Archive for 2007
Monday, December 31st, 2007
Selenium is an awesome free alternative to apps such as Quick Test Pro and the like, providing you with a browser based automation suite for web applications.Selenium uses JavaScript and Iframes to embed a test automation engine in your browser. This technique should work with any JavaScript-enabled browser. Selenium Remote ...
Posted in Testing, Automation | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
Google have got some charting code worth looking at, which basically allows you to create charts by modifying parameters in the query string.
Something as simple as this:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chtt=Tim's%20Beer%20Intake&cht=p3&chd=s:9h&chs=250x100&chco=00ff00&chl=Unemployed|Employed produces this:
Being on holidays at the moment, I'm lacking the um, 'project' on which to apply this technology, but am curious ...
Posted in Analysis, Productivity, Programming | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
On a basic level, the honeybee’s dilemma is a tale of two flower patches. If one patch is yielding better nectar than the other, how can the hive use its workforce most efficiently to retrieve the best supply at the moment? The solution, which earned Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch ...
Posted in General | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
This video is a play on Pascal's Wager which really gets you thinking on possible outcomes for a given scenario being climate change ... Is it a better bet to accept doomsday predictions for climate changes, or rest on our haunches and let the world pass by? If you haven't ...
Posted in General | 1 Comment »
Thursday, December 6th, 2007
If you're stuck with this error when trying to compile your own apps:
No rule to make target `/System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/config.h', needed by `Makefile'.
You will probably find that your Leopard installation is lacking some necessary files.
If you copy the files from your old(er) installation of perl (5.8.6) you should be able to ...
Posted in OSX, Perl, Programming | 17 Comments »
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
I've explored in previous posts the use of tools such as onboard Analytics (LoadRunner), off-the-shelf tools (Excel) and custom web based implementations (JGraph, ChartDirector) used to analyze the nitty gritty of performance metrics.
All of these tool's use are governed by some common factors being:
the Expediency factor - the timeliness of ...
Posted in Statistics, Analysis | 4 Comments »
Friday, November 23rd, 2007
I've been looking for some easy ways to enumerate all of the available performance counters on a Win32 platform programatically.
Rather than trawl through the PerfMon counter GUI, or regress back into the millions of raw counters available via WMI, I was looking for a solution somewhere in between.
The ActiveState version ...
Posted in Perl, Win2K3, Analysis, Tools, Tuning, Windows | No Comments »
Thursday, November 8th, 2007
Good grief, I paid the price of tweaking my OS 10.4.x install after installing Leopard and dealing with the myriad of problems previous tweaking posed!
The first problem was after a very long upgrade process (1+ hours) for Leopard, I was presented with a nice blue screen, a mouse pointer and ...
Posted in OSX, Hardware | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
Any job in which you need to 'fix' something requires you to correctly analyze the root cause. Treat just the symptoms and you'll find yourself on the never-get-fixed roundabout ...
Performance tuning fits this profile neatly. In an array of available metrics, how do you avoid chasing the symptoms and never ...
Posted in Analysis, Testing | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, October 30th, 2007
It's a real pain for Apple users to synchronize Microsoft Outlook with Apple Mail, but Parallels (or VMWare) brings us one step closer. You can virtualize your work environment (typically a PC with Outlook/Exchange access) and host your own local IMAP server, to sync mail between your virtual PC and ...
Posted in General, OSX, Windows | 3 Comments »
Saturday, October 27th, 2007
Have just stumbled across a very cool productivity app for OSX. I'm already a big fan of Quicksilver, and FlyGesture builds on that style of functionality albeit from your trackpad.
FlyGesture is activated like Exposé or Dashboard, bringing up a transparent window of "guides" to move your mouse through. Moving your ...
Posted in General, OSX, Tools, Productivity | No Comments »
Friday, October 26th, 2007
Needed to break a large file containing many messages, each message separated on a new line into many new small files containing only one message per file ... Started thinking in perl, but almost looked past the Unix split command:
split -l 1 -a 3 bigfile.txt smallfile_
-l 'n' will put 'n' ...
Posted in Analysis, Unix | No Comments »
Friday, October 26th, 2007
Jason Gorman describes in his article 6 requirements for the practical use of dashboards in performance related testing.
As a performance tester, I find that I often need to provide snapshot summaries of systems performance ala dashboards. The key requirement imposed is normally timeliness and relevance of data being presented.
So sticking ...
Posted in Statistics, Analysis, Tuning | No Comments »
Thursday, October 25th, 2007
Am really starting to enjoy the power and portability of using Java in my load testing efforts, especially when the environments in which you work are often limited in terms of tool sets you're allowed to use. For example the current Solaris environment I work in doesn't have a C ...
Posted in Java, Testing | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
I don't normally blog on the personal side of things, but this video I certainly identify with. Absolute classic!
Posted in General, Humour | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
It has long since annoyed me and no doubt numerous others, the inability of Excel to get beyond 65,536 rows of data or more simply 2^16 ...
A deft upgrade to Office 2007 sees an improvement in this limitation and am now able to have at least 1M rows of data. ...
Posted in General, Analysis, Tools | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
Techdebug has spotted the size increase in Gmail standard user accounts. Guess that means storage is getting pretty cheap for the heavy weights. Coincidentally DPHOTO uses the GMail service for its production users, which pretty much rules out the need for me(us) to ever have to re-install MailEnable again ... ...
Posted in General | No Comments »
Monday, October 15th, 2007
I've been experimenting with a couple of different IDEs lately for Java development, and the two at the top of my list are NetBeans and Eclipse. A frustrating thing is that Mac OSX tends to ignore anti aliasing rules for text in these applications. I think it has something to ...
Posted in OSX, Programming | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 15th, 2007
More for my own reference than anything else, here is how you install the CVS bundle for TextMate using a subversion client.
1. If you don't already have a subversion, try the precompiled version here.
2. Set the LC_CTYPE variable to use UTF-8
export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
3. Make a bundles directory if you have not ...
Posted in OSX, Programming | 2 Comments »
Monday, October 1st, 2007
If you're a Mac user and you're not using TextMate, then hurry up and join the bandwagon. This is a powerful text editor for Mac OSX, which I use for just about any type of project be it C#, Java, PHP, Perl or even COBOL. What makes this tool so ...
Posted in General, OSX, Backup, Ruby | No Comments »
