An agent called me the other day about a position as a developer on an insurance platform that I have tested on.

I mentioned that I was a tester and hadn’t been a developer for many years and the agent just didn’t get this concept. He said ‘well can’t you develop on this platform anyway?’. I answered that the developement language that they are using now is totally different to the mainframe development work I was doing a long time ago. Still don’t think he got it and he definitely didn’t like the pathetic excuses I gave him. He was very professional though but did sound a bit like a HR person (Hence the confusion, he he. Ed). No doubt he thought I was a complete waste of time.

Just installed Visual Studio 2010 Professional beta on an XP PC. I fired off setup, went for a bike ride for an hour and when I returned it was still running. Took a total of 2 hours to install. At the end it asked me if I wanted the documentation to ber installed. Too right I do with any app that takes that long to install. The documentaion install failed with some nasty error messages so I’ll be flying blind with that for awhile.

I got Smart PDF Converter Pro the other day to see how well PDF documents can be converted into doc files. I started with a single page house sale flyer, which had photos and house plans on it and it converted that pretty well. All of the pictures, plans and headings that were on the pdf file were displayed on the doc version. I then tried converting a 20 page credit report and that seemed to convert well too. Neat.

I installed the StatPress statistics plugin for WordPress and it’s quite useful, up to a point, seeing the viewing statistics for this blog. The stats it shows me for visits was less than I expected so I checked the hosting companies log files and of course there was not a lot of similarity. I checked 30 minutes worth of log files for visits, spiders and RSS feed entries and noted those totals then I checked to see what StatPress, which doesn’t use the log files, for it’s view of visits, spiders and RSS entries for the same period and StatPress was missing about 50% of them. Not as bad as Sitemeter though, as that seems to miss most visits. I checked Sitemeters figures for another page I have, a page that gets very few hits per day, say 10, and it said that over a 3 month period I had 280 visits with an average per day of zero and an average visit length of 0.00 minutes. That page is a bit boring but it’s not that boring.

I thought I’d add a chat client and forum to the blog and checked to see what the hosting company provide and it was a bit underwhelming.

I tried and found both and neither worked very well and they looked hopeless. Very basic CGI. So I’ll have a hunt around for some jazzy javascript versions. It would be good if I could get some Ajax stuff working too.

I’ve been listening to some blog marketing podcasts and oddly, bearing in mind the guy is into marketing, the presentation was hopeless. He uses Talkshoe to record them and by the sound of it phones the podcast in as the sound quality is so bad. He really is just chatting to people and we the podcast listeners are just listening to a phone conversation. There are periods of silence, coughs, splutters, technical glitches. You name it, it’s on there.

But the content is terrific. I listened to the first cast last week and then did nothing but listen to all of the rest he had recorded. Then I listened to the whole lot a second time. Coughs and all. He certainly has great ideas on marketing and how to promote your blog. Other ideas were to advertise yourself on www.craiglist.org and Twitterific. Also he mentioned a ping engine called www.ping.in which pings 20-30 blog search engines, though only about 40% were successfull. That got me searching for other ping engines and I found several. According to the statistics (Not that word again. Ed) I was pinged, from all of the engines, at least 100 times, though I’m not convinced they showed up on the various stats tools I use.

I’m still trying to make some sense of the Google Analytics stats. I have a feeling that if tried to rationalise the statistics displayed by Google Anlytics, those provided by the hosting company from their own raw log files and the stats displayed on Deep Log Analyser I would go beserk. So I won’t. Instead I’ll just use them as a rough guide. This will allow me to say with great authority ‘yesterday I had between 300 and 500 hits and may have had 700 blog entries read’.

Just checked my Sitemeter stats for today (13:00 GMT) and their count of visits to this site has missed at least 80% of the hits. Worse still, I have just had a look at the Sitemeter who’s on page, who is currently viewing the blog, and it says there have been no visits for the last 20 minutes. I also checked this page 20 minutes ago with the same result. If I look at my blog log file, which registers all visits, including spiders and feeds as well as normal visits I can see a lot of activity. Am I paying per month for this the more professional version of Sitemeter. Why do I beat myself up with this garbage. The staff at Sitemeter can justify these lousy stats, but I betcha they don’t use their own product to accumulate visits to the Sitemeter site.

Test Director questions

I look in the SQAForums every now and again. They have numerous threads on different subject of testing. When you look at many of the questions posed it is pretty obvious that a lot of the posters have absolutely no software testing experience at all and ask questions so wide that they need a complete brain dump on the subject to answer the question. There was one question either in the interview questions thread or the Test Director thread where somebody wanted to know answers to a TD interview. Sounded like he was going to an interview at a company which used TD and he wanted answers to any possible questions. Didn’t he have any knowledge of the product? Has he never used TD? If not then why were this company interested in interviewing him? Maybe they had just bought the TD product and wanted to hire people with TD experience. Sounds more like the blind leading the blind to me. Shudder.

Oh to be a fly on the wall at that interview.