I know, it's been a long time since i last wrote anything here, but i wanted to share my latest project which is now open to the public - CellSend.
CellSEnd is a free service that allows you to send texts from your computer to your mobile device.
Why would you need something like that? Think about it: Let's say you surf the web on your PC and come across something you need to have on your phone - let's say an address or even the URL of the site you are on.
You have 2 options, either type it in manually on your mobile device - which could be very tedious, or email yourself which is also a less then comfortable way of sending data to yourself.
Here comes CellSend.
CellSend lefts you open a quick text box where you enter whatever text you want and immediately send it to your mobile device.
How is it done? Simple - you get a verification code on the CellSend website (www.cellsend.net) and then link your mobile device using that code (see instructions on the site).
To send stuff to your device, either add a nice little bookmarklet that lets you open a quick text box, or, install the Chrome extension (Firefox add-on coming soon!)
That's it, I hope you all enjoy this free service - feel free to send any suggestions or problems, I promise to go over them!
I know, it’s been a long time since i last wrote anything here, but i wanted to share my latest project which is now open to the public – CellSend. CellSEnd is a free service that allows you to send texts from your computer to your mobile device. Why would you need something like that? [...]
Automated test can save allot of time and manpower in some cases.
We all know that automation may not completely replace humans in software testing but sometimes they can save you some time (get it? Sometimes – some time… )
That said, i spent many months creating some automated coded UI tests that will run every morning, testing the production servers and doing some basic testing of the system (like login, push some buttons, logout...) and for the most part it works great.
The problems start as soon as the weekend approaches. You think it all looks ok, everything worked this Thursday morning (the week ends in Thursday in Israel, weekend is Friday + Saturday here) and there is no reason that once you leave the office for the weekend, something will go wrong.
Friday morning. You wake up. Drink coffee... nice but not like the Italian coffee you get from the machine at the office. You check your iPhone for the automation emails and then you see that dreaded red color filling the small screen. For such a small device it sure can blind you with all that red.
Now you need to start checking what went wrong, logging in to the remote machine back at the office, going over all the operations that failed (spoiler: all of them failed), after an hour of checking everything you find there is nothing wrong with the system.
Basically, the automation computer feels it's not fair the weekend applies to humans only and it just said "Screw you man, if i have to do this shit, so do you!”
After rechecking everything, you feel confident that this won’t happen again on Saturday, you explain your situation to the machine and hope it finds it in its CPU to give you at least one day without any work related stuff.
Saturday morning. You check your iPhone again. SON OF A !@#$#.
Automated test can save allot of time and manpower in some cases. We all know that automation may not completely replace humans in software testing but sometimes they can save you some time (get it? Sometimes – some time… ) That said, i spent many months creating some automated coded UI tests that will run every [...]
Like I mentioned in my previous post about this subject, I am not an expert in TFS or Automation, but I have come to learn of a few problems with Coded UI Tests when you use them on a web application.
Recently, I noticed that my tests sometimes did not complete and encountered unexplained errors.
This is strange, seeing as just the other day the same test worked great. I did not change anything in the test and the application itself did not change so how come a test that ran fine a day ago suddenly encountered errors?
After wracking my brain for several days and trying to play with the search parameters of the problematic object I still could not get the test to work right but suddenly, I found something.
Apparently, the reason the test had failed to run at this point was that it was waiting for a request that was performed in the background and for some reason the request got “stuck” causing the test to wait for a long time until it failed.
Obviously, a perfect web application should not have this problem but as all QA people know, there is no such thing as a perfect web application.
I did manage to find a workaround for this problem. In the playback settings there is a setting called “WaitForReadyLevel” that can tell the test to either wait for all requests on the application to finish loading or disregard them.
Like I mentioned in my previous post about this subject, I am not an expert in TFS or Automation, but I have come to learn of a few problems with Coded UI Tests when you use them on a web application. Recently, I noticed that my tests sometimes did not complete and encountered unexplained errors. [...]
I want to start by saying I don't consider myself an "expert" when it comes to QA or Automation, but I have had the chance to learn about these things in my work place.
I recently started using Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) and creating Coded UI automated tests for testing a web application.
During the time I worked on this project, I found that there is not a whole lot of information available about it online, especially when it comes to creating a windows application that launches the Coded UI tests.
If you are wondering on how to do this, there is a great article by Shai Raiten here.
Though the article shows you how to launch the Coded UI test, it does not tell you how to handle the results or in simple terms – tell your application if the test failed or passed, and if it failed – where did it fail?
Usually, handing such information can be done by creating a cleanup function that handles the test’s results and any exceptions it may have generated but for some reason, when you launch a Coded UI test from another application, it doesn’t call on your custom cleanup function when the test is finished.
I want to start by saying I don’t consider myself an “expert” when it comes to QA or Automation, but I have had the chance to learn about these things in my work place. I recently started using Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) and creating Coded UI automated tests for testing a web application. During [...]
Dark Storm Designs has switched theme - check out our cool new look!
Dark Storm Designs has switched theme – check out our cool new look!
Did you ever encounter a situation where you need to process a DB query multiple times, causing your script to get "stuck" while waiting for the results?
Well I sure have, and it's annoying!
Sure, you can optimize your query, but in the end, even the most optimized query will not do you any good if you have to run it 10,000 times...
Today, I'll share with you how I handled this situation by creating a "Loading..." page that also counts down the time till your results are show.
It won't help speed things up but it will make sure your users don't think that their browser is stuck!
For my example, I used PHP, MySQL and JavaScript - but I'm sure you can make this work in any other languages and\or DB platforms.
Did you ever encounter a situation where you need to process a DB query multiple times, causing your script to get “stuck” while waiting for the results? Well I sure have, and it’s annoying! Sure, you can optimize your query, but in the end, even the most optimized query will not do you any good [...]
Google recently released a set of tools to easily show graphs and charts on your websites, called "Google Chart Tools".
They're release came in an excellent time for me personally, since I needed some graphs done for a PHP application I'm developing for my workplace.
Google recently released a set of tools to easily show graphs and charts on your websites, called “Google Charts Tools”, this is my short review of them.
For all you Twitter addicts out there, this is for you! (No I'm not an addict, I can stop when ever I want!)
For all you Twitter addicts out there, this is for you!
I recently had the… well i won’t call it “Pleasure” but the “Have some free time, nothing better playing right now” of watching the movie “G.I.Joe”.
There is not much i can say, it’s pretty much what you’d expect. You can’t take this movie too seriously, it’s like a parody only not very funny.
People would say it’s kinda like “Transformers” but I disagree. Transformers was funny! it was a good movie that knew it was about robots from outer space and even made fun of itself.
G.I.Joe on the other hand, tries to be serious with slight humor moments and that just doesn’t work.
They even try to fit in a love story and some kitsch moments that feel very out of place. Don’t even get me started on those annoying flashbacks that suppose to give you some back story about the characters but end up messing things up.
Basically, if you want to see stuff explode, no real plot, bad acting and don’t mind when things don’t make sense – this movie is for you!
The title of the post pretty much says it all – my review of G.I.Joe – Rise of the Cobra.
For those of you who don't know what The Guild is, here is a little info.
The Guild is a web series created by Felicia Day ("Dr. Horrible Sing-Along Blog", "Buffy"). It tells the story of a group of people who are in a "Guild" together in this MMORPG (Massive Multilayer Online Role Playing Game) which is kinda like World of Warcraft.
For those of you who don’t know what The Guild is, here is a little info + “Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?” music video!
