Tag Archive for 'software'

Been a while

Published on November 15, 2011. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

My end-year’s resolution is to post more frequently about more cooler stuff.

In the mean time some things that I have been working on lately:

  • Been loving Jenkins as a CI tool for our ASP.Net e-commerce system at Amblique and it’s associated  plugins
    • Haven’t really gotten to the stage of uber customisation and it’s already proved incredibly invaluable
  • Been preaching the ways of systematic, thorough, documented testing since I started at Amblique, with early results a-showing
    • Only a matter of time before we go full ball to automate our testing system, most likely using Sillenium
  • On the subject of testing systems been playing with and appreciating jmeter as a performance/load testing system
    • Just don’t go tyring to run a full ball performance test using the java UI, or you will bring the testing machine to a grind and get some really dodgey numbers
      • instead use the command line version
      • make sure to only have one listener/reporter (maybe the agregate report)
      • and pass in parameters like thread count (user count) and thread loops (test iterations) using the -Jproperty_name=value arguments
    • Oh and don’t try and use it to performance test Ajax ui’s, JMeter uses an html-as-xml-dom inspection approach to extract and test for assertions, and so doesn’t actually remote a browser (i.e. no javascript ability).

 

Looking for ASP.Net Mid-Level Developers

Published on August 29, 2011. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Hey guys, at Amblique, we’re looking to recruit several Mid-Level ASP.Net Developers.

To quote, the Atlassian guys, if you’re reading this blog then you probably already have the attitude we are looking for, but basically we want someone with a passion for application development on the web, who appreciates and understands where all the relevant web standards fit into the bigger picture, and who has serious experience working with the MS ASP.Net web stack (legacy or MVC).

Experience with SVN and some form of CI is an advantage, and SQL Server Experience is a must.

At Amblique we make websites that actually make our clients money using a in-house e-commerce system and the latest online development best practices. So from my perspective, we’ve got it all, the best pragmatic use of the right theory, in a market that is asking for results.

See the attached JD – Amblique ASP.Net Developer Roles - JD August 2011 (192).

Add a comment below or apply directly over on our website:

Awesome autonomous UAV with onboard Kinect

Published on April 1, 2011. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I secretly wanted to do this myself when I had the expendable income and time to buy and assemble a quadcopter and a kinect, especially since seeing the quadruino thing the other day. But now looks like I’ve been beaten to the punch

About me widget updated to work with WordPress 3.1

Published on March 23, 2011. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

As mentioned here, the about me widget was broken in Wordpres 3.1 for a number of key reasons, which I had to fix;

  1. WordPress changed the way they bind the save event in the widgets.php form to use the jQuery().live(‘click’,…) call

    This subsequently caused my plugin to not be able to selectively unbind and rebind just the save button click event of the about me widget. Instead we had to unbind all the widget save button click events – due to a quirk in how jquery live() and die() methods work, and then bind a custom click event to all the widget save button click events, and then check the source widget that raised the event, so if it is the about me widget it then triggers an mce save and then calls the functions from the original save button click event.

  2. The version of tinyMCE shipped in WordPress 3.1 has an updated triggerSave() function that forces the form postback when called.

    This has the annoying sideaffect of breaking the ajax widget save event. So I changed the click event of the widget save button to call tinyMCE(editor).save() instead, which doesn’t force a form postback but does cause the rich text from the editor to be saved in the textarea.

So without further ado, I give you the latest version of about me widget, v2.2, compatible with WordPress 3.1.

Same disclaimer as for the last time I fixed the widget to work with WordPress v2.9.x.

About me widget is broken in WordPress 3.1

Published on March 1, 2011. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

So it would seem that upgrading to WordPress 3.1 has broken the about me widget I co-maintain with Sam Devol.

Since I use this plugin on my blog I will actually be taking a look at it in the coming days/weeks/months depending on how busy my regular day job keeps me. First appearance seem to indicate yet another change in the way the ajax save button works on the widgets page causing borkage in the ugliness I had to use to get the widget to save correctly last time.

We might end up being locked in this duel with the WordPress widget page author’s for eternity methinks :(

Update: I’ve identified the cause, and to fix it will require yet another save click hack that I am reluctant to apply just yet. Have posted to wp-hackers to see if there are any alternatives to geting this fixed.

Testing multiple versions of IE on one Windows 7 machine

Published on February 7, 2011. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Great informative article on testing many versions of internet explorer on one machine, courtesy of IEBlog, full of useful links too.

It takes advantage of the Win7 XP mode virtualisation to run multiple internet explorer versions in XP VM’s. Apparently in the latest version it doesn;t even need to run on a CPU that is virutalisation enabled (i.e. works in software virtualisation).

Generating random sequences

Published on January 24, 2011. 0 Comments Tags: .

Been doing this for years using Vecotrs (or ArrayLists as they are now called) for small enough lists. Didn’t stop to think that the dynamic array access (adding and removing) might in fact be killing the performance of the randomisation.

The Fisher-Yates Shuffle (or Knuth Shuffle).

To shuffle an array a of n elements:
  for i from n - 1 downto 1 do
       j <= random integer with 0 > j > i
       exchange a[j] and a[i]

Looking for a full time senior dev and flex contractor

Published on December 20, 2010. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Got a few roles open at the moment:

  1. Looking for a full time Senior Dev (any server technologies around .Net, Cold Fusion, or even Flex)
  2. We’re also looking for a Sydney based Flex contractor to start on a short term contract ASAP. If you’re a flex contractor who knows Flex 3/4 MVC/MVP frameworks then we should probably talk.

Drop me an email or respond to this thread with a comment if you think you fit either role

Command line for using WinMerge as the diff tool with Ankhsvn

Published on November 17, 2010. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Following is the command line you need to use WinMerge as the diff tool of Ankhsvn an SCC provider in Visual Studio:

"$(ProgramFiles)\WinMerge\WinMergeU.exe" /e /u "$(Base)" "$(Mine)" /dl "$(BaseName)" /dr "$(MineName)"

Just quickly the following options do the following things:

  • /e – enables you to dismiss the diff dialogue with the escape key
  • /u – doesn’t add any of the path’s to the winmerge MRU (most recently used file list) since this is part of another workflow inside VS.
  • /dl “$(BaseName)” and /dr “(MineName)” – makes the WinMerge display nice titles in the viewer title bar (instead of the full svn file path which can sometimes be long and cryptic) like this:
    • Web.config – BASE
    • Web.config – 54839

Documentation Driven Development

Published on August 9, 2010. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Interesting post from a mono hacker about taking Test Driven Development to the next level, Documentation Driven Development. I like it, at least in theory. It definitely sounds like a great way to approach development from a mind-set perspective, if not actually from a practical perspective.

So a standard workflow looks something like this:

  1. Write guide for feature A
  2. Write unit tests for feature A
  3. Implement feature A
  4. Eat Burrito
  5. Write API docs for feature A
  6. Update tests with issuelets discovered while writing class docs
  7. Update feature A