Steve Trefethen's Weblog

TestComplete Keyword Testing Book

Steve — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:34:00 -0800

Over the past 6 months or so I’ve been working on writing a courseware book for TestComplete focused on Keyword Testing, a new feature as of v7. The book provides a detailed introduction to the TestComplete IDE with step-by-step examples of using the Keyword Testing scenarios covering a wide range of topics including Data Driven testing, Web GUI testing, Stores & Checkpoints and many others.

Falafel Software is now offering training based on the book which you can register for here.

Borland Memorabilia Auction for Haitian Relief

Steve — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:18:48 -0800

My friends on the Delphi Team here in Scotts Valley have undertaken what I think is a great cause to auction some Borland memorabilia where the proceeds going to Haitian relief through the Clinton Bush Haitian Fund.

For more details click here.

[Update Feb 2, 2010] I’ve added my autographed copy of Danny Thorpe’s Delphi Component Design to the auction, it should be up in the next day or so.

Adsense appeal

Steve — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 01:30:00 -0800

I rarely see blogger’s, at least the one’s I read, talk about their Adsense revenue so I thought I’d throw this out there and see where it goes.

I’ve been blogging on my own domain since October of 2006 and one of the things I’ve experimented with is Google’s Adsense. I say experimented because the $1.80 in average daily earnings isn’t going to change my lifestyle anytime soon and I consider it a good day when it covers the cost of a mocha. When I think about it, Adsense is pure genius. Full stop.

Google didn’t do anything other than offer a tiny (and unknown) fraction of money it earns from these ad placements. Starting last May, through a new feature in Google Analytics, I started to gain some insight as to specifically which pages generate the most revenue and I can tell you it’s not what I typically what I blog about, at all.

In fact, if I wrote based on “Adsense appeal” I’d hardly ever write about programming or development. Looking at my “top” Adsense pages they are unrelated, detours I’ve taken along the way that have garnered Google Juice for some reason or other. I now believe Google could write a tool that would predict Adsense revenue for blogs posts in real time as they’re being written. Perhaps they could even auction posts while they’re being written and with the right feedback guide writer’s to higher revenue by suggesting links and images. I’m sure all this is possible yet seemingly corrupt or something close to it.

I wonder what the saturation rate of Adsense is throughout the web? I’d think Google must have an idea and therefore must know when they’re going to “hit a wall” in terms of being able to grow their Adsense revenue. On a different note, I’d love to know what, if any impact Twitter has had on Adsense revenue since many of the bloggers I used to follow have more or less given up on blogging and now write 140 characters or less which simply doesn’t interest me.

	Page Impressions	Clicks	Page CTR	Page eCPM	Earnings
Total	1,236,418	11,505			$2,174.03
Average	1024	9	0.93%	$1.76	$1.80

Based on data from Analytics I made a few changes back in November that seem to have boosted my ad revenue over the past three months to $3.03 daily and in November, I made $168.54 my highest monthly total ever. Here’s a peek at some of the numbers (April 30th is around the time Analytics started tracking Adsense):

Do you use Adsense? If so, what are your numbers and what do you make of these?

Google Calendar on a Simile Timeline

Steve — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:02:08 -0800

At Falafel Software Google calendar is a core tool used by company. I’ve been working to leverage the data calendar in a number of interesting ways such as in the DIV below rendered using JavaScript based on calendar data from Falafel training calendar displaying upcoming training events over the next 120 days.

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I’ve mentioned the above example before from Google’s playground and I found another example which uses MIT’s Simile project Timeline control to render calendar data. As you can see from that example it’s not actually working so I thought I’d post an update with some changes I made to get it working. Here is my example. I’ve made changes to get the import of the data working though there remains a number of other improvements that could be made. I’ve yet to determine if this timeline view is really all that useful and haven’t settled on a view that I really like. At any rate, here is the code, again take a look at the source for my example above for a complete working page.

var gEventSource;
 
function loadGDataCallback(json) {
  var entries = json.feed.entry;
  var timelinerEntries = [];
  for (var i = 0; i < entries.length; ++i) {
    var entry = entries[i];
    if(entry["gd$when"] == null) continue;
    var when = entry["gd$when"][0];
    var start = convertFromGDataDate(when.startTime);
    var end = convertFromGDataDate(when.endTime);
    var webContent = null;
    var links = entry.link;
    for (var j = 0; j < links.length; ++j) {
      if (links[j].rel == "alternate") {
        webContent = links[j];
        break;
      }
    }
    var title = entry.title.$t;
    var link = entry.link;
    var icon = entry.link[0].href;

