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Apparently GE is considering selling its century-old appliances business. 

General Electric CO said on Friday it may sell or spin off its century-old appliances unit in a bid to lower its exposure to the slumping U.S. housing market.

Let me get this straight. Right now the housing market in the U.S. is in a slump. So they are going to try to unload a business that is directly affected by this slump at the bottom of the market.

The 3rd Annual Conference of the Association of Software Testing (CAST) 2008

Toronto, Ontario, Canada, July 14-16, 2008

Beyond the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing

Keynote Presentations by Gerald M. Weinberg,

Cem Kaner, Robert Sabourin, and Brian Fisher

Tutorials by Gerald M. Weinberg, Scott Barber, Hung Nguyen, and Julian Harty

The Association for Software Testing is pleased to announce its third annual conference (CAST 2008), to be held July 14-16. The meeting will be held in Toronto, Canada, a city which features enormous diversity in culture, businesses, educational institutions, and the arts. Toronto is the perfect location for a conference on this year’s theme: "Beyond the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing".

You can view the most recent brochure here, and you can see the conference program here.

So I come home from work the other day and find that my home PC is shut down. I mumble to myself, "Damn kids, messing with my stuff again". When I turn it back on I'm greeted with charming rhythmic beeps and nice little message from Intel stating that my PC overheated and automatically shut down (sorry kids, I didn't mean to jump to conclusions). Wonderful. Ignoring all the prompts to have the PC inspected by a professional I pushed my PC back to life with a few key presses and before you know it I'm back into Windows.  Firing up Intel's Desktop Control Center displayed a CPU Zone in the red with about 175 degrees Fahrenheit (not far from the "Captain, she can't take more" limit). Peering in through the clear fiberglass beyond the flashing neon blue lights as data pulsated through the system I could see 4 dust bunny encrusted fans working away as expected (1 CPU, 2 case, 1 power supply). Could it be the dust causing my headache? Excited to get out my can of compressed air, I fumbled through my drawers of outdated PC parts to find a half full can of air. Resisting the urge to sneak up behind my wife and shoot some cold air on the back of her neck (because I'm evil like that), I resorted to the less fun, but definitely fun task of shooting compressed air into all the nooks and crannies of my PC sending billowing clouds of dust out onto the carpet and surrounding area. The only way to ensure that dust was indeed the problem was to leave the PC running and view the CPU Zone Temp. on the fly, adding an extra element of danger (so they say). Instant results revealed themselves via the Intel Desktop Control Center when my CPU Zone temperature started to average 115 degrees Fahrenheit and stayed there:

I was recently introduced to Scott Barber by Steven Splain. Scott is a performance testing practitioner and one of the organisers of the Workshop on Performance and Reliability (WOPR) (thanks for the invite Scott).

Before the WOPR came into the equation, our e-mail conversation was about OpenSTA- a powerful opensource web performance, load and stress testing tool. I have used it extensively and contributed to the support group and project strategy through my ongoing discussions with Dan Sutcliffe.

Scott was intending to do a comparison between LoadRunner and OpenSTA so I thought I would help him get it started since Andy O'Brien and I (Antony Marcano) produced one this time last year... we just never got round to publishing it. So, here it is... I hope you find it useful...

From Patrick Cauldwell's Blog - Firefox and Sharepoint

Being a dedicated Firefox user, one of the few things that was still thwarting me was SharePoint.  We use SharePoint internally for a ton of stuff, and it was a drag to have to fall back to that other browser.  SharePoint pages look and work fine in Firefox, but I was having to reauthenticate on every single page, which really hindered my enjoyment of the experience.

Passing parameters to functions and methods.  Pass-by-value?  Pass-by-reference?  Which does your language use?

You probably learned this in your first CS class... so did I.

Then why did it take me a frakin' month to understand what Python does? :)

Well... if you look online, you will find some very ambiguous answers about Python being pass-by-reference or pass-by-value.  (which ends up boiling down to semantics and how you use certain terminology, but forget that for now)

Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at a Microsoft Dev/IT Pro Days conference in Belgium.  I was approached by the organizers asking if I would want to do a session on “Designing for testability”, as part of three talks I was to give there.