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London Stabbie has been quite annoyed today. He has resurrected his old computer in order to ensure that everything useful is removed, and exported his recipe book this morning. Now there is nothing more useful in keeping and disseminating and sharing recipes than a computer. One would think that after many years of storing recipes on computers someone would have figured out a good way of exporting recipes and then importing them into another computer or another program. One would be wrong. Very wrong. As wrong as drinking shiraz with lemon sole.

Stabbie was amazed at the speed of the export from a very old version of Mastercook into a text file. Less than 5 seconds for 2MB of recipes (Stabbie has lots of recipes).

Stabbie then copied the file into his new computer and fired up Mastercook 11, guaranteed to work with Windows 7. Then he imported the recipe file, and while there were a few mistakes (reported by the software) most of the recipes seemed to be imported fairly well.

So Stabbie took at look at his mother's recipe for spaghetti and meatballs. He was surprised to learn that it required no meat, no tomatoes, but a lot of flour and sugar and baking powder. Somehow Mastercook had slipped a gear and missed out several recipes, putting the wrong labels on the subsequent ones.

So Stabbie deleted all the recipes, and opened the text file with the exported recipes in it. He now has to import them 10 or 20 at a time and go through each. Some have ingredients misplaced, and others don't have the instructions or notes correct. Stabbie has more than 1500 recipes in his database. He's not looking forward to the next four months.

Cooking software is written by dweebs for noobs.

This is also true for geneological software.

Stabbie would like to get the programmers, and especially the people who arranged the user interfaces and the import and export engines, into a very small dining room, lock them in, and feed them chocolate cake iced with Ex-Lax. The toilets will not be accessible.

I had signed up for the ISEB Practitioner's course in software test management after my success at the Intermediate Certificate. This was in June. Heard nothing from them--normally they collect the money straightaway and send you joining instructions. So, I assumed that they had cancelled or were about to cancel the course--sometimes this happens when they don't get enough delegates to fill a course (they normally want at least 5).

So imagine my surprise last Thursday when they called me and said the course was on. I was a bit miffed, and as my BlackBerry is still in the shop (due to arrive at the retail outlet any day now) I didn't have access to my calendar. So I put them off until Friday and took a look at my saved calendar--nothing this week. I arranged with work to take Wednesday through Friday off, paid my £1300 (including VAT), and will be leaving shortly for the training site. The exam is in December, and there is a coaching day included just before that.

I hope that I'll still have a job then. We won't starve or lose our home, but things might get a lot tighter than they have otherwise been.

Those of us who work in the software testing biz know that one of the sorest points in software development is localisation. That is, making sure that local variations on items such as spelling, font, alphabet, time and date, and the like actually appear correct to the people who are using it. Easy examples: Dates in the US are usually showed as mm/dd/yyyy (04/29/2008). Dates in most other places are shown dd/mm/yyyy (28/04/2008). On the 20th of April it is not too difficult to tell what date is referred to, but try it on May 2nd. This is localisation at work.

In Turkey, orthography is much different from that which we who speak, write, and read English expect. There are many accents and other letters which do not seem important to us but which make a huge amount of difference in Turkish. This is similar to the ano/año pair in Spanish, where "¿Quantos años tiene usted?" means "How old are you?" and "¿Quantos anos tiene usted?" means "How many as*h*les do you have?"

This tragic couple was let down by an absence of Turkish localisation. Very sad.

I was looking at my direct debits (arrangements with one's bank for a vendor of some sort (utilities, newspapers, and the like) to deduct funds from your account for remittances) and I saw this one:

Name Date Amount

CHURCH TIMES 00-00-0000 £999,999,999.00

Now I realised that the Church Times had recently changed direct debit systems, but I was worried that the bank would actually try to take that much money out of our account, and I wasn't convinced that HWMBO's and my salary would cover it.

I sent a message to my bank's customer service department:

"I have a direct debit for the Church Times. In looking at my direct debits, I see that the last date is 00-00-0000 and the amount is £999,999,999.00.

"I doubt my overdraft will cover this if that amount is removed from my account when the direct debit next happens. As a software test professional, I do hear of glitches like this; I didn't expect to see one on my own account.

"I would request urgently that someone check this 'transaction' and ensure that the amounts and date are correct."

Today I got their response:

"Thank you for your message. Please accept our apologies for the delay in our response.

"Please note that until the originator claims funds from us the amount shown as debited in the list of direct debits will be £999,999,999. This is just a display and nothing related to the merchant claiming an incorrect amount."

What a bunch of wankers! Didn't they realise that people might get a little upset about such a large amount appearing in their bank records??

This is almost as good as the (probably apocryphal) story of the man who got a bill for $0.00 and didn't bother to pay it, whereupon he got a red bill (means "overdue" here if they print it on red paper), sent them a cheque for $0.00 which promptly broke their remittance systems.