I ask questions

I agree fully to Pradeep’s comment about the Birbal stories. They are so smart, funny, addictive, …

So, if you didn’t buy the book yet, you missed a chance.
If you want to buy it also for your team here are some arguments to convince people who do not believe it is a book for/about testing.
You could e.g. tell them: “See how often the term test is mentioned” haha

some quotes:
- a chapter called “The Test”: “I might agree with you entirely,” smiled Akbar, “if you would agree to put them (the questions) to the test…”
- “Shall we put it to the test ?” asked Birbal
- Akbar resolved to test the shoemaker’s resilience.
- But Birbal intervened: “Jahanpanah, I think it is a fairer test if somebody is in the armor - I’ll volunteer.”
- “Can we test this ?” smiled the king.
- So Akbar had the court scholars test the stranger in every tongue.
- “… How can this be tested ?”
- “I know”, smiled Akbar. “It was the last test - so you would come out.”
- And the Emperor led everyone into the garden for the test.
- A week later in durbar, Akbar decided to test Birbal’s memory.
- “Put him to the test”, said the Begum/princess proudly.
- “You seem unconvinced”, he said to Birbal. “Very well, we shall have a test.”

Did you notice how often his majesty Akbar smiles, when he mentions test ?

book:
“A Caravan from Hindustan - the complete Birbal tales from India” by James Moseley

Erkan YILMAZ

Another example for the category playing and asking questions:

I had played with … for two weeks and hadn’t made it crash once. Brian brought the whole thing down in three commands.
…
If only I could get a room filled with 8-year-olds to test my code.

Read Michael’s whole story here.

BTW Michael: if the mountain will not come to the prophet …
Grab your laptop with the test software and go to the next playground. I am sure any child - no matter what age - will be interested (not only because after eating ice cream typing with clammy/dirty fingers on someone elses keyboard is fun ). While doing this I would also involve mothers, grandparents and babysitters.

Erkan Yilmaz

… Ofelia - a little girl - asks this to a creature.

Her mother in contrast does not believe in the mystical world:
“Fairy tales - you are a bit too old to fill your head with such nonsense” she tells Ofelia.

Well, I (Erkan) can tell: NO and I recommend you all to watch this movie.

The movie Pan’s Labyrinth (el laberinto del Fauno) starts with Faunus telling:
A long time ago, in the underground realm, where there are no lies or pain, there lived a Princess who dreamed of the human world. She dreamed of blue skies, soft breeze, and sunshine. One day, eluding her keepers, the Princess escaped. Once outside, the brightness blinded her and erased every trace of the past from her memory. She forgot who she was and where she came from. Her body suffered cold, sickness, and pain. Eventually, she died. However, her father, the King, always knew that the Princess’ soul would return, perhaps in another body, in another place, at another time. And he would wait for her, until he drew his last breath, until the world stopped turning… (from IMDB)

another quote:
person 1: You could have obeyed me!
person 2: But … to obey - just like that - for obedience’s sake… without questioning… That’s something only people like you do.

Erkan YILMAZ

So, this week I will surprise my team with …

… some other sweets than usual (this time I bought a 1 kg package). I hope this lasts longer and I am also curious if they like them.

People might now perhaps talk on the effects for the quality of work or other issues, but it is just nice to see their happy faces when getting some sweets.
Everybody wants sweets in some kind of way. Awake the child in others (and yourself).

What about you ?

Erkan YILMAZ

edit 17.07.2007: also get yourself one or two dices and let people dice how many sweets they will get. So you have some element of surprise. Watch how happy people get, when they see the dice numbers.
And all gets even nicer, if the person getting 12 sweets shares them with others

I asked exactly 2 months ago this question:
When was the last time you helped to make open source software better ?

So, what did you do since then ?
I have decided to e.g. help these projects primarily in my free time:
ClamWin -
a free antivirus tool (with support from ClamAV)

Pardus -
a Linux distribution (includes many things, also KlamAV)
here the story how it came to this

Tell me, did you also help somewhere ? If not, why don’t you start finally ?

See you perhaps in one of the above or the other projects,
Erkan YILMAZ

My brother is a great fan of the Linux distribution Pardus (Pardus-Kurulan-2007.2-RC.iso) and I am a great fan of any sorts of cats (see picture at end of posting and my about page point 7).
So I thought, let my other Linux have another companion …

Truth is … I didn’t come so far initially. At the begin of the installation my screen went black. I tried then also the different offered install options, but none of them worked
Google revealed, that some users also had this problem (more info at the end of the article). The installation could go on anyway, when adding the boot option xorg=safe.

Well, in comparison to such an error an unhandled exception might appear less dramatic:

After installation, my problem was now to set up the graphics card with a good frequency (e.g. in Windows, Mandriva to set up 75 Hz with 1152×864 is possible from start, but in Pardus I have so far only 60 Hz ). Downloading new ATI drivers could not fix this problem and the ATI Catalyst Control Center (amdccle) does not want to start at all (it loads and loads and then it decides to not show). Well, I just use for the moment 1024×768 with 85 Hz

But I will definitely investigate here more. I like this distribution and… my brother has some convincing arguments for Pardus. Perhaps I switch with him the hardware

Erkan YILMAZ

edit 2007-07-11: higher resolution: I have now 75 Hz with 1152×864 and the developers have some bug reports in Bugzilla
edit 2007-07-14: unhandled exception: is fixed now in Pardus 2007.2
edit 2007-07-18: black screen: one developer told this seems to be a driver bug. Zorg had identifed the videocard
and configured xorg.conf correctly. Either the driver can not identify the output device or it does not init correctly.

… yes, I bought a 64 bit system. You want to know why ? Read here some of the arguments.
Imagine … this is cockaigne for any tester (so many training possibilities to discover bugs).
When do you want to buy one ? Well, the whole thing makes more fun with a 64 bit operating system (don’t forget: there is also 64 bit Linux and others).

Erkan YILMAZ