Fredericton, New Brunswick based PQA - Professional Quality Assurance has announced its intention to grow its workforce from the current 91 to almost 400 over the next three years. The province of New Brunswick has announced an assistance program for PQA which will see an average of $7544 per full time permanent employee that PQA hires over the next three years. This assistance is for training and equipment for these new hires.
Who are PQA?
Founded in 1997, PQA is a software quality assurance vendor which provides services such as software testing, QA consultants, content quality assurance and e-learning or training development services. They currently have three offices with their headquarters in Fredericton and satellite offices in Moncton, New Brunswick and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. With this latest expansion there are hints that PQA will open additional offices in other New Brunswick locations, likely in Saint John but possibly in smaller and economically hard hit cities in northern NB such as Miramichi or Cambellton.
Software Testing is a dirty job
As many software developers know, software testing is very difficult as you become accustomed to the warts and consciously or sub-consciously avoid trouble areas or scenarios in your application when testing. In addition, software testing, developing training materials and documentation are often pushed back to the end of the development cycle are are often the first tasks to get short changed when the pressure to ship starts to build. By farming out these tasks to a third party, your developers are free to concentrate on developing quality and compelling software.
A fresh, experienced and independent point of view
Just as a third party audit of financial records is a good idea (and often necessary), a third party software quality assurance can give your code a professional and independent critique before it ships to customers. An outsiders’ fresh view of your software may reveal omissions in your documentation or bring to light implicit or explicit assumptions that were made in the software design and development cycle. Identifying and addressing these issues prior to shipping can save a lot of money in fixing software as well as in support costs. Even more valuable than saving on support costs, by fixing problems you can ship a higher quality product and enhance the customer experience. Creating a quality experience for your customer can raise your reputation and brand. Remember: “Every Touch Counts“.
Third party QA can identify software bugs, performance and scalability problems, user experience issues, user interface inconsistencies and documentation issues. Although some of these problems can be identified and addressed in house, a more thorough assessment by a third party quality assurance vendor can make your product that much more stable and bulletproof as well as give your product that extra usability edge over the competition.
Money well spent I’d say.
June 16th, 2009
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Business, Fredericton, New Brunswick|
no comments
Created in 2006 as a way of bringing people with common interests together, Mugshot was designed by RedHat as an open source site. The intentions was to allow interaction between users using not only its own site but by plugging into other networking sites such as Facebook and del.icio.us. Mugshot included the ability to chat between users, share links, facebook updates and read RSS feeds.
Mugshot did have some innovative features such as a desktop client which allowed quick and easy access to network updates and to quickly post items or share links with your friends or interest groups.
Where did it go?
Despite some initial promise, in April of this year, the website went offline with a “Mugshot is currently not running.” message and as of earlier this May, the URLs for http://www.mugshot.org get redirected to http://www.redhat.com.
I have been unable to find any official confirmation that Mugshot has been killed and will not come back but it does not look promising.
Why did it fail?
Unfortunately Mugshot never seemed to get much traction outside of a small group of Linux (mainly RedHat) enthusiasts. Whether it was a lack of marketing or a neglect of website and network can be debated but after its initial launch period, RedHat almost seemed to ignore Mugshot perhaps hoping that organic growth could occur with open source community updating and introducing new features. Competition from Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook may have also helped put Mugshot on the chopping block.
Another part of the reasoning behind RedHat’s apparent neglect and eventual abandonment of Mugshot is that the social network concept never seemed to fit well into its strategy to be an enterprise Linux vendor. Right from the introduction of Mugshot, there appeared to be confusion regarding why RedHat was pursuing this product.
Mugshot champions gone?
It also appears that a few of the Mugshot champions from within RedHat such as Christopher Blizzard who has moved on to the Mozilla Foundation and Havoc Pennington who is currently at litl.
In a March blog post, Havoc even mentions the validity of the concept despite the lack of success with Mugshot:
It’s gratifying that the new default home screen of Facebook looks a lot like Mugshot.org, a site some of us came up with at Red Hat. We coded Mugshot’s personal-lifestream-thingy before Facebook’s news feed came out and before FriendFeed came out. Not saying either site copied us, but it’s still nice to know at least our idea was good (even though there were lots of reasons we weren’t the ones to get anywhere with it).
What’s next for Mugshot?
