ESPN does not understand the importance of software testing before rolling out a product. For those of you who have never participated in fantasy sports, ESPN just announced to tens of thousands of customers that they goofed big time, and will have to throw out all results, roster changes, etc and push everyone’s fantasy baseball team back to their pre-opening day rosters.  The implication of this action is all actions taken over the past month by participants were totally worthless.

ESPN needs to visit Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute and learn about software design and test! (eContent posting on SEI)

Here is an excerpt from their open letter to all players:

"Late on Wednesday night the ESPN Fantasy team will:
1) Revert all teams to their opening day rosters (Sunday, April 1).
2) Set the starting lineup of each team’s opening day roster as the active roster for all games played to date (April 1 – April 11).
3) Retroactively apply scoring for the entire season to date based on that roster.
4) Void all transactions to date (trades, waiver pickups, roster moves, etc.)."

As I had already surged to second place in our league … this is a bummer! Due to features ESPN was promising, our league had moved over to ESPN from Yahoo! The move was a mistake.
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This YouTube video is a hoot. If any of you are old enough to remember Fireball XL5 from the early 1960’s, you will appreciate how far we’ve come with animation.  If you are younger, imagine science fiction involving puppets / marionettes! At the time, it was big time cool.

Now a spoof from the 21st century … complete with laugh tracks:

• Superthunderstingcar!

Happy Easter!

• Easter Meditation
  (Artwork by He Qi paired with a Melchite chant for the passion sung in Arabic.)
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• Candlemas
  (Candlemas performed by the Sirin Ensemble. | Description of Candlemas)

Both of these meditations were created by the Episcopal Diocese of Washington … and linked by a Minnesota Lutheran! The image shown below is artwork created by my friend, He Qi.
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In Friday’s post, I noted how I was excited about Google Map’s new visual user interface which allows an individual to create map mash-ups without the need to know programming code or scripts. As promised here is a short tutorial (six minutes) which demonstrates how easy it is to create a Google Maps mash-up.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of a mash-up, this word is used to explain the process of linking different kinds of web data … in this case maps and other web based information … to provide increased value for your customer.

• Google Maps Tutorial
  (may take a moment to load)

You may wish to link to the map used as an example in my screencast. Click upon either of the image thumbnails to view: 1. a satellite view of my lake;  2. my Google map
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Mapping mash-ups have been the rage, but personally I’ve been "underwhelmed" with the mash-ups I’ve experienced. Why?

1. Creating a mash-up required more coding skill than I cared to learn
2. Ditto for most people
3. Thus, map mash-ups were mainly created by programmers

This may all be about to change. Today, Google has released a new service named "My Maps". Via what appears to be an easy graphical interface, one may now create "and share" mash-ups.  This new feature should increase geometrically the mash-ups available, and content will now be created by normal folk (or nearer to normal)! Over the weekend, I’ll play around with this service and post more comments, perhaps even a screencast.

Ziff Davis has an article you may wish to read about the new Google service.