When a progam crashes on a modern computer, it tries to tell what went wrong by saving what was on the memory at the time it crashed. It saves all the execution code in assembly but programmers learn how to read and it and hopefully it tells us why a program crashed. That’s what the computer is asking to do when it askes the user to ‘send information back to microsoft’. That system is called WinQual, it is used for Symantec for the product I work on, my mom uses it for Air/Flash and any decently sized software would be using it. Learning how to look at memory dumps takes a little bit of training and experience. It can often lead to no answer and worse, can lead you to a wrong conclusion, wasting your time and maybe other people’s to try to look for a bug that does not exist. Now when a program doesn’t crash, but you know something is going wrong, you can force it to crash and dump it’s execution and memory just so you can take a look at what’s actually going on.
High level design review can get you some useful criticism about design flaws, functional specification document reviews can get you a bit deeper understanding of how the prodcut is actually implemented which of course is useful when trying to find something wrong with the product. Code reviews are probably the most costly but effective form of reviews. It actually looks at the program code and sees if there are anything wrong. However, the most downstream artifact you can analyze is the memory dump. Because that’s what it’s actually running on the computer. After the designing, coding, compiling, packaging, configuring and then actually running.
I wish I could do that here for my brain. I guess that implies I think there is something wrong with me, something I have to fix. Well ok, I do think there are some things wrong with me but I don’t think I need to fix it just now. I guess I want my thoughts out on the inernet, because I don’t feel like doing it my self. Lazyness? maybe, probably. Fear of rejection? probably a little bit of that, but I already know I’m not for some people and I think I’m ok with that.
The reason why I’m talking about this is because I’ve been anti-social lately, more than usual. But I really just feel like playing Eveonline and watching House MD. Speaking of which, in that tv show, the main character is able to.. well i guess the whole diognostic team is able to sift through bunch of information and narrow down to what matters to their medical analysis. They have to ignore what might possibly matter, but not actually matter in reality. I’m not trying to reach a medical prognosis but I do wish I could only type out what is relevant. I guess when I mean relevant, I mean something that can tell something profound about me because right now, I’m just writing bunch of runon sentences with lots of spelling mistake since this Android WordPress application doesn’t have spell check.
Oh yeah, yesterday was my 24th birthday. In Asian countries, years have a cycle of 12. So in that regard, i’ve gone through two cycles of my life. It reminds me, the other day, I ran across the music video from ‘they might be giants’ that sang about getting older every second you live. The music video had a timer on each of the band member from the moment they came into the view of the video indicating the life time within the video which I thought was kind of clever and cool.
I’m considering moving out, but frankly i don’t really see the benefit of doing it. I know I won’t get any more freedom because I already have all the freedom I have while living with my parents. They cook for me which is a huge huge plus. My pride doesn’t really care about being independent so that doesn’t really matter. Maybe if I started sleeping around with girls, but that’s unlikely to happen any time soon. I get to save 2k per month when I live with my parents, plus quite a lot of spending money, heck i can probably save 3k if i really got cheap. i keep on considering paying my mom back for the car she bought me. it costed her 21k, i guess she had an account dedicated to saving for this so it was planned from a long time ago but i still feel that she didn’t need to do that.
I’m learning a lot of stuff at work. I feel good that some days, I solve someone’s problem, or better yet, our team’s problem. I got an employee applause program which gives me 100 usd credit so i must be doing something right. I’m a software quality assurance engineer, so almost all of what I do is related to testing or some how related to making sure our product doesn’t break. I deal a lot in automation as well. I cannot believe that using AutoIt actually helped out in doing my job, but it did because some of our automation is done that way. which is smart because that is a widely used windows scripting program that has tons of apis to support all kinds of interactions. I do hope I can be more useful in the near future and my current short term goal (maybe it’s long term) is to get rid of the ‘Associate’ part of my title, and become ‘Software Quality Assuance Engineer’.
I keep a text file open at work. I write down what I work on, what is on my mind (work wise of course, like what I should remember to do or worry about) and I use it at the end of the week when I’m writing a short weekly bullet point based report on what went on that week. maybe i should do that for my person life as well, maybe then, my blog post might be less random and a bit more interesting to read when i read it back in couple of months.
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