As of today, the source code for Mugshot is still available at http://svn.mugshot.org/ and it appears that a fork of the Mugshot code will live on in project magnetism at: http://code.google.com/p/magnetism/. There is no indication of that a free shared Mugshot type service (like RedHat was offering) will be made available.
May 29th, 2009
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Linux, Tech|
one comment
The release of Fedora 11 was recently pushed back by a week and then another week to June 9th due to some blocker bugs still being open. The new release date however is still just around the corner so I’ve decided to look at what is coming in Fedora 11.
What’s New in Fedora 11
- Gnome 2.26
- Firefox 3.5 (currently at beta 4) which introduces HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags an a Private Browsing Mode (aka Porn Browsing Mode)
- ext4 is now the default filesystem when installing a new Fedora 11 install
- Improved fingerprint reader experience with a improved detection and a GUI configuration tool (authconfig)
- gcc 4.4
- faster boot up times with the goal being a 20 second startup
- upgraded rpm to 4.7 for performance improvements
- OpenChange introduce for native Microsoft Exchange integration
- Xserver 1.6 which brings with it improved performance, stability and RANDR 1.3 support
- improved graphical drivers including
- kernel modeseting in Intel drivers for graphical bootup sequence
- new default NVidia drivers (nouveau) which supports more cards, has performance improvements over the current nv drivers and supports RANDR 1.2
- improved ATI/AMD Radeon drivers allowing r100/r200 based cards to work with modesetting and DRI2
Try it out
I decided to install a Fedora 11 Preview copy in a VMWare Workstation virtual machine to see first hand what changes were in store. After booting off of the Live CD and clicking on Install to Hard Drive, the install process went very smoothly. Installation seems faster than previous versions as well though I did select more packages on my previous Fedora 10 install.
Here is a screenshot of F11 in action:
Screenshot of Fedora 11
More info and reviews
For additional information there are podcasts including an interview with Fedora’s release manager Jesse Keating and Spot Callaway discussing the upcoming Fedora 11 features available at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F11_release_podcasts. Another interview with Richard Hughes on the improvements to PackageKit are available at : http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=1637
If you would rather see than hear about Fedora 11, there is also a screenshot tour of Fedora 11 available at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Screenshot_Tour.
May 28th, 2009
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Linux|
no comments
Not content to have the dominant position in the data center virtualization market with its VMware Infrastructure products including the widely used ESX, VMWare strikes out on another platform : mobile devices.
Virtualizing mobile devices
VMware MVP(Mobile Virtualization Platform) is a product which allow mobile operating systems to be virtualized. A small piece of code (about 20k) is run on a mobile device which effectively virtualizes the resources of the device allowing other operating systems to run on the virtualized hardware.
As Ars Technica describes, VMWare demoed a Nokia N800 running Google’s Android as well as Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS. Although there is some obvious overhead and performance penalties to virtualizing hardware on a mobile device (as on a server or desktop), freeing your mobile device to run the OS of your choice could prove quite valuable.
Currently VMware supports Windows CE 5.0 and 6.0, Linux 2.6.x (which would include Maemo and Android), Symbian 9.x, eCos, µITRON NORTi and µC/OS-II. It does not appear to be available for sale yet but you can contact VMware to get more information on MVP.
The future?
Although it is fairly new and probably rough around the edges, perhaps VMware MVP will get rolled into VMware Workstation 7.0 which would allow developers to easily access multiple mobile platforms for ease of development and testing.
Now if they could only emulate the iPhone and Blackberry using MVP. Then you would truly be able to use the hardware and software combination that suits YOU best.
May 27th, 2009
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Nokia N810/N800/770, Tech, android|
no comments
Has the Sun set on MySQL?
Has the sun set on MySQL? I don’t think so. Even after the buyout from Oracle, Sun’s MySQL is still looking up. With a new release coming down the pipes, there is little reason to shy away from MySQL.
After a controversial release of version 5.1 in December 2008, Sun’s (and soon to be Oracle’s) MySQLdatabase is quickly coming back with a preview version of MySQL 5.4. Part of the reason for the rapid successive releases is the shift to a new release schedule based on time instead of the previous feature based releases. Because of this shift, 5.4 won’t include any major new features such as the Falcon transactional storage engine but a more incremental set of features.
