ISOmorphism

The strange loop between development and testing is one. I don't often write specifics regarding my work though most of the posts here are done in lunch hours but today I can tell you that I am mostly working in Classic ASP. I will leave you to make up your own mind on that. Statistically I suppose that most people won't know what that is or even be bothered if they do but I have to tell you that nothing is dull today. Read into that what you can because that is all I am going to say about it today.

I think I have reached the age where I need glasses. I am OK in good light but at night I am having to hold the book at a certain distance away and really small text is almost impossible to decipher. I am lucky that my company will pay for the eye test and even a certain amount of the cost of any glasses required. My daughter has also recently taken to wearing glasses though these are only plastic ones which came with one of her many Doctor Who magazines. The trouble is they suit her and also have this magical effect on her demeanour which from the normal "whatever!" level of attitude that seems to start at about 7 years old turns to politeness and deportment. All from a piece of plastic that must have cost whatever sweatshop it was made in about 0.5p in production costs and 20p to ship over here.

The next chapter in GEB is called "The Propositional Calculus" which is filling me with dread. I think I got the dialogue before it but I didn't manage to pick out any Isomorphisms which means that they are either absent or too subtle for my clogged mind to find. I am afraid that it looks like a lot more formal systems - always the most difficult part though I suppose it is no more difficult than some of the complex string manipulations I do in my code. I wrote down a note about the strange loop between development and testing. At the moment I am doing a lot of development and then long test plans in order to cover all issues that might be raised with the new code. It reminded me a bit of the GOD Over Djinn section of the Little Harmonic Labyrynth, with me as the genie and me also as the meta-genie of the testing which must not be good. This crops a lot in coding. I might spend hours poring over a fault somewhere in code and then find that a colleague spots the error in seconds. I have to say that this works both ways before you start thinking I am useless. And of course in ASP, there is always the peculiar nastiness of ASP code which writes out VB or Javascript. Programs writing programs is intellectually fascinating but professionally it makes for lousy bug-fixing. But then again I do it in VB.net client apps and calls to dlls that have changed. I have been toying with the idea of a program which calls a dll which it has just written the binary code for, just to see if it is possible. And for my next trick I will lift the Eiffel tower as high as the International Space Station by pulling on the lift cable from the third platform.