Programming, espresso, and grumbling.

Jon and I started rewatching the Quantum Leap series from the 90s last night. We’d talked before about how we both used to love it. I never saw the episodes in order, and I know I haven’t seen all of them. My dad and I would watch reruns on the SciFi channel together when I was younger. I remember distinctly an episode where Sam was a pregnant woman, and another where he had to save Marilyn Monroe. Beyond that, I don’t remember particular episodes. Jon and I found most of them on Hulu, and there are a lot of Watch Instantly episodes on Netflix, too.

I finished writing mine and Darra’s software engineering paper last night. I’ll probably post it up here, for anyone who’s interested. Our professor is really pushing us to find a conference to which we can submit it; she suggested one over at Oxford but I don’t have the money for a trip to the UK. Ha, I also don’t have a passport for a trip to the UK; I doubt they’d be as forgiving as the Canadian customs officers were when a carload of us played dumb Americans in order to go across the border and see the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Anyway, here’s the abstract for our paper, titled “Comparison of Models for Testing Ruby on Rails Web Applications”:

Web applications are prevalent and it is important that they be of high quality as businesses, schools, and public services rely upon them. Toward that end, we compared two approaches for testing web applications. The Atomic Section Model (ASM) and the Qian, Miao, Zeng (QMZ) model are both used as a means of generating test cases that traverse a web application. We applied the two models to a Ruby on Rails web application to compare defect detection efficacy. We found that both models performed equally well in terms of total faults detected, though neither model found all seeded and naturally occurring faults. Also, the ASM model detected one fault that the QMZ did not, and vice versa.
— Darra Ricks and Sarah Vessels

I have only one final this coming week in algorithms. I’ll be studying like mad for it Monday, and some today as well. Studying will be made less fun because I’ve caught a cold that is causing some majorly annoying sinus issues. I’ve woken up a couple mornings with a really sore throat that I think is due to all the drainage (pleasant thought, right?). Jon has been sick as well recently, so when I started feeling poorly the other day, I made an appointment and went in to see the doctor. She must have thought I was ridiculous, coming in for a simple cold, but I didn’t know that’s what it was! Anyway, she gave me a little sheet on the differences between the common cold and the flu, told me to get some pseudoephedrine (the real meth-making stuff, not the knock-off), and to wait a week for it to pass. In the meantime, it’s sore every time I swallow and my ears also feel like they should pop, but they don’t. The pseudoephedrine was ridiculously cheap: I spent more to park for an hour than I did on twenty-four tablets.

I got a very exciting text message from Melissa last night saying she was off to the hospital, she might be going into labor. I hope things go very well for her and that the baby is healthy. I can’t wait to see a blog post or hear back from her somehow about how it went.