Red tape. Where do these people buy it at? Costco? Heck, the Costco bulk size isn't even large enough to cover the amount I see. They've got to be going factory direct. It's the only way they can afford it. I'm sure of it. Cases and cases of red tape line 10 wide and 4 high in each superiors' secret red tape storage closet. How do they dispense it so fast? When do they dispense it? And most of all...why?! I'm pretty sure when you're not looking they pull out one of those packaging tape dispensers and run precise circles around your needs. I bet some of them stay late into the night working extra hard at mastering the taping process. Drawing the tape out as far their arms will allow them to stretch, flipping the wrist back to gain that extra inch of red tape. Sticking the tape precisely where it's due, running their fingers over it back and forth, back and forth, pressing hard to ensure the bond is snug. Long strands, of well bound, red tape. Sporting a Grinch like smile...a smirk with a touch of evil. Their hearts race with excitement as the dispenser cuts that strand on completion. Race with the excitement of knowing how they have strangled the process, canceled the hopes of productivity. No rest until the twisted desire subsides; subsiding only when everything is wrapped neatly in red tape.

I have a secret to share with you. I have a red tape removal service. Shoot me a message and I'll take care of the red tape. Note: I can't take care of the unwrapped and stuck red tape, I will only take care of the red tape in the secret red tape storage closet.

You have two service options to choose from:

Option 1: I'll dye the red tape green. Using my insider knowledge about the secret red tape storage closet..don't ask, I won't tell you a thing. I can't. If I did I could risk exposing the ENTIRE operation. Anyway... using my highly secretive knowledge I would utilize ninja skills to infiltrate the closet, unwrap each roll of red tape, soak it in my portable 3 gallon Tupperware container full of green dye, and kindly place the fresh rolls of green tape back into the boxes. Now, I know what you're thinking: They are going to notice that it's green the first time the go to use it. You are so wrong. I have tested this, they don't notice. I have two theories on this: 1. To qualify as a superior you must be color-blind. Or 2. The sheer greedy desire of strangling your productivity leaves them oblivious to the minor detail of red vs. green. None the less, it works. I've validated it 3 times now. No worries. They just keep taping...but this time with green tape. Green equals go. Instead of restricting red, you can sprint for the finish line marked with green tape. Imagine yourself running in a race, sprinting for the finish, the finish line with green tape, your strides long and unrestricted, your pace surprising fast, as you approach that line you stretch forward crooning your neck to get that 1/10th of a second advantage.

Option 2: I'll melt the red tape into a giant red superball.
Using my inside knowledge about the secret red tape storage closet..yada yada...I'll crazily unwrap each roll like a 4 year old on Christmas morning, place the tape in my "red tape cauldron" and MELT it down to a sticky red tape base. I'll take that base and pour it into my giant superball mold (approximate size of superball varies but averages 1.35 foot). Once the formerly red tape and now red superball is firm, I'll break it from the cast and do with it what you request. I've had some pretty interesting requests in the past, one of my favorites being the gal that took said giant red superball and used it as an ergonomic ball chair. Very constructive she was.

Neither solution is permanent, more red tape will be purchased using the red tape budget, but the temporary productivity increase and spiteful satisfaction will be worth the price. Contact me for price and schedule availability.

If you follow my blog you know that I use Parasoft SOAtest for Web Service testing. If you don't...well now you know. The new 5.0 version of SOAtest has  been released and it has a pretty large set of new features and improvements.

Parasoft SOAtest 5.0 features the following key new capabilities:

• Testing through multiple layers of complex applications: Instantly translate a functional scenario from a test suite into a language that the developers understand: JUnit.
• Policy Management: Provides SOA architects the ability to create and manage policies that are enforced during design and development.
• Performance QoS (Quality of Service): Defines and enforces QoS metrics that are important for setting and measuring SLAs (Service Level Agreements) during development and QA.
• Enhanced Server Emulation: Enhanced intelligence of server stubs allows you to more accurately emulate application behavior.
• GUI Overhaul
• Reporting Enhancements
• Automatic Updates
• MTOM/XOP Support
• Other Miscellaneous features

Get the entire list of new features and their details here.

Get a trial download here.

Personally, I'm looking forward to working with the GUI overhaul. There are so many things going on in SOAtest and the GUI can be a real pain to work with. Painful outside of the typical Java GUI pains such as lack of keyboard shortcuts and lack of right click context menuing! I won't go there though.

