The Klingon Voice-Engine Debugger
Stories Columns Opinions Resources
Preflight builds spread wings for smoother projects
Developers are increasingly turning to preflight builds, allowing them to experiment with ...
|
Coverity creates program to enforce code adherence
The Architecture Analyzer uses mapping technology from the company's Software DNA static a...
|
QCon 2008 features domain-driven development
This year's QCon invites speakers like Eric Evans and Dan North to talk about domain-drive...
|
.NET similarities prove golden for Silverlight
Microsoft has focused on making Silverlight 2 symmetric with the .NET platform, and that h...
|
SOA Watch: New economic realities
In the current economic downturn, agile programming and SOA are attractive options that bu...
|
Integration Watch: A new twist on threads
The key to raising the efficiency of multiprocessors is to shrink the overall workload by ...
|
Integration Watch: The Return of NetRexx?
Java scripting languages are seeing a surge in popularity, with NetRexx looking particular...
|
Windows & .NET Watch: Transaction crowd gets a boost
With multicore chips becoming the standard for processors, the need for a flexible, usable...
|
From the Editors: Election should shake up JCP
Rod Johnson has the right ideas for opening up the Java Community Process, and he may be a...
|
Letters to the Editor: Sun gives REST, SOAP choice
A reader takes issue with a headline on our story about Sun working with REST along with S...
|
Guest View: Be smart and lazy
The optimal solution for problems is the simplest one, so always aim to streamline your ap...
|
Zeichick's Take: From EXEC to EXEC 2 to REXX to NetRexx
Andrew Binstock's column last week, "The Return of NetRexx," brought back some fond memori...
|
Advanced Corda CenterView™ Data Visualization for the BusinessObjects™ Intelligence Platform
Corda Technologies presents a white paper on pervasive BI. The BusinessObjects business in...
|
From Mobile to SOA: A Guide for Optimized Application Deployment
Customer need has driven the emergence of multiple computing tiers. Today’s application d...
|
e-Kit: Web Application Security
Is your network secure? What about your web applications.
If IT security is your top p...
|
Practical tips for saving money on code maintenance
If software design is expensive, well, code maintenance is even more so. When you look...
|
By Edward J. Correia
April 8, 2008 —
Last week I told you about a tester who inadvertently made contact with an alien spacecraft through an application he was testing. The April 1 story was total fiction, of course, even though it tied in with the real-life account of a Californian’s close encounter with a spacecraft emblazoned with Klingon-like writing.
That story too could be a hoax, for all I know, despite some pretty convincing high-res pictures. There’s no such race as the Klingons, but their fictional language did benefit one tester, at least according to his claims. Karl Johanson, a software developer and tester living in Canada, wrote me about how a Klingon phrase helped fix a problem he was having with the voice-activated educational application he was testing.
Johanson was working on a computer game that uses voice recognition to help the players learn phonemes and pronunciation. Phonemes are the smallest units of human speech, such as the “t” sound in the word “top.” He was trying to figure out why the voice recognition system was crashing on occasion. “And it did so without leaving any clues that the programmers could use to diagnose the cause of the crashes,” Johanson said. “One programmer set up his computer in ‘diagnostic mode’ but he couldn’t get that computer to crash, no matter what he said to it.”
The problem—and I’m sure you’ve all experienced it—was that they could never get the software to crash in the same way twice. “Every word or phrase that happened to crash the system on the testers’ computers never seemed to work more than once.” The programmer told the QA department that in order to debug the issue, he would need a word, phrase or silly noise—anything that would crash the voice recognition system every time you say it. “Then I can use that [word or phrase] to crash my system in diagnostic mode.”
In an effort to find the magic phrase, the people in the testing area—noisy on the quietest of days—got even noisier, as they started saying anything and everything they could think of into the computers’ microphones. “When we started talking in cartoon and celebrity voices and making animal noises and other sound effects, we heard all of the office doors near our department slam shut.” For the next few hours, the team was able to crash the engine several times, but never more than once with the same the word, phrase or noise. “I tried some sillier than normal attempts to cause a crash,” Johanson recalled, “and sure enough, eventually found a phrase that crashed the engine every time I uttered it.”
Fans of the early Star Trek movies should recall the phrase clearly. In "Star Trek III: Search for Spock,” Kirk is stuck on the Genesis Planet as it’s about to self-destruct. After kicking the Klingon commander off the cliff and into a pit of fire, Kirk’s last hope of survival is to somehow get the Klingons in orbit above the planet to beam him aboard.
Remembering the phrase uttered by his would-be nemesis minutes before, Kirk grabs the Klingon communicator, shouts the phrase into it and is immediately energized. Johanson said, “So I entered the bug in the error-tracking database, with instructions on how to reproduce it. Another tester read the bug report and said to me, ‘Karl, you entered, ‘If you say ‘Beam me up Maltz’ in Klingon, it consistently crashes the sound recognition engine.’ But you forgot to enter into the bug how to actually say it in Klingon. How is Dave supposed to test that?”
“I replied, ‘That’s okay, he’s a programmer’”—implying that because of his job title, he will already know the translation. Johanson continued, “A few minutes later we heard Dave say from his office: ‘Maltz! Chooow, ee CHOO! Hey, Karl! That worked!’”
Just because something is fictional doesn’t mean it’s not functional. If we could only figure out that pesky cloaking device.
Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/31969