Older blog entries for vivekv (starting at number 73)

30 Aug 2003 (updated 30 Aug 2003 at 03:35 UTC) »

Sun, Aug 30, 2003

OK. I am back at this again!

Sun, Aug 24, 2003

MajorCleanup

Spent the whole day cleaning up all my paperwork today. Archived most of the old paperwork to a carton box. Felt good about getting rid of various old paperwork.

Life

My wife asked me why I am not updating the diary anymore. So I am back at it again. Need to find the time to write this.

Oh - did I mention, I do have a new laptop an IBM thinkpad - 1.8 Ghz P4 with 512 MB of RAM. Real nice piece of hardware. Too bad it run MS Word and Excel all the time - occupational hazard I guess :-)

Sun, Aug 17, 2003

GoingBackToData

I have been thinking about XP and the need for large amounts of data for testing in a large project that uses Test Driven Development. Let me explain this better.

In any large projects, to perform unit test of some part of the system there is a need for certain amount of preconditions to be setup initially. A good example in an e-commerce system is to consider the scenario of checking out a shopping cart by providing address, credit cards etc.,. The first precondition would be that the user must be logged in to the system to perform the checkout. This is the easier part - TDD can login the user as part of the test case.

This is precondition that is represented as session data in the application. This is different from the data requirements of the application.

The real data requirement is that the user must exist in the system's database so that he can log in. To checkout a product, the product must be added to the shopping cart. To add a product to the shopping cart, the product must exist in the product database. Thus we have another data requirement that should be setup before we can perform testing on the checkout process. This is the data requirement of the checkout process that will increase exponentially due to the various test cases required for the checkout process.

The checkout process probably requires more information to be setup before it can perform its task - for example price of the product, any discounts on the product, tax information so on and on. This is the exponential amount of data that I am referring to. Add to this, each test case will require different types of products to be setup that will require all the additional data fixtures.

How do we solve this ? I have not seen a solution that is convincing enough for this problem. Anybody has any ideas ?

WhyIsAntGood

Everybody seems to think that Ant is a good thing. Having been involved with Java development for over four years now and having used Ant for nearly two years, I think I wholeheartedly agree with the world at large. Having said that, I have been thinking about why is it that Ant is considered "good". I think the answer lies in what ant provides as regular services and how it provides them. I am not referring to the laundrylist of features that is supported but more importantly the fact that the development team for Ant understands development so well that they have captured the essence of tools required for a development (compile it, package it, deploy it, transfer to remote systems etc., ) in such a fashion that it is available within a single environment (the ant buidl script) and accessible in a consistent fashion (the build.xml). I think this is the key to its success there is no single tool on earth that will let you checkout, compile and do FTP at the same time. I think this is the pattern in which tools for software development must be developed to be successful.

Thu, Jul 17, 2003

Life

Went home at 2:00 AM last night , got to bed at 3:00 and wife woke me up at 7:00 AM. So feeling a little run down today. Lots of trouble at work resulting in late work.

Open Source

Open Source

Have not made much progress on the DocBook website development. I should probably work on it full time this weekend to have a decent website for cvspermissions.

Work

Work is going on at a slower pace now. The site is live and running OK. We are handling the load that is coming on to it right now. Now the process of tuning things to make them run faster is in progress. Hopefully we will get some more out of the iron!

Open Source MichaelCrawford posted an article on Advogato about the GFDL and how some of the linux distribution will be treating the license. I am not aware of what the problems are with the license as well as the implications. But I do have all my articles on GFDL. Do I need to change? Can someone volunteer some advise.

Life

A sunday came to pass. Nothing much happened. Went and took care of some stuff at the bank.

Work

Had to coordinate some requirement that had come up at work. Been on the phone all morning with the team. Managed to sneak out to the bank in the middle of that.

Life Last week is a lucky week. First I get a Rs. 150 coupon from my bank for using their online banking. Then I get a $20 gift certificate on Amazon from Sun. Sure feels good to be lucky :-).

Its saturday evening and there is nobody at home. Sure feels boring. Too lazy to go out anywhere.

Ordered a pizza for dinner. Its been a long time since I had one. Staying off junk food to stay healthy :-) just felt like having one..

Wed, Jul 2, 2003

Open Source

I have been having trouble with a jabber server that we have on our intranet at work. The server is on a linux box running on a P3 class 1Ghz with 256MB RAM. The server usually has a load of about 15 people max. Now the problem - whenever multiple users join a conference room, the linux box CPU goes to 100% and jabber stops responding. Then I have to kill the jabber process to get it back running. All the clients are Windows based clients called exhodus. Anybody has a clue? Please mail me at vivek at magic hypen cauldron dot com.

