I’ve been thinking that I should be able to work from home far more than I do so right now.

I’ve got the perfect study to use as an office with plenty of room. Obviously I’d need to get a decent web site and make the study a bit more industrial. Of course as soon as you start thinking about doing this then a whole load of considerations pop up, like what kind of testing would I do from home. The obvious one would be usability testing so I started scouring the web for usability testing sites and there are quite a few, and a lot of them are very professional looking. Can I compete with them? Dunno.

I’m not really a usability testing person but I suppose I could put myself through a crash course on that. Also doing usability testing means I’d need to be able to test web apps on various platforms i.e. browsers. Of course I can create VM’s but I’m not sure that that is enough. What happens if I was working on 2 different sites at the same time? What I obviously need are more machines, PC’s. All I would need is some old ex-office PC’s with a minimum amount of drive space and a gig of memory and each one locked down with different browsers. On one PC I could have the current versions of IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera and the other PC’s previous versions of the same browsers, all the way back to IE6. So that sounds like 3 more PC’s plus 1 contingency, which means my corner desk isn’t going to be big enough. Hmm.. 4 new/old PC’s plus my current old XP machine plus the Vista PC plus my next new Windows 7 PC. Sounds like the desk is going to get replaced with a kitchen worktop all along one wall.

The problem will be stopping the darn things getting auto-updated. And how easy is it going to be download old browsers? There must be a website somewhere that has this stuff. Operating systems? I’ve got some XP and Vista disks which I’ve had since I had a MSDN account a few years ago but they won’t install forever.

I’ve been thinking about getting a Microsoft TechNet account as that includes virtually everything a developer would need and at about £400 per year you get a lot of stuff on DVD, rather than the cheaper option whereby you just get the option to download it all.

What else? I’ve got a new HP printer but that is hopeless at printing anything more than a couple of pages at a time, specially if you have their horrible ‘print both sides’ option switched on. So I’d need a 2nd printer, a LaserJet this time. Also would probably need a fax machine, which the HP does include but I have no telephone socket in the study. But there is a socket next door (Sound of drilling no doubt? Ed).

And the website? I’ve been on an intensive Dreamweaver Beginners course recently, so after that I could create pages with tables. Then I went on an intensive advanced Dreamweaver course. So now I can do the same pages but with CSS. I’ve also just finished a 2 day intensive course in PHP/MySQL/Apache so I’m ok with that (Hell , now you can trash WordPress sites good an’ proper. Ed). I even did a five week course in SEO and have been reading about all that a lot. Got my head round Adwords, so if I can write a decent web page then I can give it a big kick-off with that.

So what’s the problem? To get to the first 2 pages of Google, organically, I need a pretty good web page with lots of back links. It needs to look permanent as if its been there for years. It needs everything, phone numbers, an address, privacy policy, a site map, a good title, decent keywords, a lot of rich content (Hell you could gut some of the stuff on this page, no one would miss it. Ed), regular content, setting up with Google Analytics and lord knows what else. How long’s this gonna take to setup?

It ain’t going to be quick.

I got all of my WordPress entries into my Blogspot version of the blog but when push came to something else I didn’t really like the look of Blogger/Blogspot blogs much.

It was obvious that the thing to do was to get my own hosted version of a WordPress blog. I found a cheap host, registered a neat domain, downloaded the latest version of WordPress, unzipped it, FTP’d the WordPress files to the new host, created a database on the host, amended WP’s config file to point to the database server, database name, username and password, ran the install script and it was done. Well I did make one mistake in that the server was still pointing to localhost but apart from that the critter was up and live in an hour, and that’s a lot quicker than it used to take.

Of course I had to import the original WordPress blogs into the new own-hosted version but at least I didn’t need to convert the files like I had to with Blogspot, but I did need to amend ‘class=alignright’ to ‘class=align-right’ for every entry in each of the exported xml files. Again I used Notepad and search and replace.

I’ve been testing some bulk upload process recently, though I’d been told that one of the versions I was regression testing did work in live (If it worked so well in live then why did you need to regression test it? Ed). There were 5 different data types to be uploaded and none of ‘em worked. Jeez, they didn’t even fail very well. Prior to the actual upload process the files were validated and the validation report was even written to the wrong folder.