User Agent Strings. Tons of 'em. Browser, bots, RSS readers. The list is ever growing and never ending. Did you know that "a new user agent string is born every 65 seconds"? *

Here are two extensive lists of user agent strings:

1. http://www.tnl.net/ua
2. http://www.pgts.com.au/pgtsj/pgtsj0212d.html

Very useful if you are spoofing user agents with a tool like the User Agent Switcher extension.

* 96.7% of Internet statistics are made up.

A new version of SWEA has been released that supports Ajax. Alex has kept me up to date on his developing and testing progress with this new feature and I can tell you that he has put a lot of time and hard work to get this feature out the door. As Alex said to me on several occassions "their are many ways to do Ajax, supporting them all is a lot of work".  Webius is really dedicated to making automation and screen scraping easy for you and the new Ajax feature only adds to the long list of things the software is capable of.

Download the latest version of SWExplorerAutomation (SWEA) here.

Blink, process it again, Microsoft FireFox 2007 Professional Edition, blink real slow this time, look again, Microsoft FireFox 2007 Professional Edition. HUH?

Check it out yourself, somebody put a great deal of work into this. Don't scan through, read the words. Too funny.

Another post yet again inspired by a Google search that lead to my site but I don't necessarily address directly: "What is the quickest way to refresh a Web Page?"

Answer: The F5 key

How to refresh a Web page without pulling it from the browser's cache? CTRL + F5

No such thing as a stupid question here at QAInsight.net\QABlog.net\QABlog.com! We all have to start somewhere eh?

Well I'm still testing InstallShield installers today and thought I'd add another interesting and cryptic issue to the blog that I saw when an uninstaller removes performance counters (or fails to for that matter). The error described below is not InstallShield's fault, but instead corruption in the Performance Counter Registry that is encountered during an uninstall. However, since it occurs on uninstall it will certainly bubble up in you related installer logs. As I posted last night, the best way to troubleshoot InstallShield errors is to search the Internet; so I hope this post can help someone out.  Below is the complete description and fix that worked for me and a few others:

Error Event
Uninstall of application

Error Location
Multiple locations:
1. %temp% \InstallError.log
2. Event Viewer

Error Message
1. InstallError.Log details:
Error in Installer: System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: The configuration registry key is invalid

at System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounterLib.RegisterFiles(String machineName, String arg0, Boolean unregister) at System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounterLib.UnregisterCategory(String machineName, String categoryName) at System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounterCategory.DeleteCategory(String categoryName, String machineName) at System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounterCategory.Delete(String categoryName) at Service.ConfigureService.RemovePerformanceCounters()

2. Event Viewer item 1 detail:
Unloading the performance counter strings for service appnamehere (app name here) failed. The Error code is the first DWORD in Data section.

Event Viewer item 2 detail:
The performance strings in the Performance registry value is corrupted when process Performance extension counter provider. BaseIndex value from Performance registry is the first DWORD in Data section, LastCounter value is the second DWORD in Data section, and LastHelp value is the third DWORD in Data section.

Issue
Corruption of the Windows Performance Registry, possibly due to Windows Server 2003 SP1. See the related thread: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=442741&SiteID=1

Fix
Run the following command to rebuild the Performance Registry Library:
C:\WINDOWS\system32> lodctr /R

I spend a large part of my time testing InstallShield installers and I kid you not, I'd rather eat worms. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. ..Midnight snack too. Worm smoothies, worms on toast, worms as a mixer with gin, Worm Cordon Bleu. For a week.

The complexity is mind boggling, confusing and frustrating. InstallShield is not easy for the developer or the test engineer. The development application is very error prone.

Recently we were perplexed with an InstallShield fatal error that failed to log anything to the InstallShield log file. Perusing the Web for related information to the error number we were getting (which sadly is the best way to troubleshoot InstallShield issues) I found that Windows has an installer logging service built in. When I enabled this service, I was able to get more detail of what was going on down in the guts of the underlying msi.

Partly for your knowledge and partly for mine (because I'll forget how at some point), I'm going to document how to enable the Window's Installer Logging Service here:

1. Open/run regedit and navigate to the following path:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer
2. Add the following string value to the Installer directory: Logging
3. Add the following data/value to the Logging string value: voicewarmup

   The letters in the value field can be in any order. Each letter turns on a different logging mode. Each letter's actual function is as follows for MSI version 1.1:
   v - Verbose output
   o - Out-of-disk-space messages
   i - Status messages
   c - Initial UI parameters
   e - All error messages
   w - Non-fatal warnings
   a - Start up of actions
   r - Action-specific records
   m - Out-of-memory or fatal exit information
   u - User requests
   p - Terminal properties
   + - Append to existing file
   ! - Flush each line to the log

   Your completed registry entry will look like this:
   
   

Once the registry change is made your new installer logging will show up in your Temp directory (temp is defined by the temp system variable). The log in the directory will have a name that starts with the letters MSI  and will be followed a random number.

