Alieniloquent

Two years ago when my employer adopted Extreme Programming, we began to write automated tests for our code. My memory is fuzzy at this point, but as I recall we wanted to be able to write tests and keep the source files anywhere in our source tree, and then have our test runner automagically find them, or something like that. So when we created it we called it MasterTestXMLReportApp because it was cool enough to deserve such a long name.

As time passed those tests got slower and slower, so we split them into two suites. One that was meant to be fast and one that was meant to be slow. The slow ones were run once a night. We called that suite MasterTestNightlyXMLReportApp because it ran every night.

Fast forward to yesterday. The “nightly” tests haven’t run nightly in a long time. They just run continuously, albeit very slowly. I can never remember the name of the projects, and neither can any of my teammates. So finally we got fed up. We renamed them to FastTests and SlowTests.

We held a little memorial service, and gave them a little plot on our 0.04 acres of whiteboard, complete with a headstone.

So I was looking up an actual dictionary definition of “alieniloquent” today. I had one at some time in the past, but it’s a hard word to find in dictionaries, and that’s why I picked it for my domain. I finally found this website, the Grandiloquent Dictionary, and it has my word in it.

alieniloquent

Speaking discursively or straying from one’s point.

So for those of you who were wondering, there you go.

So I was browsing a company’s website today, and out of curiosity I clicked on their map to show where all their locations are. I was expecting to see lots of little dots representing their offices, but what I saw was so much more.

This company has gotten the scoop on all of the major news services. It has a map of the contiguous 51 states.

Here you can see a cutout of the Northwest area of the country. If you look closely you’ll see the new borders between East and West Idaho and East and West Montana. Rumor has it that Idaho has split over whether or not to put a potato on the back of their commemorative quarter, and nobody knows what’s up with Montana.

This other section shows the fifty-third, and newest state: Floridabama. Nobody’s quite sure why they formed. They don’t even have their own constitution. Almost all of the land has been sold to development companies to build retirement communities and casinos. That’s right: retirement casinos.

Note: I did not make these images. I have altered them to protect the innocent, but I really did find this while surfing.

So we were at Jonesy’s Dinner Den on Maple eating our food (which was very good) and watching the five o’clock news on their TV. The weather guy was going on about the possible tornado cells that were west of Omaha and moving easterly. In the background KVNO was playing some classical music.

That’s when we heard the sirens. Everybody paused and looked up at everybody else, and then the woodwinds kicked in. They weren’t sirens after all, just violins. It was a tense second, and then everybody laughed.

So we’ve been moving over to new computers at work and also upgrading our compiler and changing virus protection and all that jazz that makes work fun and enjoyable. One problem we ran into was that our slow build (that runs more tests) was breaking while our fast build wasn’t. Okay, sure, but what was weird was that it was breaking checking source out from Subversion.

I tackled (along with Brian) this problem today. We had a lot of waiting to do. So, naturally, we took advantage of our new magnetic whiteboard to produce this:

Enjoy.

Edited: resized image so it looked decent.