Dan Wheldon’s Good Company

The upcoming Indy 500 has me bummed out all over again about the death last October of Dan Wheldon. While reminiscing and thinking about IRL/Champ Car/CART/”big car” safety advances over the years, I started to wonder how many past winners of the race were killed before they had a chance to defend their win. For a sport which has such a bloody history, the list includes surprisingly few names.

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Adding An Icon To The “Edit With Sublime Text 2” Contextual Menu Item

As mentioned elsewhere I’ve totally fallen in love with Sublime Text 2 as an editor. One of the issues I’ve had switching to using it on Windows, though, is the muscle memory I’ve developed for selecting the “Edit With Notepad++” contextual menu option. I think part of the reason I’m having trouble switching is that the Notepad++ item has an icon and, by default, the Sublime Text 2 item does not. Several weeks ago I figured out how to add an icon to the Sublime Text 2 item and it has definitely reduced the number of times I’ve accidentally chosen Notepad++. Better write it down before I forget how I did it…

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Getting Up To Speed With Sublime Text 2 – Notes For Notepad++ Users

I recently started a love affair with the Sublime Text 2 text editor. Looking around the web, I’m certainly not alone, and there are many great tips and tricks posts. I probably can’t write anything better than what’s already out there, so this post is really just an attempt to document for my future self my own customization decisions and the logic behind my choices.

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Introducing Ippsy, The Experimental Javascript Application

A year or so ago I spent a few hours writing an IPv4 subnet calculator in javascript. I didn’t have any real goal, just a desire to play with javascript. I promptly forgot about it. Then a month or so ago I found it again and dusted it back off. I had a lot of fun rewriting it and then… forgot about it again.

After remembering it yet again last night, I decided enough was enough, filed the roughest edges off of it, and posted it:

Ippsy, The Experimental Javascript Application

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Example TestLink XMLRPC Clients in Perl

There are not many good examples floating around of Perl clients for TestLink’s XMLRPC API. There are two examples included with the 1.9.3 source, but they are very brief. I wrote two scripts to support a first-blush attempt at automated test running, and while they will get a lot more refinement over time, I thought abstracted versions of them might be beneficial for others trying to write Perl clients (or in any language – they perl samples were so sparse I largely based my script on the python example).

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Missing TestLink API Function – getExecutionResults()

I have finally come to terms with the TestLink API and have bashed out an automated test runner written in perl (which I hope to clean up and post in the next few days, there don’t seem to be many (or any) examples of this in the wild).

After getting nightly automated testing running, I wanted a very simple script which would, for each test case in a given test plan, compare the last and the second to last result and print a warning if they were different. Long term I will have better automated reporting, but our test script library is still so new that it’s not really news that a lot of them are failing. What would be news is if a specific test case passed two nights ago but failed last night.

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Expect scripts, [exec], and SIGCHLD

I had to debug an expect script that would not run in a specific environment today, and the solution was so frustrating that I had to write it down.

In short, expect’s [exec] functionality requires SIGCHLD to be functional to work correctly. If you have ignored the signal, you get a very nice explanation of why your script has just died. For instance:

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