I’ve updated my ‘Essence of agile’ haiku page with a couple of new ones. I think I’m counting one of them as post-agile. I expect there will be more as I work through my own post-agile principles.
More Haiku
February 22nd, 2010Celerity update
February 22nd, 2010I’ve just updated my celerity gem and it seems to fix all of the warnings that were flooding my scripts before.
Performance is still a touch disappointing with our website, but the changes make it much more usable (and there’s an option to turn javascript off now according to the docs at http://rubyforge.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=34490).
Blog is back online (almost)
January 25th, 2010After moving my hosting, the basic content is back online, minus the last two posts. Sorry for the interruption!
Presstimates
January 6th, 2010Presstimate:
The number you give to get a manager off your back when you’re being hassled to give an estimate; Your best guess of what estimate of effort management will accept, not how long the work will actually take.
The declining value of testers (or signs that all that government debt is a problem)
December 10th, 2009I knew the market wasn’t quite what it was, but this job ad today surprised even me.
Â
Free half-day workshop with Rex Black in Melbourne, Sydney
December 2nd, 2009ANZTB (http://www.anztb.org/) are hosting a free half day workshop with Rex Black on Risk-based testing. The workshop is on December 8th in Sydney and December 9th in Melbourne. Contact Karen Haig at info@anztb.org if you’re interested in attending. As of this morning there were 17 places left for Melbourne.
Employee IP rights in Australia
November 19th, 2009I’ve had past conversations with others on the topic of intellectual property rights of employees in Australia, and had always been under the belief that pretty much anything I did in a creative capacity would belong to my employer. Today I was pointed to this article, which suggests that’s not really the case.
Of course, for simplicity and to avoid any legal action, most people will still take care to separate their entrepreneurial activities as much as possible from their work. Colleagues frequently leave their current role to go off and fully develop something they’ve been working on secretly.
So if you’re interested, this article has a good discussion of the state of play for employees, employers and their IP rights -Â
http://www.findlawaustralia.com.au/articles/default.asp?task=read&id=16492&site=CN
I'm still on holiday…
October 30th, 2009Things should resume soon. I’m touring the Korean countryside and should be back at work mid-November. Until then, expect this site to be quiet. You can follow updates at http://www.twitter.com/xflibbleinkorea/, or http://www.quinert.com/korea/
At last, the recognition I have always craved!
September 22nd, 2009When filling out my tax return this year, I was pleased to see that finally, I am no longer ‘IT Analyst – Other’.
I am now a Software Tester!
About time.
Something to try if Squirrel SQL stops working on Windows
August 12th, 2009I’ve been using the free Squirrel SQL SQL client under windows for a month or so now. It’s a good tool, though somewhat annoying to get working. Today it stopped working.  The loading splash screen would display, the progress bar would get about halfway through and then Squirrel would exit without any messages. I had no desire to recreate all of my connections or reinstall the various drivers again, so I really wanted to fix my installation.
After trolling through forums, there was a suggestion that the problem may have been preferences related. No precise solution was offered, but I began to experiment to see if this was my problem.
First, I found the preferences folder, which lives in Windows’ documents and settings folder (eg. c:\Documents and Settings\). Inside this folder will be Squirrel’s preferences folder, named ‘.squirrel-sql’. I renamed this and restarted Squirrel. Things looked good with the application starting, so it seemed I was looking in the right place. In order to troubleshoot further, I wanted to restore the state of the application, so I renamed the new preferences folder that Squirrel had created and tried to rename the old preferences folder.
No luck! Windows didn’t like me trying to rename the folder back to its original name. I ran Squirrel again, which caused Squirrel to create another preferences folder. I now had three folders – squirrel-sql.old, squirrel-sql.new and the current preferences folder ‘.squirrel-sql’. I opened the old preferences folder, copied the contents and pasted them into the ‘.squirrel-sql’ folder.
Looking inside the preferences folder, I could two folders ‘plugins’, and ‘logs’. I could also see a number of xml files. Now that I had found the broad area I needed to investigate, I wanted to only change one element at a time. As my main objective in resurrecting Squirrel was to not lose my database connections and plugins, I ignored the xml files that were related to these, and looked at the most interestingly named file – ‘prefs.xml’. I renamed this to ‘prefs.xml.bak’ and restarted Squirrel. Still no joy, so I closed Squirrel and restored the original name of the file..
I repeated this step for ’sql_history.xml’, thinking that this file might be dynamic enough to cause problems. Again, Squirrel failed to start correctly.
Next, was a file named SQLAliases23_treeStructure.xml. Suspiciously, this was zero bytes, which seemed odd for something that looked like it was supposed to contain some kind of data structure. I added a ‘.bak’ extension to this and restarted Squirrel again.
Success! I closed Squrrel and I could see that it had recreated the SQLAliases treeStructure file again, this time with data. I restarted Squirrel one more time to make sure that there wasn’t some recurring problem with my database aliases, and it happily started again with my connections and query history intact.