Information Transfer

It would seem that besides wanting to be free, it seems that information has trouble presenting itself in a way that can be easily assimilated. There are a lot of ways of presenting data:

• Lists
• Maps
• Tables
  
• Graphs
• Diagrams
• Paragraphs

The question is though what works best. The context is an obvious starting point. It does not make much sense to use a paragraph when noting which items need to be bought at the store. Lists may be a convenient way to capture a large amount of information, but do they enable easy information transfer?

It seems that the easiest means of passing information on to another person is to present to them in a standard form. A colloquial conversational type of document is more likely to transfer information than any of the list-based mediums.

Lists are hard. They take a lot of effort to process adequately and the longer the list the worse this gets. This is because there is no flow of ideas. My personal experience is that I skim lists and go back to them and treat them as independent entities. Lists cannot contain information that is critical to the view being expressed.

Tables may be an efficient way of consolidating information. The problem is that they can't be read. The association between the various cells is via the header of the column and the row. There is a discontinuity.

Information is transferred by the story it creates as it moves through the various stages. The critical feature of the story is the progress. I can't say for sure, but I'd recommend a growth in complexity of the topic as the story progresses. This builds on the information already imparted.

Generating Data with PHP

Pretty much claim to have forgotten how to handle a piece a code to be almost immediately jogged by a short search. Anyway have completed the string generator in PHP. Possibly the most interesting point of the exercise is the strings that are created - some are just plain weird.



The weirdness is possibly the main attraction especially if one is not limited to boring strings like alphabetical and alphanumeric - although a quick random ASCII will show if there are any problems. I extended my initial release to include generating printable ASCII in addition to using the full ASCII encoding. This means that the string offering is only missing the unicode option.

I would say that just writing the generated string straight to the web-page, does not result in the prettiest of output options but it serves the purpose (at least for now).

Restart on PHP

After a few years I've picked up on PHP again. I'm reminded of how powerful a language it is - as well as how much of it I've forgotten.

My primary goal in this exercise is to be able to generate random values that can be used as test data. I started with a class for generating random strings (alphabetical, alphanumeric and ASCII) along with various formats (all capitals, all lower, sentence, title and random) as either of fixed length or of random length within a range.

This was relatively simple. The issue and where the memory hole exists is in processing input so that the values can be generated as needed. I remember processing the POST variables as well as doing input validation with error messaging. The solution is probably quite simple, I just need to finish this before moving on to the next bunch of ideas.

Data Generator

Data is probably the most important part of any application test.

Imaginative data is more likely to locate the bug than its more conventional friend. However, creating weird data can take a lot of time. To alleviate the strain, I've added my 2c to the field with a macro driven Excel spreadsheet.

There are drawbacks to the approach I've taken. The first of which is that it is scripted in Excel. The second is the number of codes that I needed in order to all the options that are included. The codes themselves aren't too complex, but there are enough to make remembering them a problem.