Happy troubleshooting!

Today the Portland area was blessed with a fairly decent coating of snow and under that a thin base of ice. With all things coated in white, clean and pretty looking, a defect loomed...

This morning I braved the weather and set out to the streets armed with a 2007 Ford Fusion (front wheel drive with traction control), ice and snow driving skills (which a large amount of Portland motorists don't have), and defensive driving skills taken to the next level (from riding a street motorcycle).

Danger after danger I went around, turned around from & back-tracked, and chuckled at due to the foolishness. My snow-driven cheery mood could not be swayed by danger and foolishness! Two blocks from work I pulled up to the last light that I would encounter on my harrowing journey. With the destination in sight, my mind was at ease and I patiently waited for that green go light. and waited. and waited. AND WAITED.

About 2 minutes into it the lady in the turn lane next to me had enough and started to renegotiate her car's position trying to trip the traffic light's magnetic induction loop inside the road. Watching her, I started to second guess my position since everything was buried in snow. Looked good to me, it all lined up in my mind. Even if we didn't trip the magnetic induction loop, the signal would default to a standard set amount of time per light/direction right? Right!? Wrong. We were screwed. No green for us. Denied by ODOT. Denied by a defect. I can't believe this is the case everywhere, but it sure was at this stoplight.

Three minutes later I looked both ways and went for it. Unscathed I am. Don't try this at home.

Rumor has it that the 2008 Ford F150 to be released in August is going to get 60 Miles Per Gallon using their Hydraulic Hybrid technology.

A while back the wife and I decided that our next vehicle purchase was going to be an F150 SuperCab. We need a truck bed for hauling things around and we also need the optional 6 seats. Add 60 MPG to that and I'm sold. 60 MPG in a truck ? Crazy! I hope it's true. We'll see come August.

Read a few more details at newstechspy.com

Rob over at Cockeyed.com has shown us how incredibly insecure it is to rip up those credit card offers you get in the mail. Rob took an application he received in the mail, ripped it up, taped it back together, filled it out using a different address (his father's), using his cell phone as a phone number, and submitted it. A few weeks later his Dad received the credit card.

Is that messed up or what? I can just picture some underpaid worker at Chase opening the envelope and entering the data into the system without giving one rip why the app was torn up and re-taped. Sad, oh so sad. Learn a lesson from this folks!

Just in case you don't get it:

If you rip up your credit card offers and throw them away (or even worse, don't rip them up at all), a thief can fish them out of the garbage, tape it back together, fill it out with his/her address and phone number and receive that card at his/her address, and then go shopping.

My advice: SHRED ALL CREDIT APPLICATIONS YOU RECEIVE IN THE MAIL

Read Rob's adventure step by step here.

A couple weeks ago, Jeff pointed me to a Web site and game that his friend created . The site provides clues to finding a sticker located somewhere in the Portland area and if you find that sticker you win a prize. The first prize was a Nintendo Wii, the 1st hunt is long gone and now they've moved on to Hunt #2 with a prize of 8GB iPod Nano. Monkey Treasure is where you can sign up and get involved on the 2nd hunt. Here is the buccaneer recruiting blurb from MonkeyTreasure.com:

Buccaneers Wanted!

Embark with us on an adventure to find stolen pirate treasure. Our treasure ship was stolen by a group of Monkeys, and we’ve managed to follow them to the Portland area. We want you to become a buccaneer and help us recover our treasure. It won’t be easy, as these monkeys are very devious. They like to taunt us by leaving clues. We’ve been close, but they’ve managed to stay one step ahead of us. We’re offering great rewards for leads that get us closer to capturing them!

They've done a great job so far, the clues make you think pretty hard, and if you put the blog clues and forums under massive scrutiny you could find yourself the winner of the iPod Nano that's up for grabs.

Ready for the challenge? Enlist here.

Today I had one of those conversations. You know, the mildly creative, useless, on the verge of non-pc, feeling giddy, make you laugh conversations. The conversation started with Matt saying something along the line of of "I can't wait to get a new PC so I can have an ass-load of hard drive space".

Ass-Load?

Wildly amused and curious how many bits of drive space equate to a ass-load I asked Matt: "How many terabytes is an ass-load"? Aaron chimed in with "I think 4 terabytes is an ass-load"!

Now, exactly when did ass-load become a unit of measurement ?

