The Ten Minute Test Plan

Great idea from James Whittaker, Test Director at Google. Inspiring read, want to see if we can put this to good use:
http://goo.gl/Tocgs

SQA: The Oracle Problem

Testing involves examining the behaviour of a system in order to discover potential faults.

The problem of determining the desired correct behaviour for a given input is called the Oracle Problem. 

Since manual testing is expensive and time consuming there has been a great deal of work on automation and part automation of Software Testing. However, the problem of automating the Oracle remains a bottleneck that inhibits progress in increased automation for test effectiveness and efficiency.


source

structured, semistructured, unstructured data

Structured data is data that is organized into entities that have a defined format, such as XML documents or database tables that conform to a particular predefined schema. This is the realm of the RDBMS.

Semi-structured data, on the other hand, is looser, and though there may be a schema, it is often ignored, so it may be used only as a guide to the structure of the data: for example, a spreadsheet, in which the structure is the grid of cells, although the cells themselves may hold any form of data.

Unstructured data does not have any particular internal structure: for example, plain text or image data.

Source:  Hadoop: The Definitive Guide

how to get the android_id from an avd/emulator

Just a couple of commands take care of this. What's nice is that this can be automated from the shell, and can thus be included in scripts and in CI (e.g. in Jenkins)

[16:23:59] ~ $ adb -s emulator-5556 pull  /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db
194 KB/s (24576 bytes in 0.123s)

[16:38:59] ~ $ sqlite3 settings.db "select value from secure where name='android_id'"
9774d56d682e549c

The output of the sqlite3 command is the required android_id:  9774d56d682e549c

source

"dependency injection" is such a big phrase for a simple idea

Dependency Injection is a 25-dollar term for a 5-cent concept.
Dependency injection means giving an object its instance variables. Really. That's it.

This is the best explanation of DI that I've yet heard.

source: James Shore

fix mp3 replay gain (AKA normalize) quick and easy

Some things are SO much easier on Linux than Windoze. Don't need an audio editor, even an open-source one like audacity to perform this routine task on Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install mp3gain

dir=/music/EckhartTolle-StillnessSpeaks
 
# fix replay gain for all songs in $dir
for i in `ls -1 $dir`; do mp3gain -r -k $i; done

where:
-r: radio mode: apply track gain automatically
-k: prevent audio clipping

install sun-java6-jdk on lucid x64

I tried the standard repo/method:

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

which did work for me on my laptop. But I couldn't get this to work, for the life of me, on my lucid x64 server, for weird reasons:

Package sun-java6-jre is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package sun-java6-jre has no installation candidate

I had to resort to a custom ppa for sun-java6-jdk that worked just fine
https://launchpad.net/~ferramroberto/+archive/java

source: http://ubuntuguide.net/install-sun-java-6-jrejdk-from-ppa-in-ubuntu-11-04