Project management

For some time I have been using basecamp for project management, but I think it's too simplistic for my needs and I plan to switch to The Trac Project. Trac has a more sophisticated priorities and categories and it also integrates with my source control subversion. It's also open source and we can host it ourselves. (I also thought about resorting back to bugzilla)

I'm also interested in some of the plug ins for Trac, like the time and estimation plugin.

Maximizing Data Throughput for Network Applications (IIS 6.0)

Windows 2003 still has the default setting to maximize file and print sharing over network applications... rackspace recommended that i change it for my web server.

Maximizing Data Throughput for Network Applications (IIS 6.0)

Pushing limits with web services

There are several considerations when you call or provide a web service that can send a lot of data or take a long time.

In .Net you can set the timeout period to be higher.

Also in .Net... "When the amount of data send or received by the Web service exceeds 4 MB, configure the Web server to handle the larger amount of data."
How to: Enable a Web Service to Send and Receive Large Amounts of Data

Test Automation with FireFox Add On

I have been using iMacros Firefox Add On
to help automate my testing through the web.

The art of software testing

In the introduction to the book "The art of software testing" it poses a simple program and ask how many test cases you can think of...

"The program reads three integer values from an input dialog. The three values represent the lengths of the sides of a triangle. The program displays a message that states whether the triangle is scalene, isosceles, or equilateral."

If you write down all the test cases you can think of, you will most likely be surprised how many things you don't think of. (they provide a list of test cases in the link)

Testing a web site before you migrate the DNS

When you set up a web site on a new domain an easy way to test it out before migrating the dns is to add a record to the host file on your local machine, and override dns to get to the new ip address.

here is a command from windows system that will open host file on any windows os
notepad %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

or on unix
vi /etc/hosts

then add the record (be sure to put a tab between your ip and the domain
70.170.170.170 my.domain.com

Be sure to remove the entry when you migrate the DNS. Also before migrating DNS records be sure to lower the TTL to 5 minutes for at least 48 hours before you make the change.

windows service problem

I have been having a problem for weeks with a windows service that sporadically quit working. Fortunately, it never happened in the production environments. It only happened on my dev box. Tonight I finally figured it out.

The first thing the service does is log a message to indicate it started. It is also in a try/catch that logs exceptions to the event viewer. Turns out the event viewer had reached it's maximum size, so it would quit working and there would be no indication of the problem in the event viewer, because it was the problem.

I ended up changing an option to "Overwrite events as needed" from "Overwrite events older than 7 days." The production server was already set to overwrite as needed, which explains why it worked in production, but sporadically failed in dev.