School award for me. Huh?

Today my parents and I received separate letters inviting us to an awards ceremony at school. Okay, I was never a great student but (I think) that I wasn't that bad either. The weird thing is that I have not been registered there since Dec. 2003. I think that my diploma says that I am "class of 2004", but I never took anything there in that year. Did they some how screw something up that there is over a year of delay between me last being there and getting an award? My guess is that it's a mistake, but I'll call tomorrow and figure out what it's about.

Update: I called and I got on the "dean's list" or something like that. If you get 8.0+ for 2003-2004 then you should have received the letter. I think that I just squeaked an eight by rounding, but that's alright by me.

The good, the bad, and the inconsequential

They replaced our toilet and shower head and added a "window restrictor" like I mentioned before. If you can guess from the title there are some high points and some low. We got a toilet like Ryan had mentioned where it's got a high pressure plastic tank and goes "boouh" every time it flushes. It sort of sounds like a far away sonic boom. From now on I think that I will refer to it as the poo canon vortex.

The bad thing is the shower head. I'm all for being good to the env., but I still have to get clean. I went for a shower last night and after 20 minutes of frustration I left the shower slightly damp. It wasn't a pleasant experience. I am going to get a new one and swap it out asap to something that I can actually clean myself with. *grumble*

The other thing that they installed was a "window restrictor" was was a little piece of metal screwed on with an allen key so that you can open the window 4 inches. Now in the summer I want to open the window all the way so I took it off. I'll replace it before we move out. I couldn't understand why they would put those on windows "not over the balcony". I thought that it was to prevent people from jumping which is dumb because they can just go out to the balcony. My mom suggested that it's probably to prevent kids from falling out by accident (which makes sense).

Now off to waffles and shower head shopping.

40 users != the same user 40 times

If you are going to do load testing it doesn't make any sense to generate a load that doesn't follow actual use. It's dumb and it'll point you in the wrong direction. Garbage in, garbage out.

We ran into that when doing some load testing with jmeter. At first we didn't know how to make our thread group use different logins so we just hard coded one login and created a bunch of threads. Not how the app will be used and performance was less than happy for me. Acceptable but not happy.

So today and yesterday I figured out 2 different ways (other than one suggested to me by Peter) to simulate different logins. The first was to add a user defined variables, add two rows (login / password) and just create more columns of users. This was okay for about 2-15 users, but as you create more the columns keep on shrinking and it's really ugly (bug). The second was to get CSVRead working (which was a bi%ch) and just have a file with user names and passwords. Much nicer and cleaner. ;-)

Aside: if anyone is having troubles with JMeter __CSVRead function, to get it working for me I had to take out the spaces between the function arguments (after the commas). *sigh*

Now with a more realistic load our app is handling a much better load and we are able to take a look at the real places in our app that are bottlenecks.

Next steps are to model different realistic situations so there are no surprises.

It's about knowing the tools

One of the things that is becoming more apparent to me all the time is how important it is to know the tools that are out there and how to use them. Just about everything that I have to do someone else has had to do before and has built a tool to help them out with it.

Right now I am learning how to use JMeter. Everything that I want to do with it (so far) has been done before, I just have to figure out how to use it. One thing about it though, it's definitely a developer made for developers (god, I hate swing).

The same is true for the other tools that I use. The trick is figuring out how to use them. That's the first trick. The second one is knowing what other tools are out there. The third trick is knowing when to use what tool. Now I'm not saying that I know all the answers, but I am definitely trying to figure it out as fast as possible.

Nice house in Carp

If anyone is looking for a house in Carp, I hear that there is a nice one for sale now. Tell all your friends. ;-)

Go Firefox go!

It looks like people are continuing to switch to Firefox. Which I love because there isn't many days that I don't curse IE. Mostly lately I've been cursing IE because it allows multiple form submissions while Firefox seems to guard against this on the client side. Nice.

I never knew you could do that with js

I found a site about javascript that had some cool things that I didn't know you could do. I always assumed that you had to do js "The separated way", I never knew that you could beyond that. Neat.

It's hard to turn your brain off...

One of the things that I find hardest to do is to turn off my brain when I get home. I keep on thinking about the problems that I have been dealing with at work. I do research at home. As I am trying to fall asleep, I keep on thinking on how I can change the code to fix open bugs, how to track bugs better, how to improve the build process, what ways our users could break the app by weird work flows and guard for that...

Ahhhggghh!

Maybe if I had a boring job I would be able to leave work at work, but I like what I am doing. *sigh* Ah well. I'm going to go back to bed and see if I can fall asleep this time. :-|

Wow

While watching The Hour (great show) they showed a commercial that they won't show in 47 (?) US states. It's by a group that wants to stop landmines world wide. Watch it.

I just think that people in developed nations have no clue what it would be like to live in a place like that. I have no idea. Still, I don't understand how anyone can support landmines.

Ewww...

Today I found out something gross. The worlds most expensive coffee is recycled through a cat. Nasty. Worse than coffee beans puked up by wild weasels. *sigh* I guess people will eat / buy just about anything.

Update: I changed the links so they default to English. My bad.

Why bother?

I often wonder about people when reading a how to and they set a env variable, and then the next step they do something but don't use the var!!! What's the point? *sigh* Here's what I am talking about:

==> set MAVEN_HOME Env variable:
[MAVEN_HOME=C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Maven 1.0.2]

==> Add Maven bin directory to path:
[Path=C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Maven 1.0.2\bin;]