A tip from Sandy:

"Here's something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1. Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
* network.http.pipelining
* network.http.proxy.pipelining
* network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.
If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages 2-3 times faster now."

I've found this great site:
www.outofservice.com/starwars/
... where you can work out you starwars twins.

Here's my results/twins:
My Star Wars Twins

I've dug out and dusted down my old laptop, with a slighly damaged screen - that's okay i only need it for OS installation.

Fedora Core 2 won't go on it, as there's only 16Meg of RAM, so I'm going to have a go with Slackware 10.0 which I got on the cover of Linux Fomat magazine. The usual problems with mastering a new OS but I think I've got it installed now. I don't need any graphical packages, so I went though Advanced Setup and removed
everything with 'x' in the name. I added Apache, PHP and MySQL - my prefered Webserver/Scripting/DB combo and I have my machine ready. TCL also for any shell scripting.

The Task
To switch the central heating system in my house on and off remotely.
So I need to figure out how to actually switch a relay (serial connection?)
Then an interface... PHP seems the obvious choice, but it won't talk to devices, so I'll glue the PHP script to the serial device with a TCL script or two.
As I'm not always at browser and I get GPRS for free with my mobile phone provider, I hope to us the (Not yet dead) WML language which my Nokia 6310i supports. WAP is lightweight and will do for a few on off switches.

Serial switches->TCL->PHP->WML

....watch this space.

We've got a few copies of Rational Robot and a '5 Pooled Virtual Tester Pack' to allow us to us an addtional 5 Test Agents.

Having requested the key for the Virtual Tester pack to go on our FlexLM license server 'dobbing'. Pointing the Rational Key Administrator at our FlexLM server resulted in this:


However when I tred to execute a test suite on more than one remote machine, i.e. using one of the pack of 5 licenses it gave this error message:
Failed to check out the necessary licenses. MC_29_5_1

After having no success searching the manual and web, I contacted our supplier who provided this link: www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss MASSIVE URL

Then on the licence server we looked at the long list of PACKAGE lines from the link above and chose just this one:

PACKAGE TMvtpool rational 8.0 FE4376C9DEE0
COMPONENTS="TMvirtualtester:8.0:5"

The TMvtpool in this one matched the INCREMENT line in the key we recieved from Rational, so it seemed the most likely one, although it would seem to make more sense if the TMvtpool was in the COMPONENTS with the package being called TMvirtualtester.

Success
An additional license was checked from the pool aand I can now have Agent on various windows platforms all ready to execute tests - providing I don't use more that 6 at a time.
Q. Why six and not 5?
A. 5 from the pool and 1 from my copy of Rational Robot.

The Rational License Key Manager now looks like this:


Why can I find rational help via the web?
Their URLs are so long I'm sure search engine bots will ignore them or treat them as recursive.

Did you know you can run install shield's setup.exe silently at the command line using:
setup -s??

It's also possible to configure setup files to repeat setups in the same way.

More information here:
http://www.appdeploy.com/tips/detail.asp?id=18