The other day I found myself in front of a bunch of fresh from the oven college grads looking up to me for some words of wisdom on Software Testing. I have been taking this class , once a year, to young recruits for some years and I am always in a fix on what to teach. I have my own share of tricks in my bag which I use for these classes but I did something new for the current batch.

It all started with a simple question i.e. What is Software Testing and I got a number of good responses but that led to a thought on what would be a first step to engage with software testing and the answer was very obvious, comprehension. Comprehension of the problem, of the object in scrutiny, of the principle which requires validation, of the hypothesis which would undergo various tests and rounds of rigorous observations before its blessed as a theory and so on. Its comprehension, comprehension and more comprehension.

The goal of Software Testing is to be able to certify a software after identifying and resolving all the defects which you encounter during your engagement with the software as a tester. That engagements would be an enriching one only if you know the subject. Its like knowing the intricacies of a specific musical instrument to play it well rather than just knowing how to play a particular kind of instrument. If you would have noticed that for all rock shows, concerts a lot of time goes in tuning the equipments. Even the masters need to tune the instrument before they begin their performance so as a tester , while its utmost important to know about testing methodologies, practices, tools etc, its far more important to know the software in question.
Continue reading →

I first thought of doing a good research to back my title but later abandoned it, since once I prep this story with data and figures, it no longer remain novel. This is just a small observation over last one week when I received two e-mails from Google relted to adsense. I dont remember getting many e-mails over the last 2 years, the time I signed up for an adsense account so it came as a little surprise.

Today I logged in my account and noticed that the home page got some UI tweaks as well. So the e-mails + the changes at the adsense page might add up to the theory that Google is investing time adn effort on this business viz. adsense.

Here’s the screen shot of the new home page.

Continue reading →

I wanted to limit the content at this website to software development related stuff, but it was difficut to not share the latest developments at the big brother Google. As we know, Google has this plethora of products which are listed here. Whether its the modest ‘Translate’ or ‘Youtube’ or ‘Picasa’, the offerings are really very rich. While most of the industry is looking at cost cutting, Google with its vast cash chest was seen as someone who would and can sustain for a long time. Well, it seems the finally Google Juggernaut is feeling the pinch.

Here’s a story from the official blog which talks about a reduction of 100 positions from the recruiting organization. Mind you, almost all the external contractors who help Google in recruiting have already been asked to discontinue their services. Read more here.

Reduction in force (RIF) is not a uncommon thing with US based companies but the other news was a bigger one where Google has identified a set of tools/products which would be closed down. This includes ones like stopping uploads to Google Video, Google Catalog Search and more.
Continue reading →

Its been a while I had this travel blog site called www.ghumakkar.com and for some reason or the other, I was not able to post a story in Hindi. I looked around but found no help. While hunting around, I could see numerous blogs in Hindi and a lot of them were on Word Press and that made the life more difficult. I asked around and somehow it worked for everyone except me.

Then one day, after a ghumakkar asked me this question again, I hunted again and could finally fix the issue. I found the answer here. So I thought that I would probably write a small post detailing the solution since the above forum post can be a little cryptic.

Problem - I am able to get Hindi Text and when I paste it in Word Press Post, it appears fine, but when I save the post it becomes ‘?????’.

Solution – The relevant property of the SQL fields which decide the encoding for the post body doesn’t have the right ‘collation’ property.

Solution in Detail
If your problem is exactly what I have described about then you can do following. This actually means tinkering with your Word Press database so I would advise against getting adventurous.

Do Following.
1. Find a tool which gives access to your database. In my case its phpMyadmin since I am on www.hostmonster.com.

2. Once you are inside phpMyadmin, click on the relevant database of the wordpress installation. If you have just one site and only one WP then just choose the one which you see. The typical name in the default installation is something like ‘_wrdp1′.

3. Once you click the database, you would see a list of tables.

4. One by one, Choose the following tables
- wp_option
- wp_comments
- wp_posts

and click ‘Edit’.

In Editing mode change “Collation” setting to “utf8_unicode_ci” of following
1. in wp_option -> option_value
2. in wp_comments -> comment_content
3. in wp_posts -> post_content and post_title

Hope this works for you. Happy Blogging.