Naar aanleiding van mijn Im Memoriam is me gevraagd om mijn stukje voor te lezen bij de begrafenis van mijn opa. Ik heb samen met mijn neef Ayold onze herinneringen gebundeld tot hoe het was om een kleinzoon van zo’n opa te zijn.

Hoe moeilijk het ook was, ik ben ontzettend dankbaar dat ik deze mooie herinneringen heb mogen delen, en, misschien nog wel belangrijker, dat ik heb mogen delen hoe opa in mij, en ieder van ons, voort leeft en dat dat iets is wat we niet moeten vergeten. Hieronder staat de tekst zoals ik hem heb voorgelezen (wat literaire vrijheden daargelaten).

Zoals vrijwel iedereen ben ik niet goed in omgaan met de dood, vooral omdat het buiten het leven valt, maar zo nu en dan komt het akelig dichtbij als het over nabije familie gaat. Naast verdriet zijn er gelukkig ook een heleboel mooie herinneringen en een hoop om dankbaar voor te zijn.

Mijn vroegste herinneringen aan opa Rolde gaan terug naar de tuin aan de Gieterstraat. Rode bessen die best wel zuur waren, een aspergebed met heel veel roestige blikjes die de asperges voor de zon verborgen hielden, de grote boom met een houten schommel, altijd zag je waar het eten vandaan kwam, want in mijn herinnering kwam het eten altijd in overvloede uit de tuin.

Er was ook een winter waar de bomen voor het huis bedekt waren met een centimeter ijzel, wat heel mooi was, maar waar ik (terecht) absoluut niet onderdoor mocht lopen. De winter was sowieso een fantastisch seizoen. Niemand kon immers zo goed schaatsen als Opa (en zeker ik niet, heb ik later geleerd…) en als opa zelf niet schaatste, dan was er altijd nog schaatsen op tv, waar opa zelf net zo hard mee schaatste met zijn bovenlichaam, heen en weer, heen en weer, heen en weer.

Tot aan het eind was opa ook het beste in klaverjassen en meestal won hij wel, en dat is natuurlijk wel logisch, want hij schreef, en zoals hij schreef, schreef geen ander. Als je aan de beurt was (maar alleen tijdens het kaarten) werd je steevast “hoe heeeet je ook alweer” genoemd, en je moest wel opschieten, want kaarten doe je niet met een praatje.

Als je rondkijkt in de familie zie je dat er over het algemeen flink gestudeerd is en dat iedereen altijd bereid is om te werken en een paar armen uit de mouwen te steken. Dat hebben we niet van een vreemde, want opa was precies zo en heeft dat netjes overgedragen. Ook was hij altijd geinteresseerd of het wel goed met je ging en wat voor cijfers je haalde (een pijnlijk onderwerp voor sommigen).

Het meest waardevolle is nog wel dat zelfs op een droevige dag als afgelopen zaterdag, het eigenlijk heel gezellig was omdat de hele familie bijeen was. We komen niet zo heel vaak bijeen, vooral omdat we met zoveel zijn, maar het van Bree zijn is en blijft een anker dat ons verbindt, en in geest was opa daarom altijd wel aanwezig bij het grote van Bree mannenweekend, zelfs al kon hij daar fysiek niet bij zijn. De geest van opa leeft in ons allemaal voort, en dat is iets wat ik zal koesteren en waar ik trots op zal zijn.

I discovered Gil Scott-Heron’s music far too late, I’m ashamed to admit. This morning I learned he died, just a year after he turned around his musical career after a decade filled with substance abuse. Last year he made the brilliant album I’m New Here, which Jamie xx produced into the sublime CD We’re New Here.

One of the most precious songs on Kanye Wests last CD was who will survive in America:

Which is only good because it uses a sample from a LP that Gil Scott-Heron produced 40 years before that (in 1970); Small Talk At 125th And Lennox:

Gil-Scott-Heron has produced some amazing stuff, and his revolution will not be televised.

 

The Salton Sea is a pretty strange place and in the past week I saw two videos about this very strange place.

Let’s start off with Everyday, by Rusko, that has some pretty shots of this very strange place and it is filled with a nice amount of dub-steppy booms.

If you thought that this place looks unreal, watch this short of how the place came to be:

Essentially this is a jobdewit.nl roundup, which links to some amazing wonderful music videos and essentially I was behind for about a month.

A wonderful music video that features a robot

Fallulah is Romanian-Danish, the music video is full of Scandinavian weird.

Once more the music video is pretty much weird, but the music is kinda catchy too.

There are still 15 unread items from this site over the past month, so hopefully I will be able to link to a couple more later this weeks. Loving music is such a burden…

Last year when I first heard the xx I was already pretty much blown away, but a couple of months ago I discovered the remix that Jamie xx made of New York is killing me, which is pretty much a superawesome dubstep fest:

This weekend I discovered that the CD is also on Spotify, and I have pretty much had it on repeat ever since. If electronic music is your thing, I strongly recommend that you check this out.

