After a great week in Mountain View with the rest of team I returned to find that not all was well.

When I tried to boot my trusty Dell Precision, nothing happened. Upon inspection, I found the video card had been pushed in and “bent”. I have been assured that no unauthorized vacuuming occurred during my absence, which leaves Miss Kitty as the likely suspect. I tried to re-seat the card to no avail. I think Miss Kitty actually did me a favor since I found a number of capacitors on the motherboard are bulging with “crap” coming out of their tops. I guess I am reaping what I sowed in my last post.

On Monday, I’ll try to find someone who might be able to replace the motherboard and possibly video card for a reasonable price but it looks like I’ll be needing a replacement for my personal computing soon.

PS. If you wish to comment, don’t forget to answer the challenge-response question!

I sit here typing this on a 4+ year old Dell Precision while my trusty 3+ year old IBM Thinkpad stands by waiting for me to hit the road. The Dell has never needed a repair while the Thinkpad has been to the shop once. I like the Thinkpad so much, I even went for the extended warranty when the original 3 year warranty expired.

I’ve been jealous of the really sweet MacBook Pros that I’ve seen other mozillian’s packing and was planning on upgrading both my workstation and laptop to some really killer Macs sometime in the first half of next year. However, I am having second thoughts after seeing the kind of experience others are having.

Norm Walsh has been having problems recently that raised my concerns a bit.
Dave Winer has also been experiencing his share of the pain, but his experience with the Apple Store has left me flabbergasted.

What other choices for a really fast workstation and laptop do I have? For what its worth, I’m running Fedora on both my workstation and laptop and don’t want Windows on either machine. Suggestions very much appreciated.

I updated the DOM Test Suite
to use the latest JsUnit and reran the full set of tests to determine
which assertions are still being fired.

The test results are nothing new from what I can tell and are probably already included in the mochikit
version of the DOM Test suite. The assertions are relatively minor and known.

• Assertion Count

• Test Results with rough location of assertions

Yesterday, Pratap Lakshman of Microsoft announced the publication of the first draft of “JScript Deviations from ES3″

The document covers not only JScript as implemented in IE, but JavaScript as implemented in Firefox, Opera and Safari. This should make for some interesting reading!

Thanks Pratap!

Assert This! - Top Site Assertions, October 27, 2007

No matter where you go, Jesse’s been there already.

During some top site testing of about 7,500 pages with a debug Minefield build on Linux over the weekend, I ran into the following assertions ordered by decreasing count. This should give some idea of the frequency of each in the wild.

My shell account at Dreamhost was compromised and this site was vandalized. It appears this was a wide spread event and a number of other sites hosted at Dreamhost were affected. If you have an account at Dreamhost, I recommend you change your passwords for your shell and email and check your web content for modifications.

I’ve cleaned up the mess (I think). Although as far as I can tell the Spider.xpi was not modified, I have generated a new version of Spider 0.0.2.7 to force an update to any Spider users.

This has been a gumption killing week for me…

Sunday

The network ports on my old Direct Way 4020 Satellite modem died leaving me entirely without a net connection.

Net withdrawal began.

Monday

Told numerous depressing options for replacing dead modem before managing to get the “upgrade” option without resetting my contract period but with a potential 2 business week delay on receiving the new modem.

Tuesday

Over to sister’s to take advantage of the Hughesnet system I got her last year…

Updated her system, downloaded virus|spyware scanners etc, scanned her machine to make sure no spyware, rootkits, bots on the local network.

Hit the new HughesNet Fair Access Policy (FAP) limit on her “consumer” grade account. FAP throttled my connection to about 2KB/s with no recharge for 24 hours.

Wednesday

Scheduled delivery and installation of new HughesNet 7000S Satellite modem for Thursday!

FAP still in effect at sister’s.

Thursday

Satellite modem installed and net withdrawal symptoms receed.

Back to work!

Friday

Desk collapses onto the floor while rearranging office to discourage Miss Kitty from using my desk and possibly causing additional hardware failures. Fortunately only monitors were involved and were not damaged.

Found sturdy tables at Office Depot to use for work surfaces. (Staple’s tables were crap and staff were no help, but Office Depot’s tables were pretty sturdy and the staff ere very helpful. Thanks!).

Finish rearranging office

Backed up laptop across all other machines.

Saturday

Back to work.

Discovered that my mozilla local mail folder had been wiped sometime on Wednesday…

Realized had wiped all good copies of the mozilla local mail folder.

I hope next week is better.

The latest installment of my automated testing saga is now available at Script Framework. This outlines the components that I have been using in automated testing and provides an example where a build is downloaded, installed, a profile created, an extension installed and a simple test that the extension works is performed.

Benjamin Smedberg wrote to point out killableprocess.py which looks like a much more robust tool than timed_run.py. I’ll check it out as a replacement for timed_run.py in my framework as soon as I finish the first round of documentation I have been supposed to write about my test framework since … like … forever.

timed_run.py is a modified version of a Python script written by Chris Cooper that manages the execution of external programs with the ability to terminate programs which do not complete within a specified period of time.