Rude Awakening

I had set my washing machine to do a load overnight yesterday (I get cheap electricity in the middle of the night you see). At about 2 o’clock this morning I was woken up by the fire alarm going, my telephone beeping saying there was a power cut, and a lack of any noise coming from my home office. So I dashed downstairs to find the kitchen full of smoke and the electricity off for everything except the lights (luckily).

It’s pretty obvious what had happened, the washing machine motor had burnt out (finally, it’s been nothing but trouble over the last few years) in dramatic fashion. Luckily the electricity had cut out for that circuit or things could have been more serious. So today I’ve had to order a new machine which should be arriving at the weekend (rather annoying timing as I am finishing work next week so could do without the expense).

The one thing I noticed is quite how many electrical items I have running off the one circuit, the server which runs this site, the desktop, all the TV and audio equipment in the living room, and quite a few other bits and pieces around the house. Redistributing the kit among different circuits will be yet another thing added to the ever lengthening list of jobs to do while I am not tied to a long commute over the next few months.

Show and Tell Thursday – Rational Test Manager “rtpar” decoder

Joining in the spirit of Rocky’s Show and Tell Thursday idea, I thought I’d share a tool which I wrote last year. The reason I haven’t posted it before is that it’s got a fairly niche market and it’s just re-using techniques which are pretty familiar now (AJAX to get some XML and then XPath and DOM processing to output some HTML). However it’s been pretty useful for me and I don’t have a huge amount of time to write anything new at the moment so you never know.

So what is it? Well, if you use Rational Test Manager for writing your test scripts you may know that getting at the scripts themselves can be quite hard work and pretty much impossible unless you have the Test Manager software installed. A part of our release procedure is that we provide the System Test scripts to the business users to check over to make sure that they reflect "real" usage of the system. So they don’t have access to Rational and they wouldn’t make much use of the other features anyway, all we want is a listing of the steps in each script. To get this out manually into text files takes ages. However, there is an export feature which will give you an "rtpar" file which contains all of the scripts within a project. Now if you look at contents of the rtpar file you’ll find that it’s just XML so where we are going next is pretty obvious…

I put together a (very) quick NSF which has two forms. One allows you to upload the XML file (with a standard Domino server you just need to change the rtpar file extension to xml so that Domino knows what it’s serving out), the other looks at the file you uploaded and formats it into HTML so that you can print it out or do whatever else you like with it.

You can see a demo of the app here.

Now, the obvious first comment is… Why aren’t you using XSLT to produce this? Well there’s no reason I couldn’t, but I needed it quickly and frankly I know the AJAX stuff better than XSLT. So just get off my back man 🙂

The code itself is pretty simple, all it does is work out the URL to load the XML file using the ubiquitous XMLHTTPRequest. Once the XML is loaded it’s really a matter of just looping through each test folder and within those each test script and outputting the contents into a table format.

The sample I have pointed to above is very small, just a single script, but we have used this tool to produce a PDF for our users which amounts to several hundred pages of scripts. Although it takes a while for the XML to load (about 30 seconds or so) it still has no problem in parsing it and displaying it.

In conjunction with the CutePDF printer tool it has saved my testers and me hours of work for every release we do. So I hope it’s of use to someone out there.

Download the NSF here

Heretical Thoughts

I know this is like heresy in the geek world but when I’m using a Windows PC increasingly I am finding myself switching back to Internet Exploder, and I’m not happy about it. The problem is that Firefox 1.5 appears to be getting slower, buggier and crashes more often. Initially I just assumed that it was my PC at work, it’s got all sorts of crap on it and is probably due for a rebuild, but I have also noticed the same on my home PC as well over the last couple of weeks. The recent upgrade to 1.5.0.1 doesn’t seemed to have helped much either.

This is not to say that I like IE, I don’t, it’s several years out of date in terms of functionality, has Microsoft’s unique take on "standards" and crashes a lot as well, but it has the advantage that it seems to reload a lot quicker than Firefox when it does go belly up.

So the plan is to downgrade Firefox back to 1.0.7 to see whether that makes any positive difference. Looking around t’internet there seem to be a small but significant minority of people who have had similar problems to me. Has anyone else noticed any similar issues or have I crossed a line here?

Getting ready for Thursday

OK, things are a little busy here right now, but I plan to, and I hope others do as well, to post on Thursday for Rocky’s Show and Tell Thursday. It’s a great idea and will hopefully counteract all of the recent bile and prove that the Domino community can be positive as well as acting like a pack of sicko attack dogs.

I don’t generally get involved in those emotive discussions as, in my experience, it’s a lot easier to win people over just by showing them the things that you can do with Notes and Domino rather than just telling them they’re wrong.

Marathon Blog

A good friend, Phil, is once again running the London Marathon this year. I’d definitely recommend getting over to his site and sponsoring him as he’s running for a very worthwhile charity. However, even if you don’t it’s still worth reading the training blog that Phil’s keeping if only to truly appreciate the effort that goes into running a marathon. The only risk is that it just makes you feel massively lazy (well it does me anyway!).

Big Changes over the next months

Anyone who watches Jobserve in the UK will have seen a whole batch of similar contract positions go through yesterday afternoon, well that would be my current role.

After almost six years I’ve decided it’s time for a change of scenery, so after working on three quite large (in Domino terms) applications and a whole slew of smaller apps for this investment bank for the last few years I let my agent know earlier this week that I won’t be renewing in March.

So, what next then? Well March is already looking pretty busy, but if you have any roles that you think might suit me then please let me know and I’ll send you a copy of my CV (or Resume for those over the pond)