Inception (no proper spoilers)

When I say no spoilers, if you read on, you may read something that makes the film less enjoyable, but there are no plot giveaways.

I don't get to the cinema often these days. I'd not heard of Inception until last week, when it was decided that I should take my twelve year old son to the cinema. He wanted to see it, it looked above average and so we went.

I think it was the first film we've seen together at the cinema that wasn't a kids film. We enjoyed it, we talked about it on the drive home. I thought the end of the final scene, just before the credits, was great.It made for a nice few hours of quality father-son time.

Two things distracted me. A phone rang. I was drawn out of the film, back to the theatre, frowning in the direction of the offending sound. But it was in the film, not in the audience. I've no idea how film-makers are going to deal with that problem.

The second distraction was Marion Cotillard, who plays DiCaprio's wife. She's simply ridiculously, compellingly, extraordinarily beautiful in this film. Whenever she was on screen, I simply forgot about the film.

So, decent enough film. Gets the brain working a bit, but it's not difficult to follow if you take Kermode's advice and don't go to the loo. My son loved it. It looked stunning.

This week, I've had the luxury of being able to read some of the criticism of it. I could argue that they should get off their high horses and enjoy it for what it is, but they all seem to have a point: There's way, way too much exposition. I can't see how they'd strip out all of it, but it's a film that explains itself far too well and leaves the viewer with (almost) no questions.

I've not thought about the film this week beyond just one niggling technical question (to which I think I know the answer). If it had been made without explaining itself as it went along, I'd have been begging friends to see it so that we could talk it through and try to figure it out, argue theories.

It's not going to stand the test of time.

Please say what I'm thinking.

Was just reading Matt Gallagher's Is a virtual machine for Cocoa programming inevitable? on Cocoa With Love. I subscribe, but often don't read a lot of the posts. They're too technical for my current ability and level of interest. I want to be more interested, but I just don't have the time/inclination at the moment. I'll be reading every word of this one because I kind of hate C.

I read the introduction wanting Matt to say what I was thinking, which is essentially that C pointers suck. There are other things I dislike about the language, the curly braces and the misuse of '=' for assignment and '==' for equality, for example, but much of this is cosmetic. The pointers are a deeper issue, although there is a element of cosmetic unpleasantness about them too.

What was I thinking ? Well, in Matt's words (Yay!) :

More relevant in the long term is the one feature that Objective-C can't remove or fix: complaints about C itself, in particular C pointers.

Even though this isn't the point Matt is making, I'm reminded of Robert B. K. Dewar's lectures on Ada. I've embedded part 3 below (will remove if requested to do so)…

The key thing to take from this is the rigour of the Ada compiler compared to C, the cost of finding defect at compile time versus runtime and the amount of time spent in debugging in Ada compared to C. I'm not saying Ada should be used instead (it shouldn't), but C in particular lets things through to runtime that are going to be a bugger to find and resolve. The nature of Cocoa, object based and dynamic is a much better fit to Python. If a virtual machine is proposed, a language like Python would be much more suitable.

Certifications

I attended a course recently, took and passed an exam to qualify as an ISTQB Advanced Technical Test Analyst (ATTA) . It's probably the last certification course I'll ever do. I have ISEB's Foundation Certification, which basically confirms I'm not brain-dead, I have ISEB's Intermediate Certification, in which I learned nothing except how to pass the exam. ATTA is an improvement, but the certification demonstrates more about my understanding of the expectations of a the examination board than my testing abilities.

The reasons for doing these courses are to enhance the CV. I'm no longer convinced that they do this. Foundation is fine, but the others are pretty much worthless. In a fight between experience and certification, experience wins.

I'm just starting a new project at work. It's completely outside my comfort zone. It appears to be process intensive. There are high expectations. The lazy, comfortable part of me is dreading this. Having talked to the test manager, I suspect the pain will be worth it. It's genuinely going to be a 'valuable learning experience'. I mean that most sincerely, folks. I think I'll learn more about testing in the next few months than I have in three certifications and 4 years as a full time tester.

There may be a trip to Switzerland in it next year too, which will be nice.

Setting Up for Productive Procrastination

There's only so much time, and much of it is wasted. I'm going to try to waste less of it by means of this cunning plan:

I'm unsubscribing from some RSS feeds and subscribing to some others.

I threw out the MacDailyNews feed a while ago, and it felt quite liberating. Today I've gone further. MacWorld, MacUser, TUAW, AppleMatters etc, in fact, the whole folder called 'Apple News' has been chucked.

I'm thinking of chucking 'Tech News' too (The Register, Wired, Ars Technica), but haven't plucked up the courage yet.

The feeds I'm subscribing to are all blogs. They're blogs by professionals software testers. It's what I do, but I don't think much about it, I don't read much about it, and I'm not really getting any better at it. I want to. Pretty much all the books I've read on testing cover the same old stuff and are, frankly, uninspiring.

So I'm looking to real people for inspiration instead. Wish me luck.

I'm starting with Adam Goucher's Quality through Innovation and Eric Jacobson's Test This Blog. I'm going to use them to learn from and I'm going to use them as experienced content filters.