Posts Archive

Having two kids does limit blogging quite substantially. I still managed to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of b2evolution tonight which took quite a while. I managed to screw up the db upgrade, and when I tried restarting it choked on all table modifications and creations. So I had to step through all of the scripts and comment out all sql that flunked. PHP is quite unreadable really.

It was my colleague Håkan Råberg who coined this the other day. Quite insightful I think. I mean, you can play Tetris in them both.

My colleague Jimmy and I spent a lunch the other day discussing client application GUI editors. We both agreed that the ones we know suck quite majorly since they create code can’t be touched, does not allow for any sort of creative programming etcetera. On the other hand, it is quite handy to see the GUI develop - not that the result always looks like the one drawn though.

So instead he made the case that you should have a window continuously rendering the code you’re writing. Sort of like seeing the GUI develop while you code instead of watching the code die while you draw the application GUI.

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.