Thom were key organizers of VERIFY 2007, a software testing conference.
Case sensitive filesystems: The bane of Mac OS X
I now have a variety of applications that are incompatible with Mac OS X because I chose to install a case-sensitive filesystem 3 years ago when I got my Mac. Yes. THREE YEARS AGO. It has been possible to have a case sensitive filesystem (i.e., where files named READme, ReAdMe, and readme are all different files) for many years. Several major software vendors have been completely caught by this and failed to (a) account for it during development, (b) account for it in testing, or (c) provide any kind of solution.
The vendors that give me grief right now are:
- Logitech (Harmony Remote manager)
- Red Marble Games (Democracy 2)
- Adobe (Acrobat 9)
Now what really burns me up is that I just upgraded to Acrobat 9 from Acrobat 7 on Mac OS, and Acrobat 7 WORKED on a case-sensitive filesystem. It's a regression!
WordTwist’s scoring
My friends got me playing WordTwist on Facebook, and I started playing it in "ladder" mode. That's where you sorta compete against your friends and see if you can get the highest score. Well, one of my friends had a score of 181, which seemed pretty amazing. I'd try and try and get nowhere near it. Of course, I'd frequently only get 12 or 15 words out of 30-odd words. Sometimes I'd have a good round, but it was rare for me to break 100 points in a single round.
Finally I decided I had to cheat and see what the maximum score was. It turns out to be really easy, but I'm not going to reveal it all here and now.