As a heavy user of the Mac command line toolset, I spend a lot of time logged into remote machines. I’ve been an avid ITerm user for a long time, it allows me to have radically different looking consoles for QA/EA/Production machines.

I was reading  http://aming-blog.blogspot.com/2011/01/growl-notification-from-iterm-2.html on changes in ITerm2 to allow console commands to use Growl Notifications (including from remote machine). Typical use case would be a large data import/build etc - followed by growl telling you he jobs complete.

We have been gradually moving large amount of our managed and internal services to AWS. EC2/RDS make for a very compelling model. As a software/consultancy house using these services let us concentrate on our core competencies. The benefit of no longer sitting waiting for hardware to fail and ruin someones weekend is hard to beat.

For those wanting to dip a toe in the water, Amazon now support S3 as a static website. i.e. you can link an S3 “bucket” to being a static website. Announcement blog post is here - it boils down to uploading the content to S3 and then pointing a CNAME at it.

After the grand experiment described below I ported a large number of the smoke tests over, these happily ran on my Mac under both Safari and Firefox 3.

Of course despite my bias for OSX/Linux apparently one or two internet users still use IE. So we probably need to test on that “other” platform too.

To do this I setup three VirtualBox instances, running IE6/7/8 respectively. I then modified our base test to take a set of parameters for test server/port/browser. i.e. make our base test setup the driver as follows :

For a while I have been doing ad hoc runtime smoke testing of deployments with tools like Selenium. i.e. running a set of simple tests that exercise a series of pre-defined application points. The scripts where typically recorded using the excellent Selenium IDE then replayed through ant/Junit on one or more target browser platforms.

Not full regression testing but a start - right? Well these tests become a pain to maintain, and unmaintained/unreliable tests are pointless. A typical test would be something like the following :

I’ve been testing a new site with Selenium. Part of this work was on my Mac and in addition to running the tests in Firefox, I wanted to use Safari too. Whenever I launched the test case the first driver window opened, but the content window didn’t ever appear. No errors, no fuss, it just didn’t happen.

After walking away from the problem for a while, the penny finally dropped……..Safari blocks pop-ups by default! Turning that off instantly solved all my problems.

If you need to enforce certain patterns in commit messages for svn (eg. ticket nos etc) create a script in ~repos/hooks/pre-commit :

REPOS="$1"  
TXN="$2"  
  
# Make sure that the log message contains some text of form Feedback nnnnn:  
  
SVNLOOK=/usr/local/bin/svnlook  
match=\`$SVNLOOK log -t "$TXN" "$REPOS" | grep -i 'feedback.\*\[0-9\]:'| wc -c\`  
if \[ $match -eq 0 \]  
then  
	echo "COMMIT HAS FAILED:Log message does not contain feedback number eg. feedback nnnn: commit message" 2>&1  
	exit 1  
else  
	exit 0  
fi  
exit 0

After installing most recent Apache on our Solaris 10 box we got a lot of errors with the default config for listening on SSL. Many many lines like :

(128)Network is unreachable: connect to listener on [::]:443

Basically on Solaris Listen 443 doesn’t hack it anymore. If you want to listen on all interfaces use :

Listen 0.0.0.0:443

We have had a very odd issue with IE7 being sent pdf files over https.

Standard headers that look like this :

Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate  
Content-Disposition: attachment;filename=mysecretpdffile.pdf  
Content-Type: application/pdf  
Content-Length: 19180  
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100  
Connection: Keep-Alive  

Work fine under IE 5/5.5/6, Opera, Safari et al, but IE 7 reports that the content is not available.

After a bit of searching I found an excellent post at :

http://in2.php.net/manual/en/function.header.php#74736

For us adding the following headers in Java have resolved the issue :

I’m kind of an old school command line hacker, but I’ve got to face up to the fact that the rest of the world seems to be moving on from the ksh. As such my previous super powers for editing command histories with vi commands (Esc-k, /, etc) are going to have to be retired. As the rest of the planet has embraced bash, I’ve found myself struggling with the fact that crtl-r only lets me get the previous command.

I needed to migrate a chunk of data from an example Derby database up to Oracle 10g today. I found a minor issue with the Hibernate mappings that I was creating. In Derby I could happily have double columns, and these needed to be converted to binary_double columns in Oracle.

However I kept having issues with the schema validation in hibernate :

**Wrong column type: binary_double, expected: double precision **

After looking into the source for the dialect mappings I’ve found that creating a new dialect that extends the Oracle 9 one as follows solves this problem :