Take a search term “seed”. Pass it to a search engine: Google, Yahoo etc. Examine the content of the top “n” results for “themes”, take each theme and repeat the search – Hey presto you get a “mind map” from the web.
As I commented, this is sucking up some of my time at the minute. My simple first attempt, searching on the word “moon” gave the following. Ok, its not brilliant but more than I expected, this could become a real time suck…
Still playing! I have reduced the depth of the tree and tuned (slightly) the way words are chosen. The tool produces different and interesting results on each run. I really must stop playing with this!!! It’s cool though, enter some words and get a new perspective on them.
Here is a mini mind map for “extreme programming”:
Recently I had to provide some references for a friend. Part of this process involved me clicking on a link and typing/reflecting my opinions. Now, this got me wondering, what if this wasn’t a genuine site?
So, if you want to find out what your friends really think of you then set-up a spoof “reference” site and send them the link with the pretence you are changing job, applying for a course etc. Hey presto they will reveal their true feelings.
Ok, nasty, but possibly a business for people who think this way. Maybe they already do and I have been scammed!
Boys seem to look to their mothers and girls their fathers, is this evolution trying to program them to pick a future partner with traits similar to their parent (of the opposite sex?) – Because if their parents show some success in mating then their traits might be a good choice for the children to follow when they look for a mate?
A tool for testing visualization software on the glass – i.e. software with views which have custom content and complex associated mouse behaviour and interactions.
- We can get users to prod the software, but they will typically go down common use cases and paths
- We can get testers to explore the software
Or we can let the mangled monkey test tool do something in between!
The tool would interrogate the UI and build a map of the possible commands (e.g. buttons) and properties (edit boxes etc.). It will also scrape the screen looking for “edges” and other interesting artifacts – i.e. search for things which could be controls of some kind and therefore could be interacted with via a mouse.
It creates a starting node (and remembers nodes not yet explored), then tries to grab features and hammer them with mouse actions whilst also invoking commands and properties (marked as available).
An adaptation would be to have a user work with the application and have the mangled monkey observe the choices they make and use this tree as a start point to experiment in and around.
Effectively the mangled monkey is somewhere between randomly hitting keys and hiring a tester.
