This is slightly off topic, one of our local radio stations has created an iPhone app (actually saying that just about every radio station has an app now!).  But the reason that I’m writing about it is because of the way they advertise it on the radio.  If I can remember correct it goes along the lines of “now you can take nnnnnnnnn with you where ever you are, with our new iPhone app”.

Now maybe I’m getting old or something but isnt the whole point of a local radio station (broadcasting on FM) that you can take them anywhere and you dont really need an iphone to do this…..

I will admit the app is pretty good and you can email the presenters and see what is currently playing and if you like it buy it straight from iTunes.  But the tag line of now you can take nnnnnn with you seems abit odd to me.

Anyway I promise that the next post (when ever that is) will actually be a useful one rather than a strange rant about a local radio stations advertising.

The BBC for example has the election calculator where you can spend all of, well lets be honest a minute or so.  Dragging bars around to find out what could happen at the election and how much percentage each party would need to get a majority.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8609989.stm

The Guardian has something very similar plus also a daily poll that they report on with great flash graphics

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/interactive/2010/apr/06/general-election-2010-polling

The times also has the daily poll on there site as well as well as an interactive map of what could happen

http://generalelection2010.timesonline.co.uk/#/Election05/Seats_Won

Then you land on the Suns webpage and what do you get a lovely text written these are the current poll percentages!

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/election2010/2925402/Suns-daily-YouGov-election-poll-April-10.html

Bad form from the The Sun I think!

Finally probably the best of them all, are you sick of the media outlets, borrowed hearing about expenses, cannot make up your mind which one to vote for because they all sound the same.  Well votematch.org.uk is the way to decide how your votes match with the major parties.

http://www.votematch.org.uk/

By trade I’m a tester and since university I’ve had to learn quick about testing both Functional and System Testing.  Testing is always seen as the poor mans development but I really enjoy getting new functionality and seeing if its possible to break it and making the quality of the final Product the best it can be.  But surely universities should be teaching about testing in more detail and explaining to undergraduates and post graduates what its all about.  I remember my university days and I think we touched on Black box and white box testing but it was only for a couple of lectures if that!

Maybe over the coming weeks I might right about my experience of testing and about how to become a better tester.  But I would love to encourage universities to look at testing as a main part of the course.

Doing a quick google and there are loads of website with some really interesting information, here are just a couple that I spotted with a quick look:

• http://www.testingbrain.com/
• http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.6942
• http://www.softwareqatest.com/
• http://www.softwaretestingclub.com/

Millennium Bug!

Wow has it really been 10 years since the Millennium Bug “hit” the world (or Y2K or Year2000 or armageddon!).  I remember all the news reports about airplanes were going to fall from the skys and Hospital equipment were going to blow up and attack the people they were suppose to be looking after.  I was at University doing my Computer Science degree at the time and it was really interesting to see how computers had taken over our lifes even then.  Could you image the problems if something like that hit now?  Our iPhones turn into Transformers and kill all there users!! Ok maybe abit out landish but some of the news reports at the time almost made you believe that would happen.

Alot of money was thrown at the problem to fix problems that did exist and the computer scientists must have done a good job review code to make sure that nothing would go wrong / fixing any problems that were spotted.  Something interesting to think about is when is the next problem like this and will we still remember the Millennium Bug then and just ignore it…. could that be a disaster waiting to happen.

If you were too young to remember the Millennium Bug have a good interesting read of it over at wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem

On that happy note Happy New Year to one and all (New Zealand is already in 2010!)

Snow

Every year it always surprises me that when thesnow falls ont the UK the whole country comes to a halt. Maybe I’m getting old and not remembering my younger years but I’m sure itnever use to be this bad! Could itbe the more technology we have the less ability we can cope with snow or are we just useless!

Sadly I suspect it’s probably the latter of the two of these . Although train technology seemed to let us down this time with the Eurostar trains, allegidly it was not the right snow that caused the trains to break down!! That’s almost as bad as leaves on the line. Hopefully they do find the right snow or fix the trains so everyone can get home for Christmas.

I’ve not seen how other countries deal with the snow but today I think three airports have been closed because of thanks…. How do they cope in Norway etc!

Oh well fingers crossed everyone can get where they need to be at this time of year. One piece of technogy not letting us down is broadband and the ability to work at home rather than fighting it out on the roads.

Merry Christmas to one and all

Wordpress MU

I’ve been looking at setting up an eshop on one of my wordpress accounts and for the downloadable content page for eshop it shows that there is a max upload size.  After alot of hunting around and googling (which I thought might have been easier to find!)

Turns out it was quick an easy find when you know where it is .  To change the max upload size that is listed in the eShop options is for wordpress mu go to the mu site admin section.  In the options section there is a max upload size and also a max blog size as well.  Changing these options changes the listed upload size on the eShop option page, but of course there is still the possible limit on the upload from the php.ini file.  This can sometimes be set by using a .htaccess file.

Subversion logo

I’m a user of a subversion server on a day to day basis and its probably the best free code repository that is out there.  It is fantastic to use and really simple to update and manage using things like Tortoise SVN.

But today I released that our repository had not been tagged to ensure that we could extract at certain levels easily.  I had a google and it looks like from windows its not easy to do the tag unless you have the working repository complete checked out.  When the size of the respository is probably 100MB and I do not usually have it all checked out its not good.

So after a bit more googling and thankfully I have a linux machine I have access to I found the command that makes creating tags really simply by running a single command that uses the servers own copy and creates the tag without checking out anything.


svn copy -r <revision> https://myrepro/project/trunk https://myrepro/project/tags/mytag -m "My Tag"


There must be a tool that can run this command on windows but I did not see one obviously.

PhpMyAdmin

What a nightmare… I’ve not really been paying much attention to the 100s of spam comments that I was getting so they had built up to a large amount.  So today I thought I would finally sort them out by just deleting all comments.  I think there was only one good comment anyway.

So I went to the standard Wordpress admin section and looked at the comments section, so I can view 20 at a time which means only being able to delete 20 at a time.  Surely there must be a better way!  The better way is phpMyAdmin, opening that up from my cpanel enabled me to quickly and easily delete all the rubbish comments that I had.

It does seem old that the wordpress admin section does not have a good spam filter built in.  At least then it might be possible to go to the Comments page and go delete all possible spam messages, similar to how an email client works.  At least that might help alittle towards the management of wordpress.  If I understood wordpress code myself / had the time I might think about doing it .