Gotta love it when the Cowboys beat the Redskins. But the victory is so much sweeter when they win in the last minute. I was biting my nails from the time the Redskins took the lead until Dallas scored with 1:30 left in the game. To bad I won't see my friends that are Redskins lovers for another week. WOOT!!
During a heated battle of Monopoly, my daughter came limping into the kitchen, "I have a paper cut. Can I have a cookie?"
Then, after putting a bandaid on her pinky, she headed back to the game saying, "Big brother, you gave me a serious owie!"
I haven't laughed this hard in ages.
A bit more about Christmas. I have two boys that are soon to be teenagers. The big thing this year is the GameBoy DS which they both wanted, but neither asked for. This may be due to my wife and I telling them very early on that the DS would be in short supply and the prices would be high; it would be near impossible for them to get a DS for Christmas. They accepted this and found other things to ask for, which really pleased me.
My wife and I never stopped looking. Every time we were out, we asked for the DS. Every time we asked, the answer was no. Last Friday, my wife was out and overheard a ruckus in the electronics section of a store she frequents. There was a lady screaming at one of the workers about how she promised her kid, who was standing there watching with tears in his eyes, a GameBoy DS. The worker was very apologetic but said they were out and there was nothing he could do about it. She left in a fury, dragging her crying son behind her. My wife walked over to the worker and asked if she had heard right, that they were out. The gentleman replied they were as if he had been asked all day long, because he had been. My wife thanked him and then asked if he expected another shipment before Christmas. The guy looked around and then whispered to my wife, "We are getting some in tonight, you should be here as early as you can tomorrow morning."
My wife was 5th in line the next morning at 7am. She waited in line for an hour for the store to open. During that hour the people in line chatted, the guy in front needed three, there was a limit of two. The lady in front of my wife needed one, so she offered to buy one for the guy. He had three boys all roughly the same age. My wife got the last two GameBoys. There were only 10 that morning.
I am impressed by the kindness that occured throughout those two days. The worker didn't have to tell my wife anything. The lady didn't have to buy that guy his third GameBoy. And my wife didn't have to get out of bed at 6am on a Saturday morning for our sons. I try to teach my kids that they should always be polite. I impress upon them that it is better to be kind, than to be rude. I am glad to see that other parents are teaching or have taught their children the same.
Presents were opened at 9am. My wife made the kids trek all over the house looking for clues she had written on pieces of paper. I think she made them go up and down the stairs 5 times. They had a blast. And they were all very happy with their presents. They are all playing their new GameBoy DS in their room and in the living room. Like I said earlier, I won't see them for a week :)
I hope everyone is having a great Christmas. I literally got a box of rocks for Christmas! Thanks Dad! :-) My kids are very excited about their gifts. They have all gone to their rooms to play, I doubt I will see them for a week or two. They are geeks in training. They get some new gadget to play with and they focus on that one thing from the time they wake up until we force them to turn off the lights and go to bed. Unfortunately for us, the new gadgets have lights of their own. I am sure we will see the glow peeking out from under the covers late at night. Rascals.
I have been looking for something that would describe how OOP works in JavaScript. How does one create an Object and give it private functions and public methods for that matter. Douglas Crockford has a great essay that discusses JavaScript Objects and details how they are written. It is a very nice overview of techniques that will add power to your future JavaScripts.
My friend Scott mentioned that he thought it was a waste to have humans functionally test a system. That you should only use an automated tool for functional testing. I agree, but I would like to add that you should also have humans do functional testing to check for the areas where a test script may not go. The edge cases. A good tester will automate most of his job, and then continue to check out the system manually to look for those small problems that a tool will not catch. Generally, some of those things will be look and feel. They may be problems with translations. There might be a speed issue. It takes 20 seconds for the response to come back, but the tool passes the test because the response came back.
I am sure the uber complex testing tools out there may be able to measure repsonse, maybe even look and feel, but there still needs to be a human that goes through the system to ensure that the system passes the tests as well.
I personally have posting privileges to three different blogs. This blog (personal), my corporate blog and my client's blog. The two other blogs have been taking up my time so I haven't really been posting here. My apologies to the few that still look at my feed. I promise to have more content on a more regular basis.
I am running MT Blacklist to keep the comment spammers at bay. But from time to time comments are being made, but emails are not being sent. I have been checking the Spam folder in Gmail, but the emails aren't there either. I don't know what is going on, but it is not making me comfortable.
This article covers the basiscs of doing http requests in JavaScript so that you are no longer required to refresh the page to have a conversation with the server. The article even throws in a Google SOAP example just for spice.