Alex offered up the biblical time frame and the possibility of how much an ass (donkey) could hold. Hmmm...So if the term was born around the birth of Christ, "were baby Jesus and mother Mary an ass-load"? Was Joseph more than an ass-load and that's why all the illustrations show Joseph walking next to or leading the ass?

Lets figure out the poundage in an average ass-load. Now, naturally this is going to be an estimate because each ass' load is definitely going to vary due to age, diet, genes, mental and physical abuse, terrain, attitude, altitude, etc.

Baby Jesus = 8 lbs

Mother Mary: 140 lbs

Given the combined weight of Jesus and Mary an ass-load is going to be roughly 148 pounds.

A hard drive weighs in around 3.5 pounds. 148/3.5 = 42 hard drives that an ass could bear. Forty-two, one terabyte hard drives equates to 42 terabytes. An ass-load of hard drive space, in 2007, given our latest PC technology, is 42 terabytes.

Dream on Matt, you won't be able get an ass-load of hard drive space in your PC for years to come.

I've got to go, I've got an ass-load of sleep to catch up on.

I went to check up on Alex Furman tonight (creator of SWEA) and got redirected to Webius.com. Wow, I haven't talked to Alex in a little over a month and he's obviously been busy. SWEA has gone big! It is now owned by Webius, comes in a pretty box, and of course the price has gone up a bit. 

This is great news. Alex has created a well thought out and powerful product and it seemed to me that the one thing holding it back from becoming a huge hit was marketing. Hopefully Webius will help make this happen. Congratulations Alex!

How does SWEA help your testing world? See what I do with it here:

Automating Web UI testing with SWEA, C#, & NUnit

I've been enjoying the new Start menu "Start Search" feature in Windows Vista which seems to be a cross between the Run command and a Search with intellisense (like Google search). It's pretty much abolished my old ways of using the Start Menu which was slow and cumbersome: click Start, click Programs, search through a mile long list of programs, click the program menu, and FINALLY click the program. Yeah, like I said... slow. The Vista "Start Search" process is: Windows Key, start to type the program name (intellisense finds it), hit enter (notice, no mouse clicks).

Using this feature and seeing how it fast it can be makes me wonder why I don't use more of the very similar Run command window in XP or Server 2003 while testing. It's similar, but not nearly as smart with it's lack of intellisense.

When testing I spend quite a bit of time in certain Windows applications and navigating to those applications is painful after being spoiled with the Vista feature. The pain grows from a mild finger ache to a flat out flat out smash your finger in the car door throbbing when you do it on a VPC! Working between multiple VPCs, setup different ways, leaves you sometimes without the shortcuts you may have placed on the desktop for speed.

Enter the Run command. Its simple, and I'm almost positive you've used it before:

Windows key+R, type the app name, hit enter. No mouse clicks. Just one caveat: You need to know the app names. I got a list of the application names for my most common apps used during testing and am getting myself in the habit. After an entire day spent in VPCs I've decided this the way to go. I'm hooked. To help me get my favorite app names memorized I'll be putting a tiny cheat sheet on the corner of my monitor. These are the app names I'll be committing to memory slowly but surely:

Control Panel Apps
System Properties: sysdm.cpl
Add/Remove Programs: appwiz.cpl
Automatic Updates:  wuaucpl.cpl

System Apps
Performance Monitor: Perfmon
Services: Services.msc
Event Viewer: eventvwr
Computer Manger: compmgmt.msc
Task Manager: taskmgr

Common Testing apps
MS Word = winword
MS Excel = excel
MS Paint = mspaint
Notepad = notepad

Again, simple, fast and efficient:

Windows key+R, perfmon, Enter key

Almost like Vista, just a little extra brain power is all.

If you're not doing it already, get in the habit and save yourself some time. Yeah, yeah, this stuff has been around a long time I know. It's just hard to get in the habit. Sounds like a fun little QA New Year Resolution doesn't it?

Here is a large list of Run commands for 117 apps.

Here is a list of all the commands for the Control Panel.

The IE team has released Beta 3 of the IE Developer toolbar. I played with it for a while and found that it's getting better. In prior versions I (and others I talked to) couldn't get the Outlining functionality to work. It appears to work now in Beta 3, but it's still a bit buggy. On a page off of Google news the toolbar was incapable of outlining all the images on the page. On a positive note, the new feature "Select Element by Click" is pretty dang slick and I could see it being really helpful in developer troubleshooting or testing investigation. The feature allows you to click any element in the Web page and that element's details and position in the DOM will be displayed in Developer Toolbar's DOM explorer. From there you can also view the source for that element too (with colored syntax).

