First of all, if you don’t have Emacs installed on Windows then you should download it now.
Once you have Emacs installed then you’ll naturally want to add “Open With Emacs” to your Windows right-click menu. To do this you’ll need to make a registry entry. The easiest way is to copy [...]

Posted in Computer Stuff No Comments »

Linux has many amazing programs that can be chained together to produce amazing results. Today I needed to turn a multi-line file into a CSV (comma separated) file. In Linux this is super easy:
cat file | tr ‘\n’ ‘,’
Basically, this will turn a file like this:
Line1
Line2
Line3
Line4
Into this:
Line1,Line2,Line3,Line4

Posted in Bash/Shell 2 Comments »

One of the greatest things about being a test engineer is that I get to delve into a little bit of everything. At work I use a handful of different languages to accomplish different tasks. Up until recently TCL programming has been a thorn in my side. I love the interactive Python [...]

Posted in TCL 2 Comments »

Background
I love Python and my personal experience has shown that testers are about 4x more productive when using Python than when using Java. However, at work I am a tester on a Java application. I’ve been looking for a way to bridge that gap and allow me to write my tests in Python [...]

Posted in Java, Programming, Python 1 Comment »

In the lab today I was having problems with a slow network.  In tracing the cables from the computer I found they went into a hub, not a switch.  After recovering from shock I checked the card settings to see what duplex mode they were in.  It turns out that in addition to being connected [...]

Posted in Administration No Comments »

Dataflow programming is something new to me.  Lately I’ve been looking up articles and information about this programming paradigm.  In a sense I suppose that I am familiar with the concepts.  In Linux I use the pipe “|” a lot to pump data from one program to another.  Each program in the stage alters the [...]

Posted in Programming, Python No Comments »

Crontab has got to be one of the greatest programs ever written. How in the world did we get along before being able to schedule the periodic execution of commands? Of course when I am setting up a cron job I seldom remember the order of the fields, so at the top of [...]

Posted in Administration, Computer Stuff No Comments »

I love Emacs as an editor.  I love all the features and flexibility.  Now, it is a somewhat heavyweight editor in that sometimes you don’t need an editor with the kitchen sink.  On those occasions I do condescend to using vi.
One of the things that I found and love is Emacs color themes.  [...]

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I think it’s a safe bet to say that anyone who has been in software testing or programming for any length of time has had to create a regular expression (RE). Most of the RE’s that I create are simple and I can do them quickly. However, this past week I had need [...]

Posted in Administration, Computer Stuff, Programming No Comments »

I need some help on this and would appreciate your comments. I need to set up a project hosting web site on my corporate intranet. It needs to be something kind of like SourceForge or ShareSource.  I actually like the ShareSource interface, but the code is not available.
There are getting to be several [...]

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