assert_not_diff

The output of Ruby's Test::Unit::TestCase's
assert_equal(expected, actual) when expected and actual are not the same is often not as useful as it could be. For example:
expected = [1,99,2,3,{:a=>34,:b=>43}]
actual = [1,2,3,4,{:a=>324,:c=>555,:b=>43},5]
assert_equal expected, actual
produces:
<[1, 99, 2, 3, {:a=>34, :b=>43}]> expected but was
<[1, 2, 3, 4, {:a=>324, :c=>555, :b=>43}, 5]>.
For large objects which differ only slightly the output that tells you where they differ quickly gets lost in the mass of output telling you where they don't.

Perhaps what's happened here is a sort of Primitive Obsession.
It's as though assert_equal assumes it will only ever be called with primitives.

So I put together a little bit of code to help out. The simplest solution I can think of uses json and diff, so I thought I'd call it assert_not_diff
require 'json'
require 'Tempfile'

def assert_not_diff(lhs,rhs)
  if lhs != rhs
    puts `diff -y #{file_for lhs} #{file_for rhs}`
  end
end

def file_for(obj)
  exp = Tempfile.new("bk", "/tmp").open
  exp.write(JSON.pretty_generate(obj))
  exp.close
  exp.path
end

expected = [1,99,2,3,{:a=>34,:b=>43}]
actual = [1,2,3,4,{:a=>324,:c=>555,:b=>43},5]
assert_not_diff expected, actual
This produces:
[                  [
  1,                 1,
  99,            <
  2,                 2,
  3,                 3,
                 >   4,
  {                  {
    "a": 34,     |     "a": 324,
                 >     "c": 555,
    "b": 43            "b": 43
  }              |   },
                 >   5
]                  ]
Which I think is a lot more useful.
Hope this proves useful to someone!

smart swarm

is an excellent book by Peter Miller (isbn 978-0-00-738297-2). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
As successful foragers return to the nest with seeds, they're met at the nest entrace by foragers waiting in reserve. This contact stimulates the inactive ants to go out. Foragers normally don't come back until they find something. So the faster the foragers return, the faster other ants go out, enabling the colony to tune its work force to the probability of finding food.
Instead of attempting to outsmart the desert environment, the ants, in a sense, were matching its complexity with their own.
Instead of trying to keep fine-tuning a system so it will work better and better, maybe what we really ought to be looking for is a rigourous way of saying, okay, that's good enough. [Deborah Gordon]
If a scout bee was impressed by another scout's dance, she might fly to the box being advertised and conduct her own inspection, which could last as long as an hour. But she would never blindly follow another scout's opinion by dancing for a site she hadn't visited.
J. Scott Turner considers the mound's function as a respiratory system so essential that the termites couldn't live without it. In a sense, he argues, the mound is almost a living part of the colony.
If individuals in a group are prompted to make small changes to a shared structure that inspires others to improve it even further, the structure becomes an active player in the creative process.
Unlike our systems, which are tuned for efficiency, the termites' systems have been tuned for robustness, which they demonstrate by building mounds that are constantly self-healing.
What really made the lights go on was the realization that termites don't pay attention to the environment itself but to changes in the environment.
Not only does this complicated structure represent an indirect collaboration among millions of individuals, it also embodies a kind of ongoing conversation between the colony and the world outside. The mound might look like a structure, but it's better thought of as a process.
We should think of it [the termite mound] as a dynamic system that balances forces both inside and outside its walls to create the right environment for the termites.
When you feel like you belong to something, it gives you so much more freedom and so much more energy that might otherwise be used up in anxiety, to do other things.
On January 12, 2006, several hundred thousand pilgrims had gathered in a dusty tent city at Mina, three miles east of Mecca...
By noon... about a half-million or more pilgrims filled the Jamarat plaza in front of the bridge... The pressure inside the crowd was crushing... More than an hour later, victims were piled up seven layers deep: 363 men and women were dead.
"Those in charge need to remember the root cause of the problem: too many people trying to get through too small a space. The ingress rate at the bridge was 135,000 per hour. The thoughput rate of the pillars was only 100,000 an hour. You can't put a pint into a half-pint jug." [Keith Still]

the life of brian

is an excellent screenplay by Monty Python (isbn 0-413-74130-3). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Why aren't women allowed to go to stonings, Mum?
Because it's written, that's why.

Jaguar's ear lobes. Wolf nipple chips. Gem 'em while they're hot. They're lovely. Dromedary pretzels, only half a dinar. Tuscany fried bat.

