FrogBlog

Travelling by plane is getting a bigger nuisance each year. Airports accepting more flights and passengers than they can logistically handle and excessive and repeated security checks causing long waiting lines and missed flights. The sight (and personal feeling) of passengers being shooed through check points by shouting security personnel reminds me of a cattle drive.

When taking off shoes and belts for x-raying became common practise I had half-jokingly predicted that soon one would have to walk through checks completely naked. Little did I know that makers of security devices and airports had already been working on that. Just recently discussions in the EU Commission made the news as so called see-through scanners were being considered for all EU airports. See
this picture. Given the severe invasion of privacy by looking at every passenger effectively naked there were quite some protests and the Commission had put their plans on hold. At least for now.

I was reminded of this topic when passing through a check point at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport yesterday. The gate looked different to what I have seen before and the need to be locked in, turn sideways and stand still with hands raised was obviously odd. With my hand luggage and belt already being sucked into the x-ray machine and my plane home departing soon I saw no alternative than passing through the humiliating check as well. Curious to what this was about I asked the personnel whether this was one of the devices under current discussion and likely to be banned. Got quite an enraged answer back questioning whether I would seriously believe to find anything illegal in use at an international airport.

I looked at the monitor the operating crew was using while the next person passed the check. Didn’t see any offending picture there so I put this off as regular yes/no scanner looking for metal or other
potentially dangerous material. A day later I looked this topic up on the Net and learnt that it is actually old news. Schiphol has been using two see-through scanners for over a year now and Australian and US airports have introduced them recently, too. Images are being inspected in a remote room which is why I did not see any. Officials claim there have been few complaints but do passengers really know what is done with them? In case there was any warning sign it must have been too small or hidden. A sample picture of a scanned person would do a good job I think. EU Commissioners have stated that one cannot be forced to by checked by such scanners but I cannot confirm the right to opt out. When the personnel upon questioning did not tell me about my right to have a regular check in another line this makes my wonder about their fidelity or training.

Now I don’t think that the examining officers get a big thrill from watching thousand of pictures of naked people every day. Possibly quite the opposite. One can easily imagine stupid comments being made, though. What remains is the overstepping of a line of privacy for every passenger without any concrete suspicion. And all this for a false sense of security. Scientist Peter Siegel has pointed out[1] that rubber or any other skin-like material still allows for hiding things. And anyone wishing something evil happening to airplane passengers will find it much easier to smuggle in things through hand
baggage, bribing underpaid airport personnel or using a rocket launcher on the ground. The number of possible attacks to human life is in fact so big that there is no way to protect against all of them. And governments are doing nothing but protect against weaknesses exploited in the past. The next evildoer (number unknown, certainly small compared to the world’s population) will just chose another option as can be seen from the recent attack in Mumbai has shown. Meanwhile we are ruining everyone’s freedom and every day life and effectively making “them” win already.

I found a good posting by security expert Bruce Schneier that talks about these problems[2]. He assesses a “diminished return of investment”. The picture that this Independent article[3] paints for
2011 has mostly become true already.

[1] http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20080606/a_bodyscan06.art.htm
[2] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/airport_passeng.html
[3] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/flying-with-fear-the-future-of-air-security-412643.html

When I commute to work I typically listen to podcasts. My favorite podcast is Chaosradio Express, a podcast in German about technology (often with social aspects on it as well). In its latest episode Moderne Webentwicklung Tim Pritlove (the host of the podcast) talks with the two developers of Soup.

Soup is a Tumblelog and they explain in the beginning that the concept of a tumblelog is to propagate really short blogs. To cut a story short: the problem I have with writing blogs is that i don’t feel like writing full-fledged articles all the time (I am a somewhat lazy person). But now I realize that it is not needed at all and I plan to write more often blog entries with some short info or tips (they won’t be as short as tumblelogs, though).

So stay tuned. This blog is not dead (although it almost looks like it is from the frequency of articles lately).

We returned from the first of two Trolltech Developer Day’s events on Friday evening. There surely are many theories on how to best fight the jet lag but I dediced to simply do what my body asked for and gave in on any of the sudden urges to sleep that attacked me over the weekend.

