IBM

Lately I’ve been fielding this question quite a bit at work and frankly its getting a bit exhausting to answer. I’ve become the automated test czar and thus all support, maintenance, and failings of our currently frameworks, harnesses, and tools are filtered in my direction. OK, I’m joking a bit here but at times I can feel the burning stare of colleagues eyes when they’re talking about the state of testing and the quality issues that nip us from time to time. You may be on the other side of the boat, but when theres a leak on my side don’t forget we’re still in the same boat together. ...

I just returned from a great trip to Hyderabad, India for this year’s Google Test Automation Conference. An inspiring trip where I spent several days getting test-geek on with a room full of other very passionate testers. It will be interesting wot where I can apply the tools and methodologies that I learned about at the conference to the print-workflow industry. More joyously, I’m looking forward to the collaboration opportunities with my new cross-continent contacts. ...

I thought this would be an interesting share, this hasn’t happened to me before. A few days ago I received a recruitment email from a local recruiter who found me on LinkedIn. I figured it couldn’t hurt to see where the exchange might lead. I’m always curious to learn what’s happening in other parts of our industry. I’ve learned that often times you can distinguish what values are implicitly expressed and valued by an interviewers questions. You can also learn a lot by what is not asked in an interview. ...

This post is really an effort to comfort myself after experiencing something of a late night conniption fit while on a business trip. The goals of the trip were many but my role was simple, assist our Solution Architect in un-buggering a few problems at a client site in North Carolina. The buggering I’m referring to was frustrating bad performance of our product. Our product is an enterprise web-based solution for solving complex print workflows. Due to the sensitivity of the data, our product is run on-prem by our customers, and air-gapped from other networks. Ever wonder how your bank statements, cell phone bills, or even your IRS statements are printed, stuffed, mailed, and tracked? We’ll those are the sorts of strangely exciting problems we work with. I’m not being facetious here… this can be some seriously honest-fun. ...

Quite awhile ago I needed an easy way to update all my Python eggs, this is tedious at best especially if you didn’t explicitly keep track of what you’ve installed over time. The script below isn’t mine (I’ve made a few subtle changes) but it is invaluable. I’ve been using it for the last 8-months without fail. Many thanks to Flávio Codeço Coelho for making his script available online. #!/usr/bin/env python from setuptools.command.easy_install import main as install from pkg_resources import Environment, working_set import sys #Packages managed by setuptools plist = [dist.key for dist in working_set] def autoUp(): for p in Environment(): try: install(['-U', '-v']+[p]) except: print "Update of %s failed!" %p print "Done!" def stepUp(): for p in Environment(): a = raw_input("updating %s, confirm? (y/n)" %p) if a.upper() =='Y': try: install(['-U']+[p]) except: print "Update of %s failed!"%p else: print "Skipping %s"%p print "Done!" print "You have %s packages currently managed through Easy_install"%len(plist) print plist ans = raw_input('Do you want to update them... (N)ot at all, (O)ne-by-one, (A)utomatically (without prompting)') if ans.upper() == 'N': sys.exit() elif ans.upper() == 'O': stepUp() elif ans.upper() == 'A': autoUp() else: print "Oops, you chose a non-existant option. Please run the script again."