The original meaning of hacker included “A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities”, “One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively)” and even “One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations”. These are all descriptions of Konrad Zuse, who probably qualifies as the world’s first hacker. He graduated as an engineer in 1935, found a job but quit after a few months to build a “computing machine” to perform “tedious calculations”, based on ideas he had been pursuing during his studies. He took over his parents loungeroom, and over the next 3 years built a large cabinet holding over 20,000 parts, metal pins and hand cut metal sliders (his friends also helped cut them). It was a 1 hertz machine (powered by a vacuum cleaner motor), and programmed by holes punched in old movie film. It could perform a multiplication in 5 seconds and was the first working programmed computing device . Like many prototypes, as Zuse said, “It just never worked right.” as the metal sliders frequently jammed. In design, it is clearly a computer , and unlike the first American computer it was both programmable (not configured by cabling), and binary (input numbers were not stored as base 10 but converted to base 2).

So 70 years on from then, we now recognize the 67th anniversary of what was truly the first reliable programmable computer. On May 12, 1941 , 67 years ago , Zuse debuted his Z3, the world’s first general-purpose digital computer, a fully automated, program-controlled and freely programmable machine (having ditched steel sheets for relays). Unlike some early computers, it was quite small - only the size of 3 refrigerators! Zuse continued on his hacking way, defining the first programming language Plankalkuel (which was finally implemented 55 years later), and founding a computer company, which grew to 1000 employees and later pioneered the use of magnetic memory. After losing a 15 year fight for a patent on his computer ideas, he sold his company and became a reclusive painter.

He was rediscovered in the 1980s, turned his mind to wind power but unfortunately died before he published his ideas. While the Z3 was destroyed during the war it was rebuilt later in the 1960s. The Z1 was rebuilt in the 1980s, but like the first version it had similar reliability issues.

So the Z1 was buggy hardware. What testing feature did the Z3 have? Amazingly enough it had a debug mode, allowing a programmer to stop the execution and examine the values stored in the machine! I was lucky enough to meet a German post-graduate student who had met Zuse in the 1980s, but most people have not even heard of him. Next time someone has a new software product they are creating, how about naming it Zuse?

I’m enjoying being technoratified . I have more than 50 blogs as favorites. I noticed a note on one announcing a reissue of a project management book, with the opportunity to win a copy. The book is “Making things happen”, by Scott Berkun. You had to post on the qualities of a quality project manager. I was one of 50 posters while the competition ran, and was lucky enough to win one of the 10 books. I’ll reserve my opinion on the book till I read it, but it will have to be excellent to outdo Johanna Rothman’s Manage It which won a 2008 Jolt award. If you follow the link you'll find a podcast from Johanna to listen to, then search further and you'll also find a video interview as well.

The PM qualities list makes interesting reading, and there is even a synthesized audio track of the original blog post (but sadly not the comments). You can also read an Q&A interview with Scott on PM from the book’s original release.

Some people are more into mnemonics than others. I can recall walking along with James Lyndsay one day. This in itself was unusual because we are normally on opposite sides of the earth. We were discussing how there are many great mnemonics for test ideas, but neither of us was able to recall the items, just the mnemonics! I think this strongly influences our exploratory testing approaches. Alan Richardson has blogged about this here . Because it is general, It doesn’t really need a mnemonic, but I will give it an acronym. Seeker, CKA, Challenge Key Assumptions. While any tester can do this, the experienced tester will be more skilled at identifying key assumptions, and be more effective at using it. If you have less experience, or can remember mnemonics (!), maybe try the standard ones! You’ll find some links by searching for “test ideas” at my testingspot.net site

Anyone who follows the news would have heard of the opening day debacle at the new T5 terminal at Heathrow in London England that culminated in passengers only being allowed carry on baggage resulting in a pile of over 20000 bags, wryly described by one blog commenter as ‘No liquids in the cabin, no solids in the hold’. With normality seemingly restored after backlogged baggage sorting moved off to Milan, Memphis and across the UK, what can we say about what happened and could it have been avoided?

Around about 20 years ago, I left my first job at Frontier Software after 2 years. All the code was in COBOL, and it was some of the best, cleanest code I’ve ever seen. For common code, we would just include libraries to reuse standard functions. I can remember reading the date routines and the obscure logic of the leap year calculations. These days, most languages provide standard libraries of functions, so all the hard work is done. Does this mean that programs all handle leap years now? Apparently not, in fact the situation is so poor that “The honor society of leap year day babies” has provided a code snippet for programmers to re-use. They acknowledge it isn’t the best, and it is just in perl, but they are not programmers just frustrated users (looking for programmers to provide other examples). They have actually updated the code and added a ruby version as well, but being unfamiliar with change control, the new version is hidden as a link off the old page. So what are some of the things that frustrated them? Systems that refuse to allow Feb 29 in a leap year as a birthday. A ToysRus birthday card system that won’t accept leap day birthdays, YouTube (since fixed), Nickelodeon and Pampers, and assorted government systems . The workaround is typically to force a choice of a day before or a day after, which is effectively corrupting the information. No wonder they are annoyed.

Quality is often measured in terms of accuracy (or Accurateness, according to this definition ) . For a shopping site, the closer you can predict what a customer likes, the more you can sell and the more inclined your customer will be to buy more and to stay loyal to you as a supplier. As any gambler knows, prediction is not a science but historical results can provide a best guess. Can you put a price on this? Who knows. One company has offered a prize to make it better though, one million dollars.

At Citcon Sydney last year, I did an informal tool survey and Selenium came out tops by a long way. We had some lightning-style talks at the session but nothing on Selenium.