I was recently pointed at the wonderful album Space is Only Noise from Nicolas Jaar. It is lovely electronic jazzy work. You can the whole album on Spotify.

Given that I have resuscitated my blog, I figured I might just as well try to keep up a bit with posting content, and what better way than to share recommendations of awesome music?

I will generally not try to explain why I find it so good, because listening to music is still something that I largely do unconsciously.

Last week I stumbled upon The Weeknd thanks to a random tweet and I have been listening to it for a week now and am still not tired of it. The CD has a has an awesome sound that is a bit of a mashup between dubstep and R&B with nice vocals, and apparently even the critics love it. The best thing of all is that the download is free, so if you like the song below (the first track of the album) I recommend that you give it a spin.

Getting started

I recently dropped in my 2 cents in a discussion about between Ludovic and SpriteCloud about QA 101. I am now working at Longtail Video performing a bunch of roles, including sales, support and QA (Quality Assurance) of our Bits on the Run online video platform. I knew a lot about online video because of my previous job running transcoding operations at Joost, but I was only aware of some common best practices; I didn’t know much about the day-to-day business of running a QA process.

The first couple of releases things were mostly a matter of familiarizing myself with the software and trying to click everything on each page and thus hoping to catch all bugs. A lot of time was spent trying to think up as much invalid input as possible and see if that would break stuff. Of course there was already a sane development/staging/production environment set up so software could be tested in a safe environment before being deployed to production.

Initial signs of organization

The easiest way to get started organizing software quality assurance is by compiling checklists. For each page you should define all operations that should succeed. Do still remember that invalid input should be rejected and, (this is a lesson that I learnt the hard way) do realize that it is quite possible that software breaks badly when you try to feed it UTF-8 characters. I keep all of my checklists in Google Spreadsheets, as that way it is very easy to share how the QA process is coming along. Also conditional markup makes all failed test cases nice and red.

This will probably not work for everyone, but during a test run we do not ticket all the bugs that are found. At first we just have a shared Google spreadsheet where we track all the bugs that are found during the QA process. Most bugs (especially typos and smaller logic bugs) are just fixed straight away and tested again once fixed. Only issues that are tagged for a future release or bugs that would require major rework are ticketed.

Also, in a fairly early stage we split up the test process in two parts, as we have two systems that work largely independent from each other.

1. The base software (contentserver, API, databases, encoders)
2. The dashboard (which runs completely on top of the API)

Thus most of our releases are also staggered releases, where first the base system is released and sanity checked, and after that we release and check the dashboard.

Automation

We don’t have a lot of automation, but I have done a little bit of programming to make the tests of the content server go quicker. Essentially I have built a bunch of PHP pages that I walk through before each release. For each release I need a video key of a newly uploaded video, so this means that I have built one config file that needs to be updated before each test run and after that I can click through the pages relatively quickly. Switching between staging and production is a matter of commenting out a couple of lines in the config file. The pages are really simple and look more or less like the image below:

At some point it might be nice to automate the tests of the dashboard too with a Behavior Driven Development (BDD) solution like Cucumber/Selenium-webdriver but for now we have not deemed it worth the development time yet.

Test process

For a typical release I do a couple of steps to test and verify the software:

• I start by gathering all the tickets for this release. I make a spreadsheet that contains all changes/tickets and how they should be tested. This also doubles as the test plan. There are a couple of possible test solutions for each ticket:
  • Add this to one of the existing test plans
  • Nothing fundamental changes, the existing test plans should cover this
  • This is covered by unit tests, just run the normal test plans
• For any new features or radical changes I will spend a lot of time on just using it so I understand how it really works and is supposed to work and will also try to feed it as much invalid data etc to see if that breaks anything.
• When this is done I execute the (updated) test plans.
• When everything looks sane I give a green light for deployment
• After release I do a sanity check with a limited test plan (that can be executed quickly) to verify that nothing essential broke in production.

Making things work for you

In the end I do not think there is one correct way to test software. Especially if you’re working in a smaller team, you will just have to figure out a process that works for you. No matter how much you test, there will always be bugs that slip through, but there are two things that are key to an effective QA process:

1. Catch all major bugs that break the core functionality of your product
2. Whenever you receive a bug report from end-users, verify if this warrants a new test case in your test plan and figure out what you can do to catch similar bugs in the future. (aka learn from your mistakes)

Like everyone else on this planet, I think I am special, and yesterday I got proof of that. On my way home I got in the elevator. There were already three people in the elevator and they were all facing the door. Only after I had settled down, leaning with my back to the side, facing sideways, I realized that the “normal” (socially acceptable) thing to do would have been would have been to go face the same direction.

I guess this either means I’m a non-conformist, socially inept, extremely lazy, or deep inside aware of this little factoid and hence immune to this subliminal cue.