Browsed and Beta’d

After a case of random popups starting yesterday (Saturday) that occurred when IE8 beta was active and kept Firefox 3.1b2 beta from starting up due to a memory read error, loaded and ran Superantispyware which fixed memory, files and registry. Other browsers such as Chrome, Opera and Flock had still run okay. Had tried Windows Defender to locate and delete a partial set of problem files, gadcom.exe, outerinfo.exe and mcafeeupdate.exe which were not completely prevented by Windows Security Center and McAfee antivirus and firewall. Initially immediately found and stopped gadcom.exe and prunnet.exe using the windows task manager since they were unfamiliar and a quick web search discussed them as threats. Saved a log file listing from a version of HijackThis before the TrendMicro merger.

Added a couple of pages to wiki for reference titles and tags:

Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams, Crispin and Gregory, 2008.

Advanced Windows Debugging, Hewardt and Pravat, 2007.

Projective Detail

End of year is a good time for a shot, whether snap or screen or, in this case, semantic. Test Information Space started as a lab page in html (officelive). Version 2.0 was implemented from tagging blogs (wordpress, blogger, live), mobile (mofuse), wikis (wetpaint, sites), bookmarks (delicious, zigtag, qitera, blinklist), social networks (facebook, twitter, livescribe, power), feeds (friendfeed, toluu), gadgets (google), email (live mail, gmail, yahoo), search, and offline (live writer, ms office, excel, emacs). RSS feeds are output from most locations. Today these show up as links from eachother’s pages, e.g. the blog portal. Semantic versions are to feature RDF output, querying, automated parsing and tagging, and finer resolution for data chunks. Examples include twine or zemanta, scaled up by significant orders of magnitude. The public domain web is a simple case and the commercial context more complex. A quick poll of professional users described a slowly emerging SW as practice communities get up to speed on the formats and tools such as RDFa, semantic engines and wikis. Current tools are an intermediate phase to yield consumer products and services. User interfaces still need elegant ways to embed combinations of data sources into desired solutions, e.g. SPARQL has been deemed difficult to use. 2009 probably will not see the disappearance of the major corporate, finance or government structures, but this dynamic is now more than academic. Ripples can occur as individual people are recombined to leverage their output capabilities, e.g. the ominous possibility of online education for employees or voters, millennials or boomers.

Porting Posts

It may be useful to move or backup a blog to another site. The export/import option can be used when transferring within the same blog type, however a WordPress export file is not presently accepted by Blogger for import. A solution is to apply Windows Live Writer to copy blog entries from WordPress to Blogger. Its abilities to post to any of the user’s blogs, and synch to read previous posts, are combined in appropriate order. This can also be used for Spaces Live. A straightforward method in Live Writer is as follows:

1. may need to setup both blog account logins,
2. select source weblog, e.g. wordpress,
3. click Open,
4. may need to change #posts set which defaults to 10,
5. click a particular title to open,
6. change weblog to destination, e.g. blogger,
7. set publication date at bottom of screen to match original,
8. add any categorization or tagging,
9. correct any format errors, and
10. publish.

Augmented Utility

Zemanta is plugged into Firefox so am seeing the recommendations on right side while entering text directly into WordPress blog. (Sometimes type into another Word doc window to use thesaurus.) Previously had discussed use in Windows Live. In this case, login worked so added Twitter, Facebook and OPML from Google reader. This created a list of sources from friends’ websites and the blogroll feed.

Head First Javascript, Morrison, 2007, is an introductory book which presents the material in a fashion which combines visual graphics, conversational style, changes in format to draw attention, and emotional appeal to attempt to make it easier to read and more memorable. It is unique, different from reading web pages or text-oriented hardcopy. There are many other titles in the series. Each indicates prerequisites, e.g. this expects reader to have HTML and is itself needed for AJAX. Code samples can be downloaded from book site.

Penetration Testing and Network Defense, Whitaker and Newman, 2005, covers security topics and techniques. It is geared toward vulnerability testing of networks, including those having dated equipment and software. Ironies included link to a web site which reports that it is no longer legal in the host country, and a trojan alert from a link listed in the tool pdf on the book site. (“Why is it so hot in here?“)

Decision Logic Tabled

Just Enough Software Test Automation, Mosley and Posey, 2002 describes a data-driven testing approach. Test and control data replicates use cases to drive functional verification of application under test (AUT) using scripts. UI tests are coded or output by capture/playback. Also see test automation.