Kirk Jackson's Page of Words - Software

Being a geek is...

Kirk Jackson — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:23:21 GMT

Deleting your POP3 mailbox using telnet, since Gmail doesn't do it properly :)

I'm using Gmail to check and download my Paradise (ISP) email. This means I can read (almost) all of my personal email in one place.

Gmail appears to only have one option for deleting mail: "Leave a copy of retrieved messages on the server". If you set this option it immediately deletes your mail from the POP server after downloading it to Gmail, which means that you can't check it with an alternate client.

Other mail clients allow you to leave mail on your mail server for a number of days, so I normally set this to 7 days so that if I need to fire up a different client or use my ISP's mail, then I can see recent email. Gmail doesn't have this option, which means if you don't delete mail from your POP account, it will eventually fill up.

For completeness, the sequence of commands to type into telnet to delete a bunch of your mail:

> telnet pop3.paradise.net.nz 110

USER <username>  // Your POP username
PASS <password>  // Your POP password

STAT                        // Lists the number of messages (e.g. +OK 1108 19255723, which means 1108 messages)

// Then for each message
DELE 1
DELE 2
...                         // I used a spreadsheet to quickly generate a list of DELE's from 1 to 1108)

Mission accomplished. An empty POP mailbox without installing (or writing) any extra code :)

Kirk

SilverStripe in web platform installer

Kirk Jackson — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:10:30 GMT

Well done to the SilverStripe team for getting into the new Microsoft Web Platform installer:

The installer helps people get web applications up and running in a flash, and it's great to see SilverStripe alongside 9 other big-named web apps. This should be great for the initial out-of-the-box experience for their users, and for exposure to new users.

See Nigel's blog for more details.

Software engineering survey - what do we actually do in industry?

Kirk Jackson — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:10:01 GMT

Ewan Tempero, a lecturer and supervisor of mine from my days at VUW (now at Auckland Uni) is part of a survey to find out what we actually practice in software engineering, so that they can compare it to what is being researched and taught:

sefolklore.com

Fill in the survey, it will take less than 10 minutes.

(Watch out for the 'rank the following 6 statements' question -- you can only put a rank against one statement)

Kirk

Remote desktop / mstsc shortcuts

Kirk Jackson — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 08:36:14 GMT

I seem to spend less time in Virtual PC and more time in (nested) remote desktop sessions these days. I'm not a huge mouse fan, and when using the keyboard I need to do this when I'm in a windowed remote-desktop session:

ALT+PgDn / ALT+PgUp - cycle through programs (ala ALT-TAB)
ALT+Home - display start menu (ala CTRL-ESC)

My fingers still do the regular ALT-TAB / CTRL-ESC the first time round, but after a while I remember to use the alternate shortcuts.

Thanks to Mark Wagner.

xUnit.net test framework - looks xInteresting

Kirk Jackson — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 10:03:26 GMT

James Newkirk and Brad Wilson have cooked up a new testing framework for .NET development: xUnit.net.

In his blog post announcing xUnit.net, James outlined the reasons why they have created a new framework -- primarily to bake best practice techniques into the test framework, and leverage some of the newer .NET features.

The Comparison between Nunit, MSTest and xUnit.net page on the site lists some of the differences between xUnit.net and Nunit / MSTest. Removing setup and teardown, and providing aspect-like functionality are both interesting angles which I want to spend some time with.

Here's a couple of examples from the samples download. First, an example of usage of BeforeAfterTestAttributes, which let you add behaviour before and after the execution of a test (ala AOP):

[Test, TracingSplicer]
public void TestThis()
{
}

...

public class TracingSplicerAttribute : BeforeAfterTestAttribute
{
    public override void Before(MethodInfo methodUnderTest)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Before : {0}.{1}",
            methodUnderTest.DeclaringType.FullName, methodUnderTest.Name);
    }

    public override void After(MethodInfo methodUnderTest)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("After : {0}.{1}",
            methodUnderTest.DeclaringType.FullName, methodUnderTest.Name);
    }
}

Here's an example of test method extensibility:

[RepeatTest(5, Timeout=500)]
public void RepeatingTestMethod()

You can create your own attributes that inherit from the TestAttribute base class, and define what will happen when the test runs (in this example, the test will run 5 times).

Good work guys, looks useful!

Kirk

Perl in a nutshell - the music video

Kirk Jackson — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 10:32:33 GMT

So true: "It's so easy to write, but not always easy to read". Perl 5 in a nutshell

I've spent many happy hours spent writing perl code :)

"Help, help, I'm trapped in a nutshell! Somebody get me out of this bloody great nutshell!"

What happened to Powerpoint?

Kirk Jackson — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 10:08:54 GMT

It seems like powerful presentations aren't done using Powerpoint any more. I don't know, maybe they never were...

Edward Tufte (the original Powerpoint detractor) has a new book out: Beautiful Evidence. An article in the New York Mag (via SVN) introduces Tufte and some of his work. He has lead a crusade against Powerpoint (his essay The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint has a good collection of the worst offenders), and his ideas have been absorbed by many designers around the world.

The new style of "multimedia"¹ presentations move from slide-based to "flow"-based. Two that I have seen recently deserve mention:

"Le Grand Content"
(via Mark Fowler)

Quite funny, answers the questions of the universe with quasi-logic and witticisms:

There are three types of virgins:
a) Virgins by choice
b) Virgins by way of poor social skills
c) People who should be in group B, but who claim otherwise for reasons of prestige

Prometeus - The Media Revolution
(via Nic Wise)

The future of media and information dissemination. A little more serious...

These presentations really engage the user through zooming images, flowcharts and synchronising speech with animations.

I wonder how long before this type of presentation becomes the norm? How long until we see presentation software that supports the creation of them as easily as a standard deck of slides in Powerpoint?

And how long before people realise that although they're more engaging, they're still hiding and distorting the truth, just in different ways?

¹ How weird does it feel to use that word in 2007?

Security & Phone Phishing

Kirk Jackson — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 00:32:06 GMT

Two of my favourite areas of software development are privacy and security. As applications get less siloed and more connected, understanding the boundaries between "mine and theirs", and implementing the system correctly are becoming increasingly important.

A little tid-bit I found interesting today was:

Did you know that the new trend is phone phishing? Criminals use VoIP to emulate the bank’s voice prompt system and lure people into giving their account information.
(http://frenchfamily.org/hunter/?p=132)

That's worth thinking about if you're an organisation that provides a phone-based service such as phone banking or checking account balances. Tricking someone to dial a phone number (especially an 0800) is probably as easy as tricking them into going to the wrong website.

A/B testing and observing your users

Kirk Jackson — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 10:25:49 GMT

Observing your users while they use your software, either directly, or through A/B usability testing is a good way to discover what they are actually doing.

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror writes about observing users, and links to a pdf paper Practical Guide to Controlled Experiments on the Web that advocates A/B testing as a way of finding out what your customers really prefer.

"A/B Testing" is putting up two scenarios ("Scenario A" and "Scenario B"), and then measuring the impact of the changes by testing against a control. This is quite common in other areas of science, but less so in software development.

Rowan Simpson and Sam Morgan from Trade Me both show examples of the successes Trade Me has had when doing A/B testing, and they have developed systems to perform A/B tests, such as running one version of feature for one half of their users, and the new feature for the other half.

Learning from your users is very important. They are the best people to ask about your product. Unfortunately, when you ask them, you get different results than when you observe them.