The ACM Awards were good. I still don't like having the nominees perform a short snippet of their best (or nominated) song. The Academy Awards did the same thing for best song, and it's still annoying. Good musical performances from Chely Wright, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, and Martina McBride. There were some others but I either don't remember or skipped them. Great to see Faith Hill and Tim McGraw win Top Female Vocalist and Top Male Vocalist. It's still a little strange how Country Music awards differentiate between song writer and singer. Good time management too, as the award show ended about one minute or two over the three hours scheduled; with host Dolly Parton blurting out the Entertainer of the Year award (to Shania Twain) at the end of the show...

This is the second day of testing for my project. The QA guy has logged almost a dozen bugs so far, about five of which I either said "can't fix", "not a bug", or actually did fix. One of the problems is that the SRD is very outdated, so there is no document that says what my stuff is supposed to do. Therefore it's almost whatever I say, which is not a good way to do things. Some bugs I can't really control: how am I supposed to fix a printing problem with Netscape?

But after a day of investigating and knocking down some of the bugs, I'm rather numb. I'm at that point when it's hard to vigorously pursue a bug and track it down. So I decided to write a bit. One of the things I hate about our bug tracking system (other than I'm not sure how to use it) is that when you enter a bug, you have to enter another bug number so that the system can get defaults off of an old bug. That's so weird to me.

Also, it's rather cumbersome to use. You query for bugs by filling out this web form, which is just text input fields. When you tab to a field it retrieves the list of valid values, if appropriate, which takes a long time for some fields. You can't specify ranges or wildcards -- it's all comma delimited values. This leads me to believe that all the engine does is string all the field inputs into a rather static SQL query, using the IN parameter to cover the comma delimited input. It's the kind of stunt I'd do, and rather primitive for a production system.

Another thing I don't like about the bug system is that it doesn't get rid of bugs. I'm used to closing a bug and then not seeing it on my queue. That only happens if the bug is assigned to someone else. So eventually you get all these closed bugs which you have to remember to filter out when you run a query. So it's like go to the query page, enter the data to filter out closed bug numbers, enter the data to retrieve my bugs, then run the report. And you can't save report parameters so that you can run a report with one click. It's not bad for a web-based bug tracking system and I'm sure it scales well with lots of users and bugs, but it's not as easy to use as the bug system in my last job, which was a text based VMS product. Still, I guess this one is better than whatever Oracle had before (which would have either been a NT based program or just straight SQL*Plus hand typing)...

Writing of work, we have mandatory training on our software release system. It's about time, because I read the web help and it barely touched on what I needed to do. This is what we're supposed to use to mark files so that they can be included in the next patch/release/whatever, and it's not as easy as I make it sound. I've been using it for a couple of weeks and I'm sure I'm doing things way wrong.

So it's good that every developer has to get this four hour training. But as is usual for meetings, this one starts at 09:00 Monday. That's going to hurt. The best strategy is probably to come to work Sunday night, work a bit and then get some sleep here. Even if I do that I'm going to be rather out of it Monday. Oh well.