Google to Bid 700 Mhz Spectrum

Release: Google Will Apply to Participate in FCC Spectrum Auction

Yay! Hope the new kid wins the bid. The playing fields is crowded by gangs of bullies.

Rainy Friday

Dashboard-NGS EOP
Conduct a small Dashboard-NGS EOP load test: sending 100 messages as quick as possible until the messages are queued and measure the time for the system to process all 102 packets and create the accompanying 385 packets.

Determined that it takes 6 seconds to process 1 message. Roughly the same to create the corresponding 385 packet.

eDoc SS combination search
Researching into result not found problem, looking at the log: the reason behind not finding the result POST ST DIRECTION equals to NE, it should be W. Implement screen capture after picklist action to see if the pick list action is being executed properly.

Also:

1. Researching into exiting WR when encountering context sensitive error.
2. IE Certificate error screen keeps poping up and WR doesn't handle it consistently, need to find a way to disable the sucker.

Chat Noir

From boing2: Chat Noir


Beware ... It is highly addictive.

Tires For Highlander

245/55P19
2007-11-30,Sears @ South Coast, Bridgestone, 180$

Jammed at 5 Freeway

This is the worst sigalert I have experienced in LA. Since it is raining in the morning and it hasn't been raining for a month, the roads are extremely slick. KPCC says: 'rash of accidents' happens. On I-5 south, around 3rd St exit in Santa Ana, an 18 wheelers and 4 cars tangled. It made such a mess, CHP has to close all of the lanes.

The are forced to open the HOV lane 1 hour later, to let people pass since the firemen haven't been able to retrieve a man stuck under the flatbed.

I missed the opening from I-5 to Main St exit when I came to full stop, and I have to slog for 2 miles in 1 hour (imagine that 2 mph @ 6 AM) to exit at the next ramp.

There goes my day, instead of 1 hour commute, I have to do it in 2.5 hours.

Links:
LaTimes.com
OCRegister.com

We are staying in Simi Valley tonight

Amazon Mechanical Turk for QA?

Researching into Amazon Mechanical Turk for QA purposes. I am getting tired of automated testing effort.

Something Is Really Wrong With eDoc Script

I parsed some log files this morning and sensed something is really wrong with the eDoc SS script execution, but there no time to inspect the execution, analysis of the EOP load test needs to be conducted too.

Give Me The Last X Records Ordered by These Criteria

While writing a script to analyze application log, written into Oracle database, I found that it is fairly hard to get the last X records using rownum after the records are ordered based on certain criteria.

Trupti Rajparia says:

[...] one should be careful when using the Order By clause along with Rownum. When Order By is used with Rownum to restrict query results, it works only if Ordered By is the primary key of the table.

Since I am not a great fan of PL/SQL (clunky POS), I decided to use Perl instead to slice and dice the matching criteria.

1. Get the INDEXED_CRITERIA from Oracle

SELECT
   INDEXED_CRITERIA
FROM logTable
WHERE
   filter criteria
ORDER BY
   INDEXED_CRITERIA


2. Get the last X INDEXED_CRITERIA (easily processed by Perl with three standard functions)
   

push each INDEXED_CRITERIA into array tempA
pop the last X records from array tempA into array tempB.
produce CRITERIA_TEXT by joining tempB with ',' as separator


3. Get the data from Oracle
   

SELECT
   REQUIRED_FIELDS
FROM logTable
WHERE
   CRITERIA_TEXT are met
ORDER BY
   INDEXED_CRITERIA


4. Process the data returned.

The Fixed Phone Has Died, Long Life Cell Phone

From The Economist: although the publisher hasn't proclaimed the death of fixed phone, I believe we know where the trends are going.

Slogging Along

Monday morning: Analyze and submit the test result of DEX Broker load test for November 2007 MS security patch.

Starter Search Combination test is launched at the end of Tuesday. After updating the downloadLogFile.pl script. Apparently the log filename renaming scheme when rolling for Maia framework is starterSearch1.log, starterSearch2.log, etc, with base file name of starterSearch0.log. This is an exception from the normal behavior of base file name X with rolling name of X.1, X.2 ...

Wednesday: Time to parse the log ... Write little script to pull logging information from the database. Need this to in order to plot the time needed between 102 and 385 packet creation.

N810: The GPS System May Not Be So Hot - Afterall

Freeman fished this article out from Arstechnica titled: Nokia N810: unboxing and first impressions.

Bad news:

• Free mapping software is disappointingly limited.
• Commercial mapping software (WayFinder) offers 36 months license. And it will be available this December
• Skype is inoperable.
• No FM radio
• No swiveling camera (for taking picture and video conference)

Unknown:

• GPS signal quality
• Power consumption with mapping software running.
  

The review of N800 cobbled GPS system itself is not very flattering. Now, should I march on with N810 or wait for the next generation of N800 with WiMax and GPS? I guess it depends on how expensive the WayFinder mapping software.

Verizon Wireless To Introduce ‘Any Apps, Any Device’ Option For Customers In 2008

Release: Verizon Wireless To Introduce ‘Any Apps, Any Device’ Option For Customers In 2008

What a baloney: any device that talks CDMA for sure. This only a ploy to get into the 700 Mhz game.

Preliminary EOP Load Test

Add finishing touch to the Dashboard-NGS project:

1. Add several bad packets (e.g.: invalid date, office code, transaction type)
2. Load test
3. Finding out why not all of the bad packets are not being logged to the database: to my horror, I found out that the dev inserts date and time into 2 separate DATE fields. The date information is inserted to one DATE field and the time portion into another one. It is not the inefficiency that irks me but the time portion is filled with mixture of 1970-1-1, 1900-1-1 or whatever as the date of the time. Sloppy code.

We are waiting for the final build for now.

BB8830?

It is a hassle to install software to simulate data modem on BB 7520 so I am looking into getting a new gear. Debbie informed me that upgrading to BB 8830 with tethered data costs USD 199.00 with no additional monthly payments. I am thinking hard now ....