    var description = '<img src="' + link + '">';
    timelinerEntries.push(new Timeline.DefaultEventSource.Event(
      start,
      end, // end - when not set, event displayed with icon (looks better)
      null, // latestStart
      null, // latestEnd
      false, // not isDuration
      entry.title.$t,
      entry.content.$t,
      icon, // image
      entry.link[0].href, // link - destination when clicking on title
      entry.link[0].href,
      undefined, // color
      undefined  // textColor
    ));
  }
  gEventSource.addMany(timelinerEntries);
};
 
function zeroPad(n) {
  if (n < 0) throw new Error('n is negative');
  return (n < 10) ? '0' + n : n;
}
 
function convertToGDataDate(/*Date*/ date) {
  return date.getFullYear() + '-' +
         zeroPad(date.getMonth() + 1) + '-' +
         zeroPad(date.getDate());
}
 
function convertFromGDataDate(/*string<YYYY-MM-DD>*/ date) {
  var match = date.match(/(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2})/);
  return new Date(parseInt(match[1], 10), parseInt(match[2], 10) - 1, parseInt(match[3], 10));
}
 
function onLoad() {
  gEventSource = new Timeline.DefaultEventSource();
 
  var theme = Timeline.ClassicTheme.create();
  theme.event.bubble.width = 320;
  theme.event.bubble.height = 180;
 
  // centering the timeline three months previous makes it look nicer on load
  var threeDaysFromNow =
      new Date(((new Date).getTime()) + 3 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
  var bandInfos = [
    Timeline.createBandInfo({
        eventSource:    gEventSource,
        date:           threeDaysFromNow,
        width:          "40%", 
        intervalUnit:   Timeline.DateTime.WEEK, 
        intervalPixels: 300,
        theme:          theme
    }),
    Timeline.createBandInfo({
        eventSource:    gEventSource,
        date:           threeDaysFromNow,
        width:          "60%", 
        intervalUnit:   Timeline.DateTime.MONTH, 
        intervalPixels: 550,
        theme:          theme
    })
/*    ,
    Timeline.createBandInfo({
        showEventText:  false,
        trackHeight:    0.5,
        trackGap:       0.2,
        eventSource:    gEventSource,
        date:           threeDaysFromNow,
        width:          "10%", 
        intervalUnit:   Timeline.DateTime.YEAR, 
        intervalPixels: 200
    })
*/    
  ];
  bandInfos[1].syncWith = 0;
  bandInfos[1].highlight = true;
/*  
  bandInfos[2].syncWith = 0;
  bandInfos[2].highlight = true;
*/  
  tl = Timeline.create(document.getElementById("my-timeline"), bandInfos);
 
  // Atom feed from a Google calendar
  var feedUrl = "http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/4u13qtkl3bcpao0ofgod94s960@group.calendar.google.com/public/full";
 
  var startDate = new Date((new Date).getDate());
  var endDate = new Date(((new Date).getTime()) + 3 * 30 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);

 
  var getParams = '?start-min=' + convertToGDataDate(startDate) +
                  '&start-max=' + convertToGDataDate(endDate) +
                  '&alt=json-in-script' +
                  '&callback=loadGDataCallback' +
                  '&max-results=5000'; // choose 5000 as an arbitrarily large number
  feedUrl += getParams;
  var scriptTag = document.createElement('script');
  scriptTag.src = feedUrl;
  document.body.appendChild(scriptTag);
}
 
var resizeTimerID = null;
function onResize() {
    if (resizeTimerID == null) {
        resizeTimerID = window.setTimeout(function() {
            resizeTimerID = null;
            tl.layout();
        }, 500);
    }
}

I’m interested in any other ways people are using Google’s calendar data so let me know if you done/seen anything cool!

Moving from dasBlog to BlogEngine.NET

Steve — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:11:00 -0800

In addition to moving this blog to BlogEngine.NET (BE) I've recently moved my personal home blog from dasBlog to BE and I’ve had to lookup the steps to export/import blog data more than once so I decided to capture them once and for all here. The process shouldn’t really take more then about 30 minutes to complete.

Download Paul Van Brenk’s dasBlog BlogML importer
Run the importer to convert your dasBlog content to BlogML. I ran into a few issues trying to import 1500+ comments from my blog so it required a bit of debugging/tweaking.
Download BlogEngine.NET and set it up either locally on an ISP (importing can work with either)

To avoid a Username/Password error upon importing into BlogEngine.NET add the line indicated below to BlogEngine.NET\api\BlogImporter.asmx (solution originally sourced from this work item on CodePlex)

[SoapHeader("AuthenticationHeader")]
[WebMethod]
public string AddPost(ImportPost import, string previousUrl, bool removeDuplicate) {
    if (!IsAuthenticated())
        throw new InvalidOperationException("Wrong credentials");

    ...snip...