Work

We have had problems with handling the load that the server will receive during peak times. We have been working round the clock to see what we can do to improve the situation. Currently running with a throttle on the number of users of the site. Hopefully situation will improve soon.

Tue, Jul 1, 2003

Open Source

I am seeing a lot of downloads on the new version of CVSPermissions. Good to know that it is appreciated. Since I moved to Sarovar, I am able to see statistics on the site which is a good thing. I should also host my Advogato Poster on Sarovar. I think there will be people interested in a blogging software for advogato. Yes?

Work

We went live over the weekend. Been having sleepless nights since then :-(. Contractual obligations prevent me from mentioning about details here but its not hard to figure out :-). We have had a few hiccups so far. Nothing that cannot be solved but has resulted in sleepless nights never the less.

Open Source

Finished CVSPermissions v 0.3. Now I have support for restriction of tagging in CVS. That is the good part. The bad part is that the access to sarovar, where I host the tool seems to be gone!. I am not sure if it is my ISP. I will try to upload the next release from another ISP. If that fails, I have to wait for another day to upload the release. Rats!

Life

Spent most of the morning just surfing the net, reading up writeup from the SD magazine on errant architecture by Martin Fowler. Fell asleep while planning to put in some new changes to CVSPermissions. Finally work up, went to meet inlaws in the evening. Came back and then worked on CVSPermissions.

Open Source

bram you should try Sarovar as a home for bit torrent.

Sat, Jun 28, 2003

Open Source

Started working on the website for CVSPermissions. I am hoping it will serve me two purposes. One I learn DocBook website DTD and how to create websites and secondly all my users will have a proper website.

Work

Off to work on a saturday. There is an insiduous bug in the system that will affect the launch. We have even asked help from the application server vendor and they will be providing it soon. For a strange reason a transaction gets rolled back when there are no errors happening anywhere. The application server is ATG Dynamo. Not sure what the issue is, The whole team is debugging and I am here to provide a moral support more than anything else. Their ATG skills are far ahead of mine.

Fri, Jun 27, 2003

Open Source

Today I tried to give the Advogato Poster the ability to talk via firewalls. Unfortunately it just didnt work. For some reason - not sure whether it is our corporate firewall or Java or XMLRPC, I always got the following error.

Exception in thread "main" java.io.IOException: Server returned HTTP response code: 407 for URL: http://www.advogato.org/XMLRPC
        at org.apache.xmlrpc.XmlRpcClient$Worker.execute(XmlRpcClient.java:444)
        at org.apache.xmlrpc.XmlRpcClient.execute(XmlRpcClient.java:163)
        at com.magic_cauldron.blogs.AdvogatoPoster.getLastDiaryEntry(AdvogatoPoster.java:292)
        at com.magic_cauldron.blogs.AdvogatoPoster.main(AdvogatoPoster.java:339)

Yes I have set the proxyHost and proxyPort properties, I have setup the proxyUser and password properties I have tried the Base64 encoding... nothing seems to work! I am tired of dealing with poorly written software today.

Thu, Jun 26, 2003

Open Source

Gotta work on CVSPermissions... gotta work on CVSPermissions... I keep saying this to myself but never get around to doing it. I guess there is no real impetous for doing it. I need to sit down and apply myself.

Work Got home this morning at 4:00 Am after the conference call. One looooong day it has been. Have to get to work in the afternoon since we are live and there could be issues there. Things seem to be OK so far.

Life Will have to catch up on sleep. Getting to be a luxury nowadays. :-). My wife bought me a new pair of running shoes :-) can't wait to get my hands on them. she is sending it to me through a friend of hers.

Wed, Jun 25, 2003

Work

Oh boy! I have a conference call today from 11:30 PM IST to 2:00 AM IST. Fun fun fun.. It so worked out that the presentation that we had to do for our proposal was at that time. I am not sure when I will get home.

I guess after this then we just have to wait for the results from the customer.

Life

Been feeling bored about things in general. No new challenges lately. Thinking of writing something. Dont know what :-) I think my wife understands what I am talking about. I am not sure if I have to start a separate Blog. I am not the blogging type I think. I have not been able to put coherent words in Advogato in general so I dont see myself as a great blogger. The concepts is very intriguing though and very interesting. I might actually start one to satisfy the curiousity but I suspect sustaining the effort will be beyond me.

Open Source

On the whole a more productive weekend for my Open source code. Managed to get out a new version of the poster, started to learn about DocBook Website building capabilities so I can put together a new homepage for CVSPermissions on Sarovar. Cannot complain/ask for more.

Work

So we are officially live from Monday. Things are looking good so far and working as we envisaged.

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