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Zzz: February 9, 2008

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After listening to the entirety of "Wizard People, Dear Reader", I can describe it very approximately as being like listening to the first Harry Potter movie narrated by the Moon Roach from Cerebus.

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Is This Thing On?

After my latest excesses of vainglory, I feel obliged to mention that I kind of blew it last week but one when we had a review meeting and the development team said their feature showed no significant negative effects when run on some set of tests. Now, there are a few scenarios where a new feature will not have any negative effects:
  1. You've been exceptionally careful and brilliant and lucky, and got everything right the first time, and/or you've gone through several iterations of testing already.
  2. The feature is completely trivial and has no negative effects because it has hardly any effect on anything.
  3. The feature is, uh, not actually turned on.

This just a month or two after another group had had a setback when they discovered that the test system was ignoring the configuration settings they were giving it. I forget sometimes that there's a reason I'm so paranoid when it comes to software.

The coda to this episode was my explaining to my boss my view of when to give people bad news by making an analogy with glitch sensitivity, a pretty clear sign that I've been working there too long.

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