I’ve had a problem with upgrading Parallels the excellent tool for running VMs in OSX. For some reason that I could not initially spot the install would hang in the preflight check before applying all the files. I also had a similar problem trying to force an uninstall.

To cut a long story short it appears that the install/uninstall scripts try to shut down the InternetSharing and bootpd daemons…..in my case these would simply not die through the current script and I had to intervene manually - the install then ran fine.

I got frustrated with spaces on Leopard because moving windows around between active spaces didn’t seem easy. Turns out it is - all you need to do is click on the menu bar for the window you want moved and then use CTL-LeftArrow/RightArrow to move the window to another space.

One of the projects I work on has a reasonable number of JUnit 3 tests (2500). We also use Cruise Control to automate the build cycle. Each package has a suite which defines all the tests to be run, but this has become more and more error prone over time. Developers forget to add tests to the suites, leaving orphaned tests etc.

The obvious solution is to use the batchtest mechanism provided in Apache Ant. However this produces an XML file for each test run, containing about 20K of setup information for the tests.
Cruise will then attempt to merge all these XML files for its build reports, which takes a lot of time and a *lot* of RAM.

As well as using JChav as part of our deployment cycle, I have additionally been using it to monitor some production servers. For the production servers you obviously don’t run them at any load that is likely to affect the real users. However 1 thread running a set of tests once an hour (thanks to cron) can give a good view of performance over time. I am fully aware of other software that can be used to monitor my sites, but given that I already have a JMeter script designed to test key points of the application it seems like the right solution.

After an interesting JavaOne session on GWT, I thought I would have a quick play with the toolkit. I hit a little roadblock initially which after discussions with other colleagues they had problems with too.

In the Getting Started guide the section on building an Eclipse project skips one step that caught me out. Do not create the project in your Eclipse workspace, instead perform the two steps in a temporary area. Then import that temporary project using Eclipse/import/Existing files into workspace - be sure to click the copy source.

My formative education was all shell based, and its a tough habbit for an old timer like me to break. I’ve never quite got on with screens so was delighted to find Terminator.

Terminator is a java application that provides a fast responsive terminal with additional features like searching. However the killer feature for me is tabbed terminals, this is going to save me so much desktop realestate!

I’ve only run it on OSX so far, but ports are available for Windows and Linux.

I’ve been working on JChav with a couple of colleagues. It allows you to take the output generated by JMeter and track performance over time.

The general idea is that you build a JMeter script that gets run from ant. So after every automated build/deploy the ant task generates an XML file showing the performance for that build.

The JChav ant task then operates on the stored XML files to produce a set of charts. Each chart shows the performance of a given page for each build that has run. Each chart shows you how the performance of the page has changed over time. That way you can show everyone how much better your code is improving (or not) over time.

Introduction

Selenium RC provides an excellent framework for automating UI tests. The issue that we have had with this approach in the past is that we have struggled to automate the use of these tools as no single platform can run the full set of browsers we need for our regression testing.

I missed the google London Test Automation conference but google video has an excellent presentation by Jason Huggons from the day on exactly these topics. Jason suggests using subordinate machines to perform browser specific tests after deployment. Inspired by this I’ve rolled up the following as a proof of concept :

I switched back in April and I thought I should share some of the software I’m now using on a daily basis.

Non Commercial

Smultron is a fantastic little text editor. It supports multiple open files, syntax highlighting etc etc.

Shrook is a nice RSS feed aggregator, with a simple well thought out GUI.

NeoOffice is an Aqua port of Open Office.

Mail Scripts whilst not something I use every day I’m including it here as it has some hugely useful functions. These include exports of mail in a variety of formats, linking mail and iCal for sending mail and a host of other handy tools.

I needed a simple encrypted partition for some my Mac laptop. After a bit of searching around, I realised that this is actually a built in feature in OSX. To create/use an encrypted partition perform the following steps :

Applications/Utility

launch Disk Utility

Select New Image

Give the image a name, size and select AES for encryption.

Then set a password for the disk. Make sure you do not select the Remember Password option as this means the partition can be automatically mounted.