London Heathrow airport was less crowded than during the summer but waiting lines were still long enough to be annoying and shortage of ground crew caused delays on take-off. I find it very much irresponsible of both airlines and airports to schedule more flights via a hub that it can obviously handle. Will try even harder next time to avoid this route.

The Silicon Valley stay itself was very much worth it. Met with several existing customers and prospects on their premises and at the conference. The exhibition area was well positioned with respect to the talks, meals and fresh air enabling an effective still relaxed contact with attendees. Our Qt programming quiz turned out to be more challenging than intended. The winner of the Nintendo DS Lite game console was drawn out of only five partipants that got it right!

Same procedure as every year: we are preparing everything for our appearance at the Trolltech Developer Days in California and Munich, Germany. This year Frerich will join me for the trip to Redwood City and Rainer will go down to Munich with Reggie.

We’ll be conducting a quiz again. The prize will be a gaming device the winner can take home at the end of day two. Last year’s prime number riddle was way too easy so we made things a bit tougher this time. We decided to challenge the participant’s Qt knowledge a little bit. I say “a little bit” because we’ll use an eased version of the original. The first one didn’t pass internal testing with zero correct answers handed in.

As we are already travelling through the Bay Area we’ll use the opportunity to visit some of our customers on site to gather some feedback, demo new features and provide help. It’s nice to be able to get from one customer to another with only a few minutes car ride between. Frerich insisted on renting a Hummer for this purpose but I feared bad press giving the UN climate change convention that is taking place in New York right now.

Please drop by at our “booth”, say hello, take part in the quiz and grab one of those ultra-sweet gummi frogs we’ll have with us.

Yesterday we attended the Java Forum Stuttgart (JFS), a Java conference organized by the Java User Group Stuttgart e.V. We had a booth there where we presented Squish and I also gave a talk.

Lately we have been to quite a few conferences. The JFS really was one of the best organized conferences we have been to. The attendees were really technical and automated GUI testing was of big interest. We got a lot of interest at our booth so that at times people had to wait while Frerich and I answered questions of other visitors. From the questions we got we could judge that our visitors had seriously thought about automated GUI testing before and real concrete interest.

I also gave a talk which was well attended as well and ended with many interesting and good questions.

I really also need to say a few words about the excellent organization. At my talk I was heartly welcomed, got help with the setup and a moderator introduced me to my audience. At other conferences I have been to, nobody from the origanizers was present at the talks and I as the presenter had to do everything myself which always feels a bit odd.

Also one thing I really appreciated was that there was a separate lunch for exhibitors before the official lunch for the visitors. Why is this so great? During the breaks (coffee, lunch, etc.) people walk the floor and visit the booths. So those are really the times where you HAVE to be at the booth. This means you usually get no chance to eat lunch during the lunch break because you are busy talking to visitors and the catering service removes anything eatable immediately after the break. So it was great to have a good and relaxed lunch for the first time and a conference

In summary, it was a well-done conference and we’ll surely be there next year again.

Oh, and as it turns out, the taxi drivers in Stuttgart really like to talk a LOT. It was really entertaining but I also enjoyed the silence in the taxi we took back from the airport in Hamburg at the end of the day

In two days our company froglogic will have it’s 4th anniversary. The past 4 years have been very exciting times for us.

Harri and I started the company in July 2003 (the hottest summer I can remember), after just having relocated to Hamburg. At this time the economy was still rather bad and I remember some pessimistic comments from the lady at the counter when we registered the company.

We started by working out of a small room in Harri’s apartment and our only start-up investment were 2 computers so we could start developing Squish. I coincidently found a design overview document of Squish which I wrote back then, so I thought I could as well post it here as attachment

We continued working in this setting for quite a while and it was good to see that Squish (for Qt only at this time) really started taking off in spring/summer 2004. Beginning of 2005 we felt confident enough that Squish will keep growing, so we finally moved into small offices and hired our first employee in May 2005.

The number of employees, our revenue and profit kept growing organically and we moved into bigger offices around Easter 2006. At this time we also started extending Squish for more technologies, such as Web testing and Java testing.

In a month we will move into new offices yet again since Harri and I had to move into the conference room already due to too little space in our current office.

I’m looking forward to the coming years and further growth. I’d also like to take the chance to thank all our customers, users and partners for their support and trust in us in the name of the froglogic team.Squish DesignSquish Design

Most programmers have a favorite beverage they like and need for programming. For some it is coffee and for others it is some cola brand. I was never one of these: I always preferred tea over coffee (and I know quite a bunch who prefer tea as well).

