Musings on the Human Condition

I feel silly now, but I was pretty excited when Apple (and Steve Jobs) announced iCloud just the other day (June 6, 2011, to be exact). Given the quality of their other products (iPhone et al), I had high expectations. But this is a truly mediocre effort and a premature announcement. How did I arrive at this controversial conclusion? I installed iCloud on my desktop (also known as CloudMe, why can't Apple pick a name and stick with it?). I also installed the CloudMe sister app on my iPhone so that I could review the integration across devices. To my dismay, I discovered that iCloud is, in fact, no more than a file upload facility, whereas Dropbox is a true file sync tool. One saving grace is that it works at the folder level. You tell it which folders to track on your device, let's say your desktop. And if it sees a new file in one of the folders you've asked it to track, it will upload the file to the cloud. However, and this is where Dropbox leaves iCloud in the du...

  © Puneet Singh Lamba Who: A river stream, jam packed with fall(en) leaves What: Mostly oak leaves, looking gorgeous in their reflective container Where: Greater Boston Area When: November 13, 2010 Trivia: The leaves and acorns of oak trees are poisonous to cattle, if consumed in large amounts

Martin Fowler is one of my favorite technical authors. I am sharing a link to his eminently thought-provoking keynote address (VIDEO) at the Agile Connect 2011 conference, June 8-9, Las Vegas. In order to whet your appetite, I'll reveal that his talk is comprised of three sections as follows. And I'll offer short summaries, in case you decide not to watch the 1+ hour video. Non-deterministic tests and how best to deal with them. These are tests that succeed or fail randomly. They, therefore, cause your build to succeed or fail randomly. Fowler correctly recommends that such tests should be taken out of the suite and quarantined until the non-deterministic behavior has been fixed. He also lays out several root causes for non-deterministic tests including lack of test isolation (i.e. inter-test dependencies), asynchronous behavior (i.e. non-sequential events), remote services (i.e. failures outside your code). An economics-based argument for when and why to invest in good...