I did a presentation for the Houston Java User Group on February 24 - FWIW, the slides are the same as my presentation at Agile Austin.

Last week, during a break at the Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability 2010, we sat down with our very own Gary Beerman, one of the newest members of the AlertSite management team. Gary shared some exciting details of our new, highly interactive, and customizable customer dashboard, which we'll be permanently rolling out to all customers sometime next week.

The 2010 Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability Conference came to a close yesterday afternoon with everyone exhausted from three days of networking and demonstrating the power and utility of our Web performance monitoring solutions to attending retailers and customers. For those of you who couldn't make it, I thought I'd share some photos from the event. Check out some shots of Disney (not that we had much time to be tourists), the conference venue, our company booth, and our employees hard at work. View our Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability Conference 2010 Flickr slideshow here, or by clicking on the image below.

This weekend was Valentine's weekend, and if that's news to you than you are probably in the dog house for forgetting! The National Retail Federation’s holiday data predicted 35.6 percent of consumers would be purchasing flowers for Valentine's Day.

Code Collaborator has a bunch of cool scripting features.  One useful scripting technique is to get information from the server using the 'wget' utility. 

Back in August I posted an entry on how our peer code review tool had met the requirements for the Ready for IBM Rational program. Specifically, the integration that Code Collaborator provides with Rational ClearCase was validated.

Many tests are positive: they check that an application accepts valid data and processes it correctly. A negative test checks whether the application handles improper user behavior correctly. For instance, a positive test would be to open the File | Save As dialog in a text editor, enter a valid file name and then confirm the file was saved successfully. A negative test would be to open the File | Save As dialog, enter an invalid file name or path and check whether the application handles this invalid input data properly. If a developer has not anticipated this situation, the application will crash. So, it's important to use both positive and negative testing approaches when testing your application.

As reported yesterday by Forbes.com, Twitter was inundated with Tweets during the New Orleans Saints Super Bowl victory on Sunday, ultimately leading to rocky site performance and a few sightings of the fail whale. As demonstrated by our own performance monitors, the site experienced drops in availability at times corresponding to scores or major plays by the Saints. Interestingly enough, the Indianapolis Colts did not have a similar affect on the microblogging site.

Starting next Monday, Feb. 15, until Wednesday, Feb. 17, we'll be exhibiting at the 2010 Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability Conference at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando, Fla. The conference is geared toward anyone responsible for the development and sales performance of retail Web sites. It explores common Web design and performance issues, and gives attendees practical tips for improving online sales with better, more reliable Web designs.

The crux of the controversy over network neutrality is really a power struggle between the providers of the networks, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), that provide consumers access to the Internet, and the providers of Web sites, services and content ("Web content"), that we all want to access.

 Roy Paterson can be credited for making our Eclipse integration as
great as it is. He's also a very fun guy, usually being one of the
masterminds behind the crazy antics around the office. When you hear
laughter in our cave, you can bet Roy's there. Whether he's juggling
with a wacky hat, or helping a customer with Code Collaborator, he's a
blast to have around!

We were pretty excited last week when the super bookmarking capabilities of DéjàClick were featured on MakeUseOf.com and Lifehacker.

Cloud computing and cloud testing are gaining popularity in small and mid-size software companies. These technologies allow you to use almost unlimited computing resources to test your web, client/server and network applications. We decided to publish a series of articles discussing cloud testing and describing how to use TestComplete for this. Here is the first article in the series:

Jim Bethancourt has been running the Houston Java Users Group (HJUG) for a few years now. I first got to know Jim when he asked me to do a presentation on Java memory leaks.