Posts Archive

I just upgraded this site which is running b2Evolution so that I would get a the new referrer spam filter function up and running, which is long overdue.

After that I spent a good half hour in phpMyAdmin to delete all hits from the offending sites. Jeez, it’s so many! And why in good heavens name would anyone, ever, click on the link toiletphotos.com? Weirdos.

Yesterday we discovered a small but annoying performance bug: when getting a list of languages from the JVM we did not cache them but kept on retrieving them, which turned out to be quite slow.

So, like the good guys we are we wanted to have a test that ensured that the error was not reintroduced. We looked at JUnitPerf which seemed to be appropriate - it decorates a unit test and times it. The only problem here was that we were talking about that good performance was 800 ms, and bad performance was 1800 ms. Such timings can randomly fail on a slower computer or a computer that was busy doing something else. We do not like that kind of tests.

My brother just informed me that I’ve been getting a lot of adult referrers. I have to admit my naivite that I was not aware that it even existed.

I will upgrade b2 so that I can blacklist these sites. I have absolutely nothing to do with them.

I’ve got myself a SonyEricsson P900 which no doubt is the coolest gadget ever. I’m writing this sitting on the bus while at the same time listening to some ogg tunes. Awesome!

We have got our functional testsuite working. It currently consists of more than 260 tests doing everything from the simple login to running recorded WebDAV tests and restarting Websphere etc.

We’ve done it in the way that Testing Extreme Programming prescribes, with collection of methods that are implemented both remotely and locally, running the servlets in-process. The methods are pretty high-level for a very high degree of usability.

We’ve used HtmlUnit as the basis of our tests, extending it in the high-level methods. It is a great package as it tests the JavaScript too, as opposed to recorded tests that only tests the servers response to a given HTTP request.

After a lot of work my shiny new IBM R40e is up and running with almost working ACPI, internal network adapter and a 3Com 54g wireless PCMCIA card, all on Gentoo Linux.

A Mini HOWTO:

• Get an old PCMCIA card for the installation as the internal network adapter is not supported by the Live-CD
• I choose the Gentoo Stable kernel which is working great
• Do not enable PCMCIA in the kernel, emerge the pcmcia-cs package instead for continued setting up of the system.
• Get the network card driver from Broadcom, the card is a BCM-5700. Compile it and put it in the /lib/modules/*kernel-version*/kernel/driver/net/ folder. Run update-modules and modprobe bcm-5700 Add it to /etc/modules.autoload/kernel-2.4 if needed
• Get the ISL driver for the 3Com card. Follow the instructions closely, but patch the gs-sources kernel instead. I removed the pcmcia-cs package before compiling the kernel as it provides its own cardbus implementation. Supposedly only the card drivers can be compiled, but I didn’t try that.
• Emerge the wireless-tools package. iwconfig is your friend.
• ACPI is somewhat unstable, the battery information comes and goes in a undetermistic way.
• The modem is supported by the HSF driver but that in turn does not support preemptible kernels. Choose whatever you want

I’ll probably update this as I learn more. This is posted over wireless by the way :)

I got myself a new laptop the other day, a IBM T40e. It has a pretty good price performance with a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4M. While researching the laptop market it occured to me that most resellers still has not understoiod the difference between Centrino, Pentium 4M and Pentium 4. The vendor I choose happily listed the T40e as a P4 even though it in fact is a P4M.

As a Gentoo fanatic I put the Live CD in an booted - no network. The Broadcom 5700 adapter was not supported out of the box, so after trying I few innovative ideas like creating a custom LiveCD, I suddenly realized that I could use my old Xircom card in the PCMCIA bus. Sometime the easy solutions are really hard to find, and sometimes I’m just a dork for not seeing them. This time it was the latter.

A few nice people commented on my posts on functional tests and suggested a few other alternatives:

• Canoo Webtest. It’s XML-based which makes it go right out my window. Sorry about that. We are a small company where programmers have to do their share of test time. This means that we are not afraid of code, in fact we prefer it.
• Jameleon. I had not seen this one, but looking at the tutorial it seems a lot more complex than the stuff we use now.
• PureTest. This is a very competent scenario recorder/player, and I do like the guys at Minq. But as I stated earlier, recording HTTP will not test your page the way HttpUnit does with JavaScript and all.

I am truly happy with the way we do it now. We have a base testcase class that provides methods like clickButton(). These methods are implemented as Strategies by both a remote HTTP implementation and a local in-process mock implementation.

After evaluating the previous named contenders for webtest tools, the winner was … none of them.

It dawned upon us that the MaxQ way of doing this, ie. recording tests, really is not the way to go, ever. What you’re really doing is testing the server from a HTTP perspective, without testing button clicking and stuff. For example, all hidden fields must be specified at every request. If you have anything Javascript based you still have no clue if this works after having these funtional tests.

Joe Walnes seems to be a really smart guy. He has released XStream, which to me seems like the only XML serializing library you will ever need.