The hardest part of the day today is figuring out what music to listen to. Not really, now I have to watch my time wisely as I have run out of billable time on this project but I need to do more manual testing on the device being sued at the conference to make sure it is working in every way without any problems. It will not take tons of time but it has to be done whether I get paid for it or not.
The first thing I had to do this morning was recap the whole project in executive summary form to give to the customer in our final meeting on Monday. I actually enjoy doing that as it reminds me how much I accomplished the last month but I constantly have to remind myself of the target audience. Not too much technical detail but enough that a valid summary can be given from the details. Kanbanery has some nice reporting features that helped me some, but it also helped me since I constantly use it to record what is needed to be done and I move the tasks when I am done. Any customer interaction is recorded as comments, which this time also helped me with a couple of summary items.
As I was testing the final changes, it suddenly came to me that what I really need to do is create a perfect test file that has an example of every single value so I can double check on more time that everything is perfect. Now that I can load data from files that is just so easy to do. Time to get serious about my test fixtures. It must have been the time pressure of this whole project that we made not think clearly.
In order to get the list of all airports in North Carolina and Virginia, I tried several sources on web and then just found the airport lists on Wikipedia and used them. The list of IATA NC airport codes and VA airport codes was used to locate all of the commercial primary airports. I then used Flight Stats to look up the complete information exception altitude which I had to use Mrs. Google on each of the airports. Most of the time the airport code would work in the search, as in "RDU altitude" and if not then I would just search for the city and use the altitude I saw in any search results match so I did not have to click on any link in the search results. If all else fails then I go to U.S. Climate Data site which always has what I need. Then I got into a roll by using a search string of "zip code near ... airport" within maps.google.com and then entered the closest city name, state name and zip code into the Maps Easy web site to get the latitude and longitude. I then traversed the USA from Bangor, Maine to Los Angeles, California by picking major cities along the way. I then picked half way points between these 15 cities by approximating the halt way GPS coordinate. This simple GPS path of 31 points helped me find a couple more problems in the code, so it was all worth it even though it took me several hours to do it.
After a full day of work with numerous breaks, but still a full day, I am finally DONE.
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