Monthly Archive

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Aya Goldman has joined the team of Outsight Interactive as a Quality Assurance Analyst.

I first met Aya in 2002 working in the QA department for a large retail company. There I developed an immediate regard for her work, her process and her capabilities. She has proven to be one of the most dedicated, professional individuals it has been my pleasure to work with.

Aya earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Since then she has been working full-time in the Quality Assurance field testing hardware, software and, more recently, complex community-based internet applications.

Aya brings a broad understanding of the underlying technologies, a proven QA process and a keen eye for detail. That coupled with her affable nature make her a pleasure to work with and a most welcome member of our team.

Outsight announces the launch of a banner campaign showcasing the new Spring colors that FootJoy is offering for their SciFlex gloves.

The banners are running for a week beginning 4/20/2007 on Golf.com, Golf Channel, PGA Tour, Golf Week, Golfstat, and Junior Golf Scoreboard

The ancient board game Go is the most popular board game in the world, and yet few people in the United States have even heard of it. Go is a game of metaphors: it has been compared to a fine art, a martial art, war, a conversation, life itself. Whereas Chess is a game of capturing prisoners, Go is a game of securing territory.

At it's core the rules of Go are incredibly simple: Two players (Black and White) alternate in placing a single stone on a 19x19 grid. Touching stones of the same color form a unit, which can be captured if all of the unit's neighboring spaces in both the horizontal and vertical directions are occupied by opposing stones. Grid points which are completely surrounded by stones of a single color become territory for that player. The game ends when both players pass their turn (because further moves would be of no value). The winner is determined by adding the number of points of territory plus the number of prisoners taken for each player. You can check out the American Go Association's rules page for a more detailed discussion of the rules of go.

Despite its simple rules, Go is at least PSPACE-hard, and could be as hard as EXPSPACE-complete, and the best Go programs consistently fail to perform much better than an experienced beginner. Though interesting, the computational complexity of the game of Go is not the purpose of this entry. What struck me, somewhere between the comment "software projects are like many other things in the world, like many other things in the world." on a recent entry by Jeff Atwood, and a blip about "writing code as art" by Jeremy Allison, is that the game of Go, like many other things, has something to teach about software development.

The Setup

You have a double formatted as a string with the decimal part separated from the whole part by a full-stop, e.g. "1234.9". Of course, not all cultures separate their digits the same way, and in fact, the site you're working on has a locale setting for a locale that uses a comma to separate the integer from the decimal, and vice-versa, e.g. German:"1.234,9" or French "1 234,9" style digit grouping. For the sake of argument, let's also say the decimal number is being parsed out of an XML file input by a US or UK user and that a full-stop is meant to separate the whole and fractional parts of the number.

The Problem

ASP/VBScript's clever and useful FormatNumber and FormatCurrency functions which solve oh-so-many related problems are no help:

SetLocale("de-DE")
'This is what we want (notice no quotes below)
FormatNumber(1234.9) '-> 1.234,90

'This is what we get (when using a string)
FormatNumber("1234.9") '-> 12.349,00
FormatCurrency("1234.9") ' -> 12.349,00 €
'ARGH!

When in a German locale, FormantNumber sees the string "1234.9", it assumes that the full-stop is merely a misplaced thousands separator and drops it. Though I was confused and angry at this behavior at first, I have come to see the sense that it makes (consider interpreting "1.234" in a German locale).