The People's Front of Judea fucking gets things done!

What's this then? 'Romanes Eunt Domus'?
It says 'Romans go home'.
No it doesn't. What's the Latin for Romans? Come on … come on

And what have they ever given us in return?
The aqueduct?

Oh … I'll give you nineteen then.
No, no. Do it properly.
What?
Haggle properly. This isn't worth nineteen.
But you just said it was worth twenty.

Eighteen?
No, no, no. You go to fourteen now.
Fourteen.
Fourteen, are you joking?

Siblings!! Let us not be disheartened. One total catastrophe like this is just the beginning!

What is the secret?
Leave me alone.
Yes! Tell us the secret!
What is the secret?
is is the secret of Eternal Life?

Look … you've got it all wrong. You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody. You've got to think for yourselves. You're all individuals.
Yes, we're all individuals.
You're all different.
Yes, we are all different.

Always look on the bright side of life.


Perfect Software and other illusions about testing

is the title of an excellent book by Jerry Weinberg. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
Testing a system is a process of gathering information with the intent that the information could be used for some purpose.
Without a process that includes regular technical reviews, no project will rise above mediocrity, no matter how good its machine-testing process.
At least half your testing costs can be cut before anybody ever runs a test, if only your systems are designed with testability in mind.
"We absolutely need this software in place twenty-four weeks from tomorrow. We need two weeks to staff up and get approvals. Then we'll need four weeks for requirements, four weeks for architecture. four weeks for design, and eight weeks for coding. That adds up to twenty-two weeks, so we'll have two weeks left for testing."
If you have ten kilograms of pure uranium-235 and you add another ten kilograms, you'll have twenty kilograms. But if you do this a few more times, you won't have fifty kilograms, you'll have a nuclear explosion. One plus one doesn't always equal two.
The more bugs you find, the more you're going to find, not the other way around.
The human mind craves meaning. If you feed people a random bit of data, they'll struggle to divine meaning from it - and they'll move from the intake phase to the meaning phase so fast they won't be aware of doing so.
You have to know what you're expecting before you give meaning to a test report, otherwise everything looks or sounds right. That's why I'm a strong advocate of the test-first philosophy, whereby developers write their tests to include expected results before they write a line of code. It's what we did fifty years ago, but the practice was gradually lost when industry trends separated testing from development.
That separation occurred initially because it's psychologically difficult for people to test their own programs. There's still significant risk if you rely on test-first without pair-programming or some other process that casts more than one pair of eyes, and more than one brain, on a program.
If test-first is a good idea, then significance-first is even better. Why? … if you actually perform even an enormous number of tests, you would likely lose the valuable information among all the worthless crud. The number of tests performed should be as small as possible, but no smaller.
"We didn't have any problems until we started testing. We were right on schedule. Testing screwed up everything."
"What the American public wants in the theatre is a tragedy with a happy ending." [William Dean Howells]

Experiential Learning 3: Simulation

is an excellent book by Jerry Weinberg. There's no isbn - you can buy it from Leanpub. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
Would be writers commonly trap themselves by speaking their stories, rather than writing them.
The essential principle of the fieldstone method is "energy".
In a few days we can raise the participants' level of both creating and reviewing, which are the yin and yang of such creative work.
Really, the possibilities are endless, so there's never an excuse for saying you can't think of an experiential exercise.
If they cannot overcome their feelings that the simulation is "silly", then that is an important perception which we'll want to examine during the invention.
A simulation doesn't have to be "real" to be successful as an experiential learning too. What has to be real the feelings it stimulates in the participants, for feelings are what drive learning.
Paradoxically, realism often interferes directly with learning from a simulation.
Frequently, a VW company will sell a poem without knowing whether they can build it.
"Rules" are frozen solutions. Rules are solutions to yesterday's problem, carried forward to the present, but usually without reference to the problem they were intended to solve. Each rule is really an "if-then" rule, but "if-then" part is seldom stated.
You are not a grader, but a teacher.
Every time you jiggle one of your control points, you're ruining some of the teaching power of the simulation. Why? Because you're simulating a universe in which there are powerful hidden gods who control the world.