Sun making its mark
This is probably the first release in which we will see Sun’s influence over the databases’ evolution. Sun is interested in making their hardware (and OS) platform more appealing to run MySQL on and so emphasis on better support for Sun’s hardware and Solaris in particular should come through in 5.4 and future releases.
The major enhancements between 5.1 and 5.4 are scalability improvements. This new version adds the ability to address more than 4 CPU’s or cores (at least for the InnoDB engine). This allows MySQL to scale up much better on larger servers such as 16 way x86 boxes and up to 64 way on Sun’s new CMT servers.
There are other scalability improvements including the inclusion of Google’s SMP and IO patches, a new thread concurrency algorithm and more efficient read-write lock mechanism.
Optimizing queries
Subquery optimizations and improvements in how joins are performed have provide dramatic improvements in execution times for certain queries. A specific OSDL DBT-3 query was changed from a 12 minutes query requiring 9 million reads to a 1.8 second query with 153,000 reads. Obviously this is probably an extreme example but many subqueries will be sped up due to these changes.
Other changes which clearly show Sun’s influence on MySQL include the inclusion of DTrace probes on Solaris, porting of Google’s SMP patches to Solaris and “operating system specific optimisations”
So how does it perform?
Overall performance according to benchmark looks quite a bit improved including a 59% improvement in EAStress2004 benchmark and generally improved read only and read write benchmarks on both Linux and Solaris.
One of the nice things about 5.4 is that most of the improvements and enhancements don’t require and database changes or altered configurations.
Looking forward to final release
April 30th, 2009
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Tech|
no comments
For the last few weeks, people in Fredericton and along the Saint John river valley have been anxiously watching the water levels in the river to watch if the river will flood as in 2008.
After a near record snowfall in the winter of 2008-2009, warm and wet weather early in April quickly rose the river levels. After rising to the flood level of 6.5 m in Fredericton around April 8th, cooler and drier weather allowed the snow melt to slow down. This allowed the river level to drop more than two meters to 4.35 m, providing people living near the flood zone some breathing room.
And the Saint John River rises
Due to a lot of rain and warmer weather over the last week or so, the river is back on the rise. New Brunswick’s Riverwatch is now forecasting a rise past the flood stage on Friday morning and rising to 7.0 m on Saturday morning. Although the weather forecast is calling for dry weather for the next few days, the temperature is also forecasted to rise to over 20 degrees which will increase the rate of melting for the remaining snow that is left on the ground.
Even with the river rising over the official flood level of 6.5 m, at 7.0 m damage to low lying areas should be fairly minimal although I would imagine that a few basements will be flooded. The river would have to rise over another meter in order to attain last year’s high water mark of 8.35 m ( Map - PDF ) at which point there was extensive damage to many building along the waterfront.
Additional resources:
- Environment Canada’s real time hydrometric data shows present and past river levels through New Brunswick and the rest of Canada
- The city of Fredericton has a Riverwatch site with information including maps of previous flood levels and flood prone areas of the city
- The province of New Brunswick’s Riverwatch site has detailed river level forecasts as well as additional planning and emergency information
- The city of Fredericton has a few webcams which can give you a view of the current river levels
April 23rd, 2009
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Fredericton, New Brunswick|
no comments
Fredericton Flood Watch 2009
As the snow begins to melt in the Great White North, thanks to the great Fredericton flood of 2008, one question that has been on people’s minds here in New Brunswick is whether or not there will be extensive flooding on the Saint John River again this year. The images of the floods and fear of possible flooding in Fargo, North Dakota and in the Red River valley in Manitoba remind us of what we experienced in Fredericton, Woodstock, Edmunston and all along the Saint John river a short year ago.
From Sean McGrath's Flickr stream
Just like 2008?
Thanks to the NOAA website, we can examine the current snow depth and snow water equivalent for the western portion of the Saint John watershed. We can also compare the amount to last year’s record amounts as a benchmark. Luckily it appears that the snow depth and water content is less than last year even though they are both above normal in most areas.
NOHRSC Interactive Snow Information.
Unknown factors
There are still several additional factors which could affect the possibilities of flooding this spring. Rainfall and the quickness of the snow melt can have significant impacts on the water levels in the river. Last year’s floods were caused in part by a large storm which dropped over 100 mm of rain in the upper Saint John river valley in northern NB, Maine and eastern Quebec just as the snow melting was taking place. Another large storm of similar magnitude or a quick warming trend could quickly increase the river’s water levels and make all previous predictions useless.
