To get a better idea of what a testing environment I’m writting a letter to several companies with a short questionnaire. I now have a letter which is acceptable _and_ gets over the correct information. As I’m doing the work for one company I have get the responses back, and then present them in such a way that I don’t give out insider knowledge and give an unfair advantage to the company that I’m doing this for.

Also changed today was the questions on the questionnaire to make it more general. Then I can use the same one for both internal and external use.

Having a letter and set of questions is of no use unless I have any one to send them to. So the remainder of today was spent trying to gather around 20 companies to which I can then send the letter to. This proved a challange, it’s like trying to do maths on the spot. When you have to do it you can’t, but do it for no purpose and you can. I think I still came up with a reasonable list, so once I’ve checked the letter and questions again I shall send them.

Synergy is a piece of software that allows you to link sereral computers together over a network in order that you can use the same keyboard and mouse across them all. The computers are still independant from each other so running multiple copies of the same program is possible. It’s even cross platform!

The advantages are easy to see. With several monitors on your desk it enables you to operate several systems, not always on the same hardware or running the same operating system. The same keyboard and mouse opperates the lot which is a great space saver.

I find it very useful to use it with my main desktop and laptop. I use my laptop with a laptop stand which means that the laptop keyboard is not at the best angle for typing on. Using synergy I am able to use my desktop keyboard and mouse (which are in the best position for my hands) to operate them both.

It’s also a great way of have a development environment on one computer and a clean enviroment on the other. Putting the files on the network enable me to develop on one computer, and then with the flick of the mouse be on the different computer and testing the result.

Much cheaper than a KVM, and much more flexible.

Discovered an alternative name for what I’m looking research – testing infrastructure. This helped to pull up a few more pieces of information but not that much.

Started to work on the questionaire and came up with a several question. It’s going to be hard work thinking up questions that ask what I want to know in the right way. It’s about asking it in such a way that I don’t point at a certain answer. Those that answer the question will be filling them in in such a way that they hope it will influence the outcome of the project in their favour and not what is best for the company and testing in general. They could be doing this on purpose or subconsciously so it’s something that I have to look out for.

Last week I requested a journal from the library and yesterday the library web site showed that it had arrived. After work I went into to the library just after 6pm to collect it. The uni is now closed for Easter, unfortunatly the library seems to think that this means students will stop wanting to use the library after 5pm. So when I arrived there was not a single librarian to seen but plenty of notices saying they were closed at 5pm during the holidays. Grr

Apache allows you to use a self signed certificate. This allows you to encrypt the data that is sent between the server and client browser, but importantly it does not say who you are. You can change this by gettings some one else to sign your certifate and then it is supposed to be trusted but this costs.

So in theory you could be sending encrypted data from a fake server. But as I’m not bothered about this I just sign my own and get along with it.

I was reminded of the procedure for creating your own certificate today when mine from last year ran out. I knew it would run out soon but didn’t know it had happened until I got two messages today. The first was the warning about using an out of date certificate, the second my usual about using an encrypted page.

A quick search through my servers home page turned up the following:

/usr/bin/openssl req -new -key /home/e-smith/ssl.key/server.key -x509 -days 365 -out /home/e-smith/ssl.crt/server.crt

I decided that I didn’t want to have it run out after a year so I changed the 365 to 730 and now I’m secure and valid for another 2 years, if not trusted by every one…

Got a scope thoughts back yesterday, then expanded that to give a full scope including what the project includes. Added a part which says what I’m not going to do as part of my dissertation.

Today read though a book by Jeferson (I think), it has really turned my views on testing on its head. I’ve discovered that testing isn’t about if a program works but if it breaks. More about this later.

Quite a tiring few days so I can’t type more than this.

Had a look into styling xml documents today

The first issue was with Firefox, in was confused about what apache was sending it. Once I had sorted out that Firefox wanting the xsl sent to it with a mime header of application/xml then I was away.

My first experiment was simply just seeing if I could apply some sort of style. I got this working by linking in a xsl file with turned the xml displayed into a table layout.

Next came the styling of individual parts of the table, I wanted specific rows to have different back ground colours. So I learnt that xsl has an if statement by reading http://builder.com.com/5102-6371-5085807.html. Quite simply it:

<xsl :if test=Boolean-expression>
< !—- peform an action
</xsl:if>


But that doesn’t provide the else part I read further and found:

<xsl :choose>
<xsl :when test=condition>
< !—do something
</xsl:when>
<xsl :otherwise>
< !—do something
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>


Just what I wanted, a bit of guess work led me to having multipule xsl:when which then provied me with if:if-else:else.

The now formatted xml file can be seen at staff.xml and the xsl file at staff.xsl. To see what the they really look like then you will need to view the source as your browser will format them.

This blog now validates as compliant XHTML, previously it didn’t valuate due to human error

What I had done was call the calendar function where I wanted it to go. That just happened to be inside a <ul> statement and guess what I didn’t do. That’s right, wrap that in a <li> statement.

Once I had the calendar wrapped in the correct way it validated first time.

XHTML validation service has resumed

Had a quick look through the remaining journals, none of any help unfortunately.

Expanded the rough scope I had written down last week and then put more detail to each point. This should help me to keep a track of what I’m supposed to be doing and also provide the tasks for the timeline. Sent an e-mail to my boss asking for a formal definition of the scope so waiting for a reply from that.

After lunch used the break out area to read through “Software Testing in the Real World” by Edward Kit, found a paragraph which sums up the whole of my dissertation and the idea behind it. Got a few other ideas from it as well relating to the general area of testing.

Next week I it’s write up time for the scope, plan the timeline and start putting together some of the research that I’ve been doing into testing. Should start to get interesting soon, I hope…

I’ve had a play tonight and got the calendar working, unfortunatly this makes the page not validate as XHTML.

Also changed is a new link to my picture gallery, with this I’ve had to change the css and images to match better. Those using Firefox should see the page as intended but in IE the page doesn’t line up and I’m not sure why.