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Wow - this is embarrassing. Another one of those “I can’t believe I haven’t posted in so long” posts. But really, it’s been 5 months since my last post, and 7 months since my second to last one. Ouch!

That is going to change, especially because I little side project I have going on involves a lot of blogging…

As for what I’ve been up to…

• Got married a few weeks ago
• Sold my company earlier this year (I don’t think I ever actually blogged that - whoops!)
• Been traveling a lot to Boston (50% of the time)
• Speaking at various conferences (The Ajax Experience, STPCon, StarWest, etc) - mostly QA-related stuff
• Not too involved in Struts and OpenSymphony, but I hope to be again soon
• Still fairly involved in OpenQA

I think that’s it. More posts soon…

Forget all the whizbang stuff… Stacks, Dock, Time Machine, etc. And look past the fact that stupid Apple has decided to abort Java on OS X. As someone who travels a lot and loves his basic Dell keybaord, this is what I’ve been waiting for:

Yup - that’s right. OS X will finally automatically change the keymapping for me between my laptop keyboard and my desk keyboard. Considering all the travel (and lounging on the couch) I do right now, I have probably gone in to this preferences panel over a thousand times just this year. Never again!

One of my very good friends, Kevin, as well as my old CEO back from my Spoke days, work at a company called MerchantCircle. Kevin recently opined about how the focus of MerchantCircle relates to the upcoming presidential election.

First, a quick note about what MerchantCircle does: think “social networks for businesses” and you kind of have the idea. Instead of focussing on the consumer, like review sites like Yelp and CitySearch do, they focus on the business. Businesses can “partner” with other businesses for coupon deals (think “friends”), create their own home page, (think “profile page”), and provide an official response for praise or criticism of their business.

I find his points interesting specifically because of the waves Fred Thompson is now making as he begins his candidacy. Fred Thompson is claiming that he, like Howard Dean, will use the power of the internet and social networks, to run a more effective campaign for less.

So far we’ve heard about Barrack’s MySpace page, but I don’t really think things like that are a good demonstration of how Web 2.0 can be utilized to improve our democracy. MySpace is, afterall, mostly about kids who can’t even vote, or stoners who likely won’t.

However, more focussed communities like MerchantCirlce (small businesses), Digg (high tech workers, perhaps?), or online schools (ie: University of Phoenix, etc) might provide an excellent conduit for engaging in deep, thought-provoking exchanges about specific issues.

Forget town halls, virtual town halls, or even debates - they are too general and end up suffering from the “law of diminishing returns” because their audiences cover such a broad base. I think engaging with a specific community about needs specific to them, on a mass scale, would really open our eyes up about the candidates. I would love to see an online chat with Digg users, or a forum for MerchantCircle users to ask tough questions.

Update: MerchantCircle just recently celebrated it’s one-year birthday. Congrats to them. I love the idea of bridging local small businesses and the vastness of the internet.

My only complaint would be that they focus on the business owner and not the consumer, but that’s not really a valid complaint because they readily point out to and integrate consumer-focussing sites, ending up being a companion to them more than a competitor.

I recently upgraded the OpenQA forums over to Jive Forums 5.5 (beta) and I am very impressed. We were using a pretty old version (4.2.1) and the difference was like night and day.

The upgrade

The upgrade was as simple as it can get

1. Copy the new war file over the old one.
2. Open the forums in the browser.
3. Enter the administrators password to initiate the upgrade process.
4. See a nice little list of steps that need to be completed, along with estimated times for each task.
5. Done.

It really was that easy. Everyone should build software this good. The only other company I know that has a nice upgrade framework is Atlassian, and theirs is nowhere as elegant, nor does it provide the visual feedback that inspires confidence in a process that inherently introduces risk.

Reply by watches

By far my favorite new feature. Previously, the OpenQA forums have been using Jive’s unique “email gateway” feature that allowed a mailing list and a forum to stay in sync. This let users choose the style of message delivery (web, RSS, forum watch email, mailing list membership, etc).

I chose RSS+web because I get enough email as is and hate being subscribed to random lists that I can’t remember how to jump off of. Plus, I like knowing that my membership is part of the forums, which gets you little things like “reward points” for answering questions (something which obviously email doesn’t have).

But whenever I traveled, I missed email. I wanted to be able to reply to the threads I saw in my RSS reader while offline in an airplane, but I couldn’t. In the latest version of forums, Jive introduced a killer new feature: reply to watches by email.

Now I can watch my feeds in RSS, but when I know I’ll be on the road coming up, I can turn on my email watches to the forum. Then, as each message comes in, I can reply to the watch notification itself and my response will automatically show up in the forums (and get sent out to the mailing lists, thanks to the gateway we’re using). To me, this is the best of both worlds, and Jive did an excellent job with it.

My only complaint is that the subject the watches come in with is unique every time. This is due to how they sync up replies with threads. The downside of this is that my watch notifications won’t get grouped together as a thread in my mail client, so it’s a bit harder to follow conversations. I also had to modify the watch templates to include the entire thread instead of just the new message. This gives the required context that one would expect if they wanted to reply by email.

