Blogs

We’ve just booked up with the Warren Smith Ski Academy again for another week of training in Saas-Fee. Not until early next season though :( But it’s the first trip booked… Now, where and when to go this season…

I’ve noticed that quite a few blogs I read have turned off comments and trackbacks and removed all trace of any previous comments/trackbacks. I realise that the comment spam problem is a pain but I find that I treat blogs without comments/trackbacks as “less reliable sources”… I guess it depends on the theme of the blog content. Blogs that are just someone’s random thoughts and dont have an agenda probably don’t really need comments or trackbacks, after all, who cares what other people have to say on the topic.

I had one of those “Doh!” moments yesterday. In summary, always put the performance monitoring code in early, looking at a program’s vital signs as a jiggly graph can show up all kinds of unexpected things… The work on the gateway server that I’m currently building for a client has been going well but yesterday I had a weirdness develop. Very rarely a test would fail because the server would fail to respond to a request.

One of the people I email’s corporate mailer has started to bounce my mail with the following message: *mx.example.com[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] said: 554 You have been blocked by a DNS blacklist, please see:- http://www.openrbl.org/ (in reply to MAIL FROM command)* So I wander over to www.openrbl.org and type in my domain name and it tells me REJECT: invalid ip-address or non-resolvable hostname: jetbyte.com… Now, it’s true that jetbyte.com doesn’t have an ip address, but it has a perfectly valid MX record… Shouldn’t OpenRBL be checking that the MX record is valid rather than checking that the domain has an ip?

I’m writing some tests where I need to log calls to function for the test log so that I can make sure the function is called in the expected way when the test runs. The logging version of the object under test derives from the object and adds the logging functionality and calls the object under test to do the work. Of course, for this to work, the functions that I’m interested in can’t be private.

Barry suggests that to do meaningful performance tests you need to know a bit out the way the thing that’s under test operates. I guess he has a point given his reason for performance testing was to compare a new version of the thing under test with an older version of the same thing… Personally, I’d be tempted to leave the poorly performing tests in the test harness. Then add some comments about why these particular situations are unlikely to show up as real usage patterns and why the object under test performs poorly in these particular situations.

I’m in a bit of a quandary. I’m writing a class that does processing on a byte stream. You poke bytes in, it does stuff, it gives you bytes out. My quandary revolves around how it gives you the bytes… The processor operates in two directions, that is, there’s an inside and an outside. It processes data traveling from inside to outside and also from outside to inside. Poking a set of bytes into the processor in one direction may or may not result in bytes being output in that direction and may or may not result in bytes being output in the other direction.

“Additional information: An operation on a socket could not be performed because the system lacked sufficient buffer space or because a queue was full” I’ve managed to get the .Net 1.1 TCP/IP issue that gives the above error mesage when trying to use sockets on .Net 1.1 fixed. Thanks to Alex Lowe for pointing me in the right direction and for the guys at MS support for allowing me to call them up and tell them I need to download the hotfix for KB 826757.

Alex Lowe asks what Microsoft could do to improve their developer support. In general I think they do a reasonable job given the huge surface area of APIs and products that need support; I think some of the MS staff blogs are helping too. But they could do more… What I’d like is more information, all of it, every scrap. :) Don’t bother cleaning it up, just make it available somewhere and let Google index it.

Roy’s post about information hoarding made me think, which is always good… Last night I followed a link from Larkware to this article on MSDN about Pocket PC services. The article annoyed me, I’d have preferred that it had been better edited, but given the choice between having the information that’s in the article available or having it sitting in someone’s mailbox waiting to be edited I know what I’d prefer.