CI with Jenkins for Javascript: Part 2: Static Analysis

Part one So. We’re up, we’re unit testing, we’re publishing results. But unit testing is only as good as the tests themselves, and that depends heavily on the programmers’ ability to write good tests. Maybe we want more than that. Maybe we want a metric that isn’t essentially self-reported. Maybe we want static analysis. What is Static Analysis Static Analysis is a category of testing techniques that covers any metric of code that can be collected without executing the code. Continue reading

CI with Jenkins for Javascript: Part 1: Unit Testing

In a lot of ways, the Javascript world feels like it’s trapped in the year 2k: the dot com bubble is swelling huge, and nobody has time for best practices, it’s time to reinvent everything and strike it rich. As an SQA professional, it’s immensely frustrating to outline a technique and be told “Javascript doesn’t do that.” (That’s one of three answers that ought to be banned from a webdev’s vocabulary; the other two are “I think jQuery does that” and “Maybe with Node? Continue reading

Quick Tips: Posting as yourself on a group facebook page

This isn’t my usual domain for quick tips, but Facebook moved this feature, and some people I know have been having trouble with it, so I thought I’d put this up. If you want to post under your own name on a page, and you happen to be able to post AS that page, here’s where the button you need to click lives: Click this dropdown Then choose an identity from this list

Quick Tip: Increasing the file upload limit in wordpress

If you do a google search for “increase file upload limit wordpress” or some combination of similar words, you see the same advice repeated all over: change your php.ini file so it reads something like upload_max_filesize = 10M post_max_size = 10M (possibly including an execution time variable as well), and/or change your .htaccess to read: php_value upload_max_filesize 10M php_value post_max_size 10M Which literally does the same thing at a different level. Continue reading

Introducing: Terminus

So in my “Introducing: Agni” series, I explained the process I went through to get a used machine from Goodwill up and running to replace my previous living room server, Mercury, which exploded. I realize I left a loose end — I had to restore the mysql database from a several years old backup that I’d taken before I started backing up to the backup drive that died, and we just reconstructed the data after that point. Continue reading

Hello World!

Hello everyone! Welcome to my new tech blog. I’ve previously blogged about technical issues rarely on my personal blog, but since there’s really a different audience for that stuff as opposed to my costuming, writing, and personal updates, I figured I’d break it out into a new wordpress install and link it to my resume. Which means… for the first time, I’m blogging under my real name! So, welcome! I’ve transferred over the most interesting of my tech blog posts from my other blog so that there’s something to read about. Continue reading

On Coldfusion's ParseDateTime Function

I know I rarely talk about work on this blog, but today’s issue was a doozy and I want to be sure the information is out there someplace that can be found with a Google search. Today was February 3rd, and one of our services started blowing up with errors involved in date parsing. The obvious answers were immediately discarded: there had been no change over the weekend, no change to this service in weeks in fact, and yes, it HAD been working previously. Continue reading