Wiki formatting

The new forums also allow for common formatting, often found in wikis, to be used in forum posts. This is nice because now I can format new replies by email and I know it’ll look good for both audiences: text (email) and HTML (web and RSS).

But what I was really impressed with was the customizations. Jive supports a link syntax similar to Confluence (Atlassian’s wiki) that uses square brackets. Unfortunately, the OpenQA forums use square brackets a lot due to the fact that people post xpath expressions all the time, such as

//div[contains(@id, 'border-box')]

This, of course, produced some bogus links. What impressed me is that I could drill in to the wiki formatting settings and individually turn off link support. Even more: when I turned it off, it no longer appeared in the help guide! That’s the way software should work all the time.

Other stuff

THe OpenSymphony Forums have had integrated web chat support for a while, written by yours truly. However, the OpenQA ones never did because I didn’t want to maintain the code going forward. While it isn’t quite as nice as the OpenSymphony forums, Jive Forums now comes with an integrated web-based group chat. This is a great way to host meetings and to help people out in real time.

The features I’m missing from the OpenSymphony forums are:

• Ability for chat transcripts to be easily searchable and accessible. I did this by posting the chat log to the forums every 24 hours, but other solutions are possible too
• When in the forums, being notified that activity is happening in the forums (new message posted). I did this with a “chatbot” in the OS forums, but again, this could be done other ways, such as XMPP watches, etc.
• Tying chat rooms and forums together such that the people in the associated chat room are listed along side the forum as “now chatting”. Even better, their expertise level (reward points) are shown, so people can immediately tell if experts are ready to help them in real time.

The good news is that a lot of this stuff will likely end up in some sort of integration between Openfire and Clearspace (think of it as Forums + blogs + wiki + content management + etc).

Overall, Forums 5.5 was a great improvement. I’m looking forward to Clearspace, when hopefully my little nit-picks will be addressed

Speeding up Apple Mail:

bq..
Apparently this is a well known performance boost for Apple Mail users - I wish I'd known about it sooner! I'd been having all sorts of problems with performance and Mail.app hanging, and this simple trick has it like new again.

I have to wonder why such a thing isn't done by Mail.app itself given how bad it did get over the course of the last 6 months.

(Via Brett Porter.)

Worked great for me. Pretty amazing little trick!

Testing Ajax?:

I ran across an interesting article entitled “Improving Test Coverage of Ajax Applications” in which the author likens the challenges of testing Ajax applications to that of testing traditional GUI apps. While some newer frameworks (like Selenium) are positioned to actually verify Ajax-ian behavior, they can lead to a false sense of security because of the complexity associated with the combination of actions in using a GUI.

(Via Test Early.)

I posted the following comment to the entry above, but I think it important enough that I bring it up here as well. I’d be interested in hearing about ideas that can help make expressing tests for AJAX applications easier:

Absolutely - Selenium and other tools are now available to help, but there are still real challenges in describing these new types of interactions. The old-school tools (SilkTest, QTP, HttpUnit, etc) either didn’t understand the concept of multiple user transactions in a single page or didn’t have the technology to deal with AJAX at all.

Selenium helps with the AJAX/multiple user transactions issue, but it still requires testers to express the desire to “click on button X, wait for Y to appear” in their tests. I think there is still room to make this easier to understand and test against, possibly by integrating with AJAX and/or web-based frameworks, and thereby understanding the interactions at a deeper level.

Anyone know if a good Mac client exists for MusicBrainz? The only one I’ve found is iEatBrainz, but it runs like crap on an Intel mac because it isn’t a Universal Binary.

Any other good solutions for dealing with large amounts of poorly tagged audio files?

I don’t think I’ll be leaving my living room for a while…

The last two episodes haven’t been uploaded to iTunes - anyone know if FOX and Apple have suddenly decided to stop their partnership?

I am a big Apple fan, but I have to admit that it’s pretty lame that I can’t even find a place for help on this particular question inside of iTunes. Not the most customer-friendly site

Today I’m pleased to announced that the OpenQA jobs board is now live. As OpenQA, and the great projects that make up the community, have grown over the last year, a rich community of developers and users has sprouted up around it. Part of that growing process involves needs for commercial support, training, and technical expertise around the opensource tools at OpenQA.

That is where jobs.openqa.org comes in. It is a place where people looking for developers with deep knowledge of OpenQA can go to look for work, as well as a place where people can offer services around OpenQA-related technologies.

As OpenQA continues to grow, we hope to keep adding features like this to help strengthen the bond between opensource QA and commercial companies.

And of course, a small personal note about this for full disclosure: my company, Autoriginate, is one of the first companies offering support and training for Selenium, an OpenQA project. The creation of the Jobs Board certainly helps my company, but it can also be used by any other company offering similar services without exception. We believe this is required to take OpenQA as a community to the next level of growth.