January, 2007
You are looking at posts that were written in the month of January in the year 2007.
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The movies…
Posted on January 15th, 2007 by arnljot.
Categories: other.
I’ve seen quite a lot of films lately. And the wierd thing it seems is that most of them are excellent. Just look for yourself here.
I need to watch some mediocre films soon. Seems like I either like things, or dislike them… No in between.
Bark and CubicTest
Posted on January 10th, 2007 by arnljot.
Categories: java.
Bjarte Østervold from Norskregnesentral and Christian Schwarz from BEKK was external speakers on last nights “Fagkveld” seminar at Avenir.
They spoke of Bark and CubicTest respectively, and both presentations was really interesting. Although I must admit that CubicTest with it’s graphical editor for web GUI testing really tickles my fancy.
CubicTest is an EclipseIDE plug-in that lets a user create and edit tests graphically, and then run them using Watir. A new exporter feature is now written into CubicTest so even though Watir seems the preferred way to run tests, a Selenium exporter may also be written.
Christian and I spoke of a few things, mostly how it would be interesting to run the Watir ruby scripts in JRuby inside CubicTest to get a tighter integration allowing the ruby scripts to directly report results to CubicTest. And we also discussed how exporters are made since I might be interested in writing a JWebUnit exporter considering this article about integration of Jetty and JWebUnit.
This is why I rarely believe in tests - more F-Secure
Posted on January 6th, 2007 by arnljot.
Categories: other.
Shocking.
This is their test of F-Secure where they proclaim it “Best in test”.
Here are their test procedures.
My first objection is that they haven’t tested installing software to the system after the security package is installed. Under some circumstances under F-Secure (and surely others too) that’s next to impossible.
Also they haven’t tested the software with different types of software. For instance will http protection in F-Secure disable many mainstream IE plugins (google toolbare for one).
Further more their “this is what you must have” list is meaningless as testing criteria for software. Like mentioning a UPS. In my opinion they should first have listed features that each software suite should have (one being a control panel to see real-time what goes on…), secondly they should make certain their testing procedures mimics real life usage of the suite (like adding and removing software, and would it kill them to run PC Mark also to see application performance under the suites?).
These guys are professionals, surely they have participated in real life software tests or system selections. They know how to make proper tests, this work was just sloppy.
PS: The linked sites are in Norwegian
My New toy - IBM Lenovo Z61m
Posted on January 5th, 2007 by arnljot.
Categories: other.
My new toy is a IBM Lenovo Z61m, and I’m really falling in love with it. The best thing with it is one piece of nice software that is pre-installed on it: The Think Vantage Help/Message Centre. It’s neat how it gives hints on how to get more out of the laptop. But the icon could be much improved. It’s currently a ugly little blue envelope. Juck!
Which is a typical problem with the IBM Lenovo gadgets and software. The icons and hardware design (look) is depressing. Most of the time it seems like something that’s been made because they had to (icons), while the rest of the time it seems to have been designed for business executives of the 1980s (the laptop, 19″ monitor and mouse and keyboard).
I must admit I envy my peers with their posh Ferraris and Apple notebooks. Also I wish that IBM had a Core 2 Duo option, but alas no…
Also my laptop deal requires me to use F-Secure Internet Security 2007 OEM. Which sucks. I usually go for Norton Internet Security, or Norton Anti virus with various firewall options (Tiny or Zone Alert). But this time I had to go for F-Secure.
Why does it suck? First of, the GUI. It’s a complete mess, and is slow and unresponsive. Also it lacks one feature I consider basic: An easy way to access real-time status and a real-time updated log. Deep inside its GUI it has a link to a file which will be opened in Notepad…. Jeez Louise!
Second grudge I have against F-Secure is how poorly it fits in with the rest of the security features of Windows. Norton disables Windows features it knows it’s incompatible with. F-Secure competes… This means that my new copy of “Settlers II - 10 years anniversary edition” brought my laptop to a grinding halt first time I inserted it 
Rubbish!
Worse still is that F-Secure brings OpenOffice to a grinding halt every time you try to open a file. It will load, but not after the CPU has peaked at 100% for quite some time. The worst example is to try and use the Help feature (F1) of OpenOffice while running F-Secure in the background. Every time you try to click on a help subject, the help application will freeze up (process not responding) while F-Secure (fssm32.exe) is gobbling up all CPU resources in the background…
One last example of the unintuitive GUI of F-Secure. When I suspected F-Secure of being the culprit who wouldn’t let me play my new copy of Settlers II, I decided to disable real-time virus checking. Finding the off switch proved next to impossible. There were no simple place where I could just turn of that feature, so I had to dig deep inside F-Secures innards, and disable many features. Voila, it was done. And Settlers II worked.
But surely, I cannot run without virus protection for long. So I went inside the GUI again to enable it. Before I started the protection mode I had was “standard” or something like that. But after I retraced my steps, and enabled everything again it was “custom”. Okay… So how can I set it to a predefined level or mode? There is no way to do that! Rubbish…
F-Secure has a really good name in the industry, and I’m really disappointed with this products user friendliness and GUI. On the positive side of the product, it seems like it’s really good at tracking what’s going on with my laptop. And I also like the feature of security messages from F-Secure. I would however like to se that the tool integrated better with windows and didn’t take up as much CPU, also I’d like to see a much better GUI. I would almost consider the GUI of F-Secure a security hazard in it self.
So have I told F-Secure or my vendor of my grudges? In short - no. The vendor is Telehuset.no and their support partner is InfoCare.no. I received this laptop eary December 2006, and I contacted them early November 2006 in regards to some questions I had. After asking for updates mid December, and still no answer from them: I’ve lost all confidence in them. And I just pray that nothing happens to this kit. If I’m going to be in need of support on this machine I hope that it’ll be something that doesn’t require me to need help from telehuset.no or infocare.no, in other words something I can contact Lenovo directly on.
All in all my impressions are good. But like you can gather, I’m not impressed with the vendor and support partner, or the F-Secure GUI and CPU performance.
Appfuse tuning
Posted on January 4th, 2007 by arnljot.
Categories: appfuse, java.
This was a really interessting post regarding how to tune Appfuse.
Seems like it’s worth to keep in mind when building webapps on any framework stack, regardless of form size.
The post can be found here.