Work Journal 2013-jan-29

Today was bugsquash day on the project I'm working on. The customer tested well and reported issues quite professionally. Probably the best testing effort I've seen by a customer. (One of the persons on the customer side has previously worked as a proffesional tester, which might be an important part of it).

Console in Internet Explorer

One bug happened in IE (Internet Explorer). I couldn't reproduce, but the customer insisted that the bug was still there. Luckily additional information was attached. 'console' is not defined I did a little searching and it turns out that console.log will fail in IE if the development tools (F12) have not been activated. This is the same reason that I could not reproduce the bug (I was running or had been running the development tools.). My solution was to simply remove all console calls (there was just one) from the code. Having console calls in production code does not make much sense anyway in my opinion. This question and answer helped me figure out what was going on. This console behavior is also present in IE 9.

kilobyte is ___ bytes?

This is a real life problem. I did have to convert kilobits to megabits. Pretty much the same song. But first - if you havn't already seen it this cartoon from xkcd has the essence of the issue. In short if you mean 1024 bytes you can write it as 1 KiB which is unambiguously. If you mean 1000 bytes you have no way to write that in a way that would not potentially be misunderstood by someone due to the history of the kilobyte. In my case I don't know if the kilobits I have are 1000 bits or 1024 bits. Converting from Kibits (1024 bits) to Mibits would be fine, but if it was really kbit (1000 bits) and I converted it to Mibits with the assumption it was Kibits the result would be a freakish monster that should never meet anyone's eyes. My solution: fix some other defects first. Tomorrow I'll ask the dataprovider. Promise.

Work Journal – a diary on what I did work/programming related today.