Geeky Ramblings

They gave me a new machine at work a few days ago … along with this new machine came a APC 750va UPS.

This is pretty cool, as I’ve been advocating having UPS’s attached to personal workstations for quite some time. I even went to the expense of purchasing my own UPS for my workstation before they got me the new one.

So today we had a power failure in the office … it was then that I found out that you have to pay attention to the outlet on the UPS you plug the computer into. I had inadvertantly plugged my computer into the Surge Protected outlet … not the Surge Protected & Battery backed up outlet.

So, when the power failed … so did my computer … my speakers, on the other hand, stayed powered up without a problem.

Sometimes I really hate MS Outlook.

Yesterday I had to run a test that Cindy, one of our QA people, was having problems with … she was trying to test our issue tracking system against a DB2/400 database, but were getting a system error from the iSeries.

She emailed me the instructions … they was pretty straight forward …

log on to test system
open a command shell
cd into the testing directory
run
. ./setup.script
command parm1 parm2 parm3
command parm4 parm5

Unfortunately, Outlook removed some line breaks and it looked like this:

log on to test system
open a command shell
cd into the testing directory
run
. ./setup.script
command parm1 parm2 parm3 command parm4 parm5

And so I couldn’t run the command properly because the parameters were wrong.

I wasted about 2 hours last night trying to figure out why the test procedure wasn’t working.

And, yes, I did find the option to disable that particular behaivor.

[tags]Outlook, QA, Testing, Work[/tags]

I had a very frustrating day at work today … nothing was working right … even when it did work right, it wasn’t supposed to.

I’ve been trying to track down a bug in some software that only manifests when we put the system under a very heavy load. Unfortunately, a heavy load is very hard to simulate.

Luckily, our QA has a pretty solid test framework that will simulate 18 users performing 10 transaction each all at the same time.

Problem is, I can’t debug when the test framework is running. If I try to run the test framework in my debugger, there’s enough delay added by the debugger AND additional latency in the communications that the error I’m trying to fix doesn’t manifest (not to mention that the server I’m interacting with doesn’t have as much of a load on it).

My only option is to add logging code to the software and run the test framework over and over and over again.

I ran the test framework a few times in the morning and saw the error … I wanted to add a bit more diagnostic code to extract more information about the failure.

I ran the test framework again THREE more times … and not once did the error manifest.

I know the error is there … I just don’t know what I need to do to fix it yet. And if I can’t get it to manifest, I can’t refine the solution.

Darn frustrating.

[tags]Work, java, debugging[/tags]