We eventually did have a tiny bit of success with one of the data types, provided the data was squeeky clean and there wasn’t much of it. Took ages for even this success and I just put it down to some not too shoddy code that just happened to be lying around in the right place at the right time, got itself invoked, thrashed about a bit and by a miracle managed to update a couple of columns.

That was a few weeks ago and as a result several defects were raised just to get the software into some kind of shape that we could then have another bash at it. Needless to say the very experienced developer didn’t touch ‘em with a barge pole, and along with some words from one of the managers that it works in live, generated so much confusion that instead of testing the bulk upload process with small files and therefore where it was easy to determine some kind of expected results, this lot went big. Erm…lets try an 82mb file. That took 3 hours to validate and load, or fail and then they started looking at any data that had managed to claw its way onto the database. Due to all the time this took they were only getting around 2 runs a day. I left them to it.

Then last week, several weeks later, I was asked to test it again. None of the original defects had been closed, think they just respelt the word ‘defect’ as ‘defekt’ so they’d miss all the defect tracking report filters, they probably thought if you can’t see it then it’s not there or some other gonzoid attempt at logic. I started testing the same old bulk upload processes and waddayaknow…..just the same as before, full of bugs. I gave up after 2 days as there was no point as the software just didn’t work. I did raise eight quite major defects but they got ignored again. The developer just doesn’t fix bugs.

I think this might be the worlds slowest loading blog at the moment, database problem.

Someone told me about Microsoft’s WebsiteSpark and how you get a whole buncha software for just about squat.

I needed to get OK’d by a web hosting company, spose that was just so that a connection was made so that when I have generated my web masterpiece I get to use those guys to host the darn thing. I then went to the Microsoft site where you can download the software and it was the usual Microsoft ugly site. Kicked off a load of downloads which queued themselves up and have left it to get on with itself. All of the files are ISO’s, so need burning to disk before installing. I’m getting Expression Web 3, Expression Studio 3, Visual Studio 2008 Professional, SQL Server 2008 Web and Visual Studio Test Professional 2010. You also get the product keys and if you haven’t made your presence on the web within 3 years you have to pay Microsoft $100, as if they’re gonna check. Neat.

My old XP machine’s power supply fan is running most of the time the PC is running these days. I couldn’t figure out why that was. Had a look at task manager to see if it kicked in when all the system memory was in use and therefore the hard drive would have been used as virtual memory. That might have been enough to start the power supply fan (And wake the dead. Ed). That wasn’t the case as the fan was coming on with plenty of spare memory available but I did notice that the fan came on whenever the CPU processor was above 50%. I convinced myself that what I really needed was a beefier power supply. Today I thought I’d have a look at the power supply and noticed that the grills on the side of the case were completely chock full of dust so cleared that then had a look inside. Duuh…haven’t looked inside a PC in years. Looked OK and I restarted it without replacing the cover. Within 30 seconds of starting it was blue screening. I had probably accidentally disconnected something. Rebooted again, another blue screen. Rebooted into safe mode and had a look at device manager and that looked ok but the fan was going like billy-o all the time.

As I don’t use that PC too much I uninstalled a pile of stuff. Rebooted into normal, not startup, mode and left it at the loggin page for 30 minutes. No blue screen this time and no fan starting. I then logged in and left it for 30 minutes and so far it appears to be OK.

We’ve just had another release of our web page and the regression testing of it is huge. There is always a bit of panic when we do regression and when the page goes live extreme panic in case nothing works. Our test scripts, which were written by someone that doesn’t know Quality Center very well, each prove a single requirement whereas a script would normally prove a dozen or so requirements. As we have single requirement scripts and they need to be tested in various ways, and in foreign languages and also different browsers there are sometimes 200 test scripts for a single product backlog item. Some of the scripts are quite complex and there are no short cuts so invariably the most I am able to do in a day, and the very most, are about 100. Other people manage to charge through 250 which I find unbelievable. The company does like working very fast which I hate as I just can’t see the point and so much of the testing is missed. The words that are on the tips of a lot of peoples tongues, and which they don’t dare utter, are ‘we don’t have time’.

Never mind the friggin’ quality feel the width.