And the rain falls
The last weekend (April 4-5) brought some heavy rains over New Brunswick and the weather forecast for the rest of the week is calling for more rain which does not bode well for keeping the river under flood levels.
Due to the recent rain and warm weather, there is already some flooding being caused by ice jams in the upper Saint John river valley near Hartland. Tributaries such as the Nashwaak and Oromocto river are also nearing flood levels. The water level in the Saint John river at Fredericton has also risen dramatically in the last few days going from 2.5 m to a current reading of near 5 m with a forecasted rise to 5.8 m by Wednesday. Flood stage is defined as 6.5 m while the high water level during last year’s major flood was 8.36 meters.
Hopefully the river will crest near flood levels and spare people living along the river a lot of grief.
April 7th, 2009
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Fredericton, New Brunswick|
one comment
About a week ago, I finished reading a book that has long been on my reading list: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond.
After being very impressed when I read his Pulitzer prize winning book Guns, Germs and Steel, I was eager to read Diamond’s take on civilization collapse and the reasons behind their failures. Here is my review of it.
Stories of Collapse
The book examines several fallen civilizations such as Easter Island in the South Pacific, the Anasazi in which is now the southwestern United States, the Maya civilization in Central America. There is also a deeper examination of the Vikings and in particular Greenland which was settled in 900 AD until approximately 1400 AD.
Each civilization and culture is examined and emphasis is placed on environmental factors that contributed to their weakening and collapse. Deforestation, soil erosion, overfishing/overhunting and population growth are recurring activities which influence the ability of a society to support itself. For example, the deforestation that occurred on Easter Island severely limited the ability of the people there to use fishing to support themselves.
As in Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond uses multiple fields such as archaeology, anthropology biology and geography to provide evidence to his claim that the environment played a pivotal role in the downfall of these cultures.
Diamond examines a few situations in which a society collapsed while another with similar issues made different choices and managed to avoid a collapse. This case occurs today with the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic which share an island. Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere has recently had many struggles in comparison to its relatively well off island neighbour. The author argues that history and societal choices helped determine the diverging destinies of the two neighbours.
Another case which is examined is the Norse civilization in Greenland which became extinct while the culture of the Inuit in the same region experienced the same environmental conditions and due to their lifestyles and choices, survived.
Collapse is all around
Collapse is not only a study of ancient civilizations but also a reflection of issues which the world is currently facing. A few case studies of recent or ongoing “collapses” remind the reader that we as a society are still vulnerable to possible collapse if we as a society are not careful. The cases examined include the recent genocide in Rwanda, Haiti and possible collapses in the making in China and Australia.
Though I was not completely convinced by the case studies of Australian and Chinese collapse, the author does point out some major issues with environmental degradation (drought, erosion, that are having impacts on Australian and Chinese societies but I’m not sure about the severity or the eventual denouement of these situations.
Not all doom and gloom
Collapse is not all doom and gloom. In addition to examining societies that have collapsed, Jared Diamond also examines a few societies in which responses to crises lead to a sustainable society. Japan for example ran into issues due to deforestation and population pressures in the 1600s. Using a combination of population growth controls and effective timber management (along with imports from other countries), Japan managed to keep collapse at bay and in fact thrived due its choices.
What are we to do?
Collapse ends on the positive notes of hope with Diamond suggesting that if societies value the environment and make wise choices based not only on short term results and profits that we can thrive as a society and avoid collapse. Perhaps it is too late as some ( http://postcarbon.org/shape_recovery ) are speculating that this economic recession that has just started might be a sign of our current civilization hitting a wall.
Should I read it?
I quite enjoyed reading Collapse:How Societies choose to Fail or Succeed quite a bit. The book did feel a little environmentally preachy at times but overall it was a good examination of societies, some of the environmental challenges they face and how their response to those challenges dictate whether the societies will collapse or thrive. A great read for the environmentalist in you but even if you aren’t a green to the bone type, the book could still appeal to you with its great examinations of past societies, how they lived and how they failed or succeeded in the face of challenge.
March 30th, 2009
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Misc|
no comments