If you haven't already, start warming up with the beta 3. Once complete, this tool will be a must have in your developer and testing tool toolbox.

Get update information and screenshots of changes at the IE Blog. Download IE Developer Toolbar Beta 3 here.

Invirtus, the company that gave us VM Optimizer, is now offering a new product VM Converter. This little gem converts physical machines to VMs (P2V) and also does virtual to virtual conversion (V2V). If you have a need for this in you testing world you download a free trial here.

I don't have a need for VM converter myself since my VPCs are typically built from scratch with an OS and SQL base and then saved off to be built upon under a new VPC name, but I thought it might fit into your testing world?

I've been tagged by Greg and now I've been held accountable to post Five things you (seriously) didn't know about me. I usually ignore this stuff when it comes around in email, but I think my readers deserve to know a little more about me. I suppose it could make me more personable? I'll put a little twist on it by giving you 5 astonishing deep, dark, juicy, closet like facts and 5 light, ho-hum, boring facts about me (minus the gory details). Ten little snippets in all. If you want details, then let's talk!

Dark and Juicy 5

1. I search for and watch youTube videos with keywords "fist fighting". Some caveman-like part of me finds guys beating each other up intriguing.
2. I like danger. I own a Yamaha YZF R1 Sport Bike and it currently fulfills my danger desire (when it accidentally goes over 110 MPH in few seconds).
3. I had a son that was born at 26 weeks and lived for 2 days. It changed my life in so many ways, and lessons were learned by OHSU that helped to improve neo-natal care.
4. I live in and hate the city. However, I have a hard time swallowing change when it impacts my family; so I can't get out.
5. I'd rather manage cattle, mend fences, and ride a horse all day than be in high-tech.
    

Ho-Hum 5

1. I was construction worker and construction business owner for 6 years. Trades of tile, painting, and finish carpentry.
2. I owned my own small, mall bizness named "Twisted Pretzel". It failed because the location was crappy. The product was like a bagel in pretzel form. Tasty...
3. I have 4 kids. I love 'em like crazy, even though they drive me crazy!
4. In high school I graduated in the top 10. There were only 26 in my class... Shut up! Top 10 is the important thing.
5. I drive an oxidized 1993 Isuzu Rodeo with 160k miles and balding tires because I want to. I wash it only once a year because its so ugly you can't really tell when it's clean.

Part of the tagging game is that I need to tag 5 others. I choose Dror, Rosie, John, Antony, and Brian. Tag, you're it; please give us "Five things you (seriously) didn't know about me"
 

Its been a little over a year since I rolled out QAInsight.net with my just starting, blogging beginner, writer wanna-be Hello world post. If you're a recent subscriber or just happened to stumble upon the site you most likely missed my top 18 Quality Assurance & Testing related posts in 2006. Why 18? Why not? Why do you find defects when a developer says "only a tiny change was made, you don't need to test it"? Because that's just the way it is. None the less, here's the 18:

A wonderful year it has been, I've learned a ton about blogs, blogging, testing, QA and QAInsight visitors.

How do I feel about blogging after 1 year of doing so?

First off, I haven't lost that initial thought the day I started dreaming about blogging: I really don't care to write about "Quality Assurance" process or methodology, I prefer to talk about "Testing". I feel "Quality Assurance" has been driven into the ground and I'm just plain tired of hearing about it. Don't get me wrong, process and methodology is important but it just gets old when you hear the same thing over and over, each with a little, unique twist to it. I'll leave that to the other guys, testing is my love.

Second, writing about testing doesn't drive hoards of people to your site. Duh... it's boring unless you are in QA and are sincerely interested in improving your testing.

Third, when writing about testing it often requires technical details with detailed steps. It is REALLY REALLY hard to show personality and humor when doing this (at least for me).

Fourth, I enjoy creative writing far more than writing technical posts. Writing a testing post requires note taking, procedural step documentation, and just plain TIME. Creative writing I can spit out in 20 minutes with little thought or fret. For example, my post Death toll rises due to FireFox got a TON of hits and I wrote it on the fly without having to think like a robot. People gobble this stuff up! I love writing like this, and will be doing more of it in the years to come.

Fifth, leaving comments on other blogs or sites and those comments just happen to point to your site will help drive traffic. For example: Six reasons why Robert Scoble is Mini-Microsoft. Granted, calling somebody out on something helps too.

Sixth, Google Adsense drives traffic. When you write a post, Google notices, your content is indexed quickly, and can be found through Google search.

And last but not least, the blog software Dasblog is the way to go. It works and it works well. If you're thinking about about starting a blog, do yourself a favor and set yourself up with Dasblog.