    Post post = new Post();
    post.Title = import.Title;
    post.Author = import.Author;
    post.DateCreated = import.PostDate;
    post.DateModified = import.PostDate; // or "DateTime.Now"  <- LINE ADDED
    post.Content = import.Content;

Log into your BE install click on the Settings tab and scroll all the way to the bottom to view the Import & Export section.
Click the Import button which launches the Blog Importer tool that looks like this:
Enter the name of your BlogML XML file, the URL to your BE blog and your credentials
Click Import
Hit your BE blog and enjoy your imported data!

Btw, here is a post to a few other items I had to address to really get my blog moved over.

A few minor BlogEngine.NET TextBox widget improvements

Steve — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:14:12 -0800

I really like the ability to use multiple widget zones, it's a great feature that offers a lot of flexibility WRT theming. There is one drawback which is BE makes some assumptions and places hardcoded markup in the TextBox widget which is not desired. I'd like to see two minor changes along these lines which I think would help improve the usability. First, WidgetBase.cs has an assumption that if the title of the widget is not displayed a gets inserted which IMO is not desired. Second, the tinyMCE editor used by the TextBox widget wraps all content in <p> tags which is also not desired IMO. I like to use the TextBox widget to place any markup on my theme including <script> blocks therefore in WidgetBase.cs I'd like to see the following change:

if (ShowTitle)
  sb.Append("<h4>" + Title + "</h4>");
else
  sb.Append("<br />");

to…

if (ShowTitle)
  sb.Append("<h4>" + Title + "</h4>");

And in Widgets\TextBox\edit.ascx add the option for TinyMCE for:

forced_root_block: false

I’ve already made these changes for my blog which makes the TextBox widget much more useful. I now have an editable sidebar, banner region, page footer and footer script block.

If you’d like to join a conversation on the topic I’ve posted this to CodePlex.

Update on my switch to BlogEngine.NET

Steve — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:10:27 -0800

While I updated my blog awhile ago I thought I post an update as to how my conversion when and mention a few of the things I had to do to convert. BlogEngine.NET (BE) has been a refreshing break from dasBlog and the ASP.NET v2.0 design of BE is so much more enjoyable to work with. Porting my theme was a no brainer and while I had several hurdles in order to actually move it has been well work the effort.

For example, my blog now loads much faster, pages are now compressed, and login problems are a thing of the past among many other benefits. Some of the issues I faced in the move included:

Moving my posts and comments
Preserving the dasBlog style title-based links to my posts
Preserving non-post articles I’d written
Porting dasBlog’s macro for quickly linking text to a BE Extension

I first tried using a dasBlog provider but eventually decided against that approach as it would have prolonged the aforementioned comment loss issue. Eventually, I settled on a minor change to the slug (URL) handling for BE coupled with a dasBlog URL rewriter which handles various redirects and any referrer related issues as I find them. Additionally, I added the blocked IP logic from dasBlog to BE allowing me to cut down on spam attacks (at least a little).

Selenium Training

Steve — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:46:00 -0800

If you are or would be interested in training on the Open Source web testing tool called Selenium please leave a comment or contact me and let me know some specifics about what type of training you’re looking for. I’m focused on .NET development and would be looking at covering Selenium from a .NET perspective.

Switch back to Yahoo Mail classic

Steve — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 09:48:00 -0800

Since I still get tons of email and comments on this post, and recently received yet another email about it I decided to post this hint about switching back to Yahoo Mail Classic:

Browse to Yahoo Mail and use the Options drop down on the right side of the browser window:

Of course this is only current as of the time of this posting but it works for now. Sadly, I'm no longer using Yahoo these days.

HTH

Setting the version number for a CCNET build

Steve — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:28:00 -0800

I’m working on a custom EDI solution and generally build CCNet from the command line. Recently, I wanted to up date the build of CCNet and wanted to be sure the version number was set correctly. Since I’ve had to look this up a few times, as I never seem to recall the steps I thought I’d post them here.

This assumes you have a complete SVN tree of CCNET on your machine.

Start a CMD prompt
CD to the directory where CCNET is located
Edit ccnet.build and change the following line setting the “value” attribute to the desired version # (ex: 1.4.4):

<property name="CCNetLabel" value="1.4.4" overwrite="false" />
Build from the command line using the createAssemblyInfo target:

b.bat createAssemblyInfo
From the command line using the all target:

b.bat compile

This will build ccnet with the specified version number.