surely you're joking Mr Feynman

subtitled 'Adventures of a Curious Character', is an excellent book by Richard Feynman (isbn 978-0-099-17331-1). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
Radio sets were much easier to understand in those days because everything was out in the open. After you took the set apart (it was a big problem to find the right screws), you could see this was a resistor, that's a condenser, here's a this, there's a that; they were all labelled.
I finally fixed it beause I had, and still have, persistence.
They didn't even know what they "knew". I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way - by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile.
In this room there were wires strung all over the place! Switches were hanging from the wires, cooling water was dripping from the valves, the room was full of stuff, all out in the open. Tables piled with tools were everywhere; it was the most godawful mess you ever saw. The whole cyclotron was there in one room, and it was complete, absolute chaos!
It reminded me of my lab at home. Nothing at MIT had ever reminded me of my lab at home. I suddenly realized why Princeton was getting results. They were working with the instrument. They built the instrument; they knew where everything was, they knew how everything worked. ... It was wonderful! Because they worked with it. They didn't have to sit in another room and push buttons.
I sat with the physicsts, but after a bit I thought: It would be nice to see what the rest of the world is doing, so I'll sit for a week or two in each of the other groups.
So you must be always jiggling a little bit, testing out which way seems to be the easiest.
One day I was watching a paramecium and I saw something that was not described in the books I got in school - in college, even. These books always simplify things so the world will be more like they want it to be.
I chose to play a thing called a "frigideira" which is a toy frying pan made of metal, about six inches in diameter, with a little metal stick to beat it with. ... I practiced all the time. I'd walk along the beach holding two sticks that I had picked up, getting the twisty motion of the wrists, practicing, practicing, practicing.
One day, shortly before Carnival time, the leader of the samba school said, "OK, we're going to practice marching in the street. ...
It was rush hour in Copacabana, and we were going to march down the middle of Avenida Atlantica.
It said to myself, "Jesus! The boss didn't get a license, he didn't OK it with the police, he didn't do anything. He's decided we're just going to go out."
So we started to go out into the street, and everybody, all around, was excited. Some volunteers from a group of bystanders took a rope and formed a big square around our band, so the pedestrians wouldn't walk through the lines. People started to lean out of the windows. Everybody wanted to hear the new samba music. It was very exciting!
As soon as we started to march, I saw a policeman, way down at the other end of the road. He looked, saw what was happening, and started diverting traffic! Everything was informal. Nobody made any arrangements, but it all worked fine.
One exercise they had invented for loosening us up was to draw without looking at the paper. Don't take your eyes off the model; just look at her and makes the lines on the paper without looking at what you're doing.
One of the guys says, "I can't help it. I have to cheat. I bet everybody's cheating!"
"I'm not cheating!" I say.
"Aw, baloney!" they say.
I finish the exercise and they come over to look at what I had drawn. They found that, indeed, I was NOT cheating; at the very beginning my pencil point had busted, and there was nothing but impressions on the paper.
When I finally got my pencil to work, I tried again. I found that my drawing had a kind of strength - a funny, semi-Picasso-like strength - which appealed to me. The reason I felt good about that drawing was, I knew it was impossible to draw well that way, and therefore it didn't have to be good - and that's really what all the loosening up was all about. I had thought that "loosen up" meant "make sloppy drawings," but it really meant to relax and not worry about how the drawing is going to come out.
When it came time to evaluate the conference at the end, the others told how much they got out of it, how successful it was, and so on. When they asked me, I said, "This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There's a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!


nothing new ever works

I'm having a new bathroom put in at the moment. The plumber was here doing some plumbing. Then the tiler was doing some tiling. He proudly mentioned that he had a new van. When he said that I thought of the New Law from Jerry Weinberg's The Secrets of Consulting

Nothing new ever works

Then he says he has to go out to get something. He says he'll only be half an hour. Ninety minutes later he's still not back. For a moment I start to think negative thoughts about the stereotype of an unreliable workman. Then I remember his new van. Sure enough, he turns up a few minutes later and he's fallen foul of the New Law. His new van had got a puncture, and being the first one it had taken him ages to change the wheel.

Buckminster Fuller once said...

If you want to change how someone thinks, give up. You cannot change the way people think. Instead, give people tools that help them do something different.


wip limit

I bumped into a nice example of a wip limit. It's in a Columbo episode called The Conspirators. In it the murderer, a man called Joe Devlin, likes to drink whiskey. He's careful not to like drinking whiskey too much though, so before drinking he uses a diamond (set into a ring) to mark the side of the whiskey bottle. As Devlin makes the mark he says "This far and no farther". Once the level drops to the mark he stops drinking. Thus Devlin is using a WIP limit - a Whiskey In Progress limit.