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.