A moody Monday marked the week’s morn but fantastic Friday forecasts fun with friends for finishing the first week of November. After a wonderful weekend of Halloween and Saints Day, I was optimistic to return to work and solve the riddle of test 3x. But bad winds made progress slow. See if you can follow the story:
The QUAIL methods we had finished and ready for use did not appear to be sufficient to construct a message monitor for PItoPI. While Pam is charged with adding server-style error message logging to UniInt, currently there is no direct way to tap into the UniInt message log. So I set out to find a work-around to monitoring interface activity from the output messages. At the same time, this week my test stations decided to complain. The main test station tested my patience with the long periods of unresponsiveness in Visual Studio. Not only did the test runs tie up the CPU so much that Window-Eyes stopped talking, every time the mouse cursor moved between the windows within the Visual Studio program, I was forced to wait up to 20-30 seconds before speech would continue. This naturally makes debugging and reviewing test outputs extremely annoying. So, on Julie’s recommendation, I set off to tackle the performance problem. The simple starting point was to install PerfMon, the Performance Monitor Interface and configure the tags for monitoring the wineyes, gwm32 and speech processes, along with the VSTS process and system resource counters. Indeed PerfMon proved a ten-fold spike while running the tests. But the question still remained what to do to fix it. So the quest shifted towards the software and hardware condition and possible upgrades. Indeed upgrades were available, both to the core and as add-on scripts. We approved the necessary software upgrades from GW Micro and Freedom Scientific and got the latest version of WE (7.11) installed. Then I found user scripts to enhance the functionality. Between all these changes, the performance did seem to improve enough so that by Friday, I could run the tests that were previously problematic. The inspiration came Wednesday and Thursday on how to design the monitor I needed for the message log. Yet there was still something wrong. Spending Friday morning at home in peace and quiet provided the concentration to do a full line-by-line code review in Text Pad. Come to find out, a couple chunks of code were actually missing from the third PItoPI test script, rendering it dysfunctional. The most significant two were the TestWorkingArea creator block and part of the inner logic of the message parser. Updating the code in Text Pad before running a debug in VSTS worked great. In debugging, I was pleased to find that the error messages finally were reading better. Soon the test was scrubbed and behold it worked! Now I have a functional message monitor, the basis of a couple more calls that we will eventually add to QUAIL.
So just as the code cleaned up by Friday, this week the testing suite also got cleaned up on the hardware side. The IT folks came down to help straighten up my whole work station now that I have rolling cubbies for the test machines under the desk. So now at last the cables are in order and my work area is again spacious. The only remaining task from Nicole’s list is installation of the desk drawer. With the IT inspector’s verification, the only casualties were QA Machine #1 and #2. For two weeks I have attempted to revive the dying dinosaur that served so well for a year as my home work station. But alas, it became clear the hardware was failing when sufficient memory was no longer available to run speech. So Rachael took the drive to spool off the data directly. QA#2 is officially retired and dead. QA#1 followed in its footsteps when the boot-up error came up that a chip failure had been experienced. Well, of the five systems I got a year ago, now only two remain. We’ll see how long they last.
So with the week finishing on a clean note at work, the excitement has mounted for a wonderful weekend. For Jiana has arrived! A weekend of fun now begins as we explore the treasures of the East Bay and our literary and musical endeavors. You’ve got to love the guitar!