Patrick Lightbody's personal blog
After several days of playing with Posterous and Tumblr I’ve decided to move my blog over to http://blog.lightbody.net (powered by Tumbler).
If you are one of the few RSS subscribers still watching this blog (which would surprise me since it’s been ~2 years since my last post), it should auto switch over to the new blog since I’m using FeedBurner.
However, be on the lookout if you don’t see more regular updates because I really do fully intend to blog quite a bit more starting now 
I was forwarded a great article on advanced Selenium techniques. Worth a read for anyone who uses Selenium. While the article focuses on ExtJS, the lessons in there can be applied for any website. Building Java (or perl or python, etc)-based components that represent the logical page is a technique I’ve used in the past, but it’s great to see it written up so clearly!
I’m looking to run some un-verified scripts (written in a yet-to-be-determined language, but needs to be Java-based, so JRuby, Groovy, Jython, BeanShell, etc are all candidates). I want these scripts to be able to do some things and restricted from doing other things.
Normally, I’d just go use Java’s SecurityManager and be done with it. That’s pretty simple and lets me restrict file and network access, the ability to shutdown the JVM, etc. And that will work well for the high level stuff I want to block off.
But there is some stuff I want to allow, but only via my custom API/library that I’ve providing. For example, I don’t want to allow direct network access to open up a URLConnection to yahoo.com, but I am OK if it is done with MyURLConnection. That is – there is a set of methods/classes that I want to allow and then everything else I want to be off limits.
I don’t believe this type of security can be done with the standard Java security model, but perhaps it can. I don’t have a specific requirement for performance or flexibility in the scripting language itself (the scripts will be simple procedural calls to my API with basic looping/branching). So even a “large” overhead that checks a security check on every reflection call is fine by me.
Suggestions?
Here is a running list of all the bugs I’ve come across with IntelliJ IDEA 8 so far. Some of these may actually be thoughtful changes from the behavior in version 7, but they are annoying so I’m calling them bugs
There are a lot more and I’ll update this list as I find them. This was just the ones I wrote down while coding this morning. Got some of your own to share? Add them in the comments and I’ll roll ‘em in here to share with the JetBrains team.
A great article by Eric Karjaluoto on all the difficulties of a startup. Tons of great reasons to avoid doing a startup, but at the end of the day, this is what it all comes back to:
With all of that said, I have to emphasize that little of this really matters. If you’re inclined to start a startup, nothing anyone says will stand in your way, nor, should it. If you have the bug to make something, it’s impossible to shake, and in my mind can be one of the best life experiences you can have.
[From Why your web startup will fail]
I’m a huge fan of Balsamiq, which also is a self-described “Micro ISV“. One of the things they do well is communicate everything they are up to on their blog. Early on I decided I’d leave the official BrowserMob blog a bit more sparse so that it only had content that my customers cared about. The rest (marketing ideas, business status updates, etc) would be left for this blog. This is one of those posts
A friend of mine let me know that Google recently did a toolbar PageRank update, which is the best place to get a basic idea of where your page rank sits. This got us talking about simple SEO optimization tricks I could do that wouldn’t take all my time. This is important for a micro ISV like my company.
The lists of things I have already done or plan to do for BrowserMob are:
These are the basics I can do quickly. Beyond that, the real push towards a higher PageRank will only happen with real work. My first guest post in support of BrowserMob was recently posted on Ajaxian. This drove 10X more traffic and signups to the site when compared to our last peak day.
More importantly, it’s now one of the most authoritative documents on the search “Ajax load testing”. While it doesn’t link to my business, it offers credibility that I know what I’m talking about (btw – awesome to see Dojo masters enjoyed the article). It also links to my business, so someone who is really interested in the subject not only learns about it, but now can also choose to check out BrowserMob if they want.
Going forward, my marketing plan will involve a lot of this type of activity. I want to get the word out there that load testing can be easier and more affordable. I’ll continue writing articles on the BrowserMob blog, but I’ll also be writing most guest posts on popular sites. I’ll also be asking industry experts to blog their thoughts on the business, product, and idea on their blog (good or bad).
Hat tip: many of these ideas formulated after I read Balsamiq’s excellent post on startup marketing advice.
I just posted on the BrowserMob blog my thoughts on how 2009 will turn out for the Selenium world. This is in addition to a new blog post on the Selenium blog about our short term plans to get a 1.0 release out.
Please take a look and let us know what you think.
One of the little touches I added to Able, which came from code originally in BrowserMob, was a nice little JDK logging formatter. It is designed to work with modern IDEs (IntelliJ IDEA being my personal favorite) and their ability to understand shorthand notation for classes.
As I was building BrowserMob, I was getting irritated by long package and class names as well as the fact that my log messages weren’t lined up nicely. For example, I’d get:
INFO 12/29 19:26:28 org.directwebremoting.impl.StartupUtil - Starting: DwrGuiceServlet v3.0.0.109.dev
INFO 12/29 19:26:31 com.browsermob.stripes.WelcomeActionBean - Some log message
INFO 12/29 19:26:37 com.browsermob.stripes.WelcomeActionBean - Some log message
I tried a simple formatter that truncated the class name, but the result wasn’t very helpful, since the class name (usually the most important part) would get cut off when the package name was too long:
INFO 12/29 19:26:28 org.directwebremotin - Starting: DwrGuiceServlet v3.0.0.109.dev
INFO 12/29 19:26:31 com.browsermob.strip - Some log message
INFO 12/29 19:26:37 com.browsermob.strip - Some log message
That was when I realized that often the package name wasn’t that useful, especially since they were often very predictable and unique even in a compact state. For example, in the past developers I have worked with would often write “n.s.s.c.StripesFilter” as a short hand for “net.sourceforge.stripes.controller.StripesFilter”. So why not use this for logging too? The result was much easier on the eyes:
INFO 12/29 19:26:28 o.d.i.StartupUtil - Starting: DwrGuiceServlet v3.0.0.109.dev
INFO 12/29 19:26:31 c.b.s.WelcomeAction~ - Some log message
INFO 12/29 19:26:37 c.b.s.WelcomeAction~ - Some log message
Basically, the packages would get cut down to the first letter of each sub-package. If the class name pushes the whole thing beyond 20 characters, then a tilde is added to indicate the name is longer than could fit.
The nice thing about this is that it works beautifully with modern IDEs. I can copy the text “c.b.s.WelcomeAction” and locate that string in IDEA and it’ll know what I mean:
If you want to use this formatter, you can find the code here in the Able source repository. It could probably get some performance improvements, such as some simple memoization, so feel free to send any tweaks you make my way. Do you have any neat tricks you do with logging? If so, please share in the comments!