Here at froglogic’s office, people really like Bionade. I never liked it. But luckily our supplier recently ran out of it and it was not available when Harri was doing his order. So he tried something new: Club-Mate

The correct pronounciation of it seems to be the “German” way, i.e. [ˈklup ˈmaːtə] and not the English way [’klʌb meɪt]. The reason is that Mate has nothing to do with English word for a friend, but with the South American mate tea. And Club-Mate is basically an ice-tea variant made of mate tea.

Well, to make a long story short: I am now addicted to this stuff. The first sip I did was awful, but after finishing the first bottle I reluctantly tried a second one. And after that, I started to really enjoy it. This seems to be quite common: somewhere on the web I read that it is like starting to smoke — nobody enyojed the first cigarette either. (But the good thing of Club-Mate seems to be that it is rather healthy, contrary to cigarettes.)

The good thing is that only Harri and me got around the first sip and nobody else in the office is enjoying it. So we don’t run out of it that often. But just now I am drinking the last bottle, hoping that Harri placed an order for more.

Oh, I just notice that my build finished. So back to work for me. And what is your favorite beverage for programming?

Today’s the third, and last, day of our stay at the Webinale Conference. Squish is still a rather new and unknown contender in the AJAX world but it turned out that this is not a disadvantage. In fact, the whole scene is moving so quickly that there’s always something new (sometimes useless and over-hyped, sometimes interesting) and something else is outdated.

One nice thing about this conference is that even though there are a few vendors of AJAX Toolkits here, and lots of talks about how to write proper web applications, nobody cares about testing those GUIs yet. We’re the only ones to tackle that topic and hence get a very good amount of attention here by the visitors. Reggie’s talk was also received very well and even though the conference is rather smallish (this is the first year it’s taking place), we managed to get hold of a good number of leads (which, by the way, are of rather high quality - most people here already thought about testing, tried other testing solutions, and are generally everything but new to the topic).
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In about 3 hours, Frerich and I will fly to Stuttgart for the Webinale 07 conference - a two-day German Ajax/Web 2.0 conference and exhibition.

We will man a booth there to show off Squish 3.2 (specifically the Web edition). Tomorrow (May 22nd) at 10:30 I will give a talk on automated Web/Ajax testing where I will talk about the experience we gained on this topic and what to look out for when automating Web tests.

So if you are at the Webinale, make sure to drop by our booth at least for an infameous gummy frog!

Today we finally switched to Subversion as our revision control system at work. After using CVS for about ten years, the list of things we didn’t like about it became long enough to justify switching to something different.

At first it wasn’t quite clear what that “something different” would be; many KDE people (mainly from the Linux camp) suggested to use Git but that’s a no-go for us (we need our revision control system to work on Windows as well), leaving aside that some people here would probably rather walk over broken glass than adjusting their work style.

Since we’ve been using Subversion for quite some time at KDE, and we know that it feels very much like CVS (minus the annoying things), it came as a natural choice. First attempts to convert our internal repository went very well, and now - with the switch being final - many scripts which were developed as little side projects to KDE, such as ’svnlastchange’, become useful to us, too.

And I don’t have to do the mental switch between svn and cvs all the time when moving between the office and home.

The biggest advantage Subversion gave me so far is related to merging patches: I have different checkouts for different Squish branches (one for 3.2, one for HEAD^H^H^H^Htrunk, et cetera) and very often I’m committing something to one checkout and then want to merge the same patch to the other checkout. I wrote a little script for that called ‘ilc’ (for ‘integratelastchange’ ;-)) which makes that very easy. With that script I can just do


$ cd ~/src/squish/trunk
// .. Hack away ..
$ svn ci foo
Sending foo
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 12000.
$ ilc 12000 ../32-branch


And that’s it. However, I’d like to get rid of the revision number argument so that when the script is invoked with just one argument, it will always integrate the revision which I just checked in. Unfortunately the different types of revisions (COMMITTED and BASE and PREV and whatnot) confuse me a bit, I couldn’t find the right one yet.

Maybe some reader knows how to do that?

Even if that can’t be solved, I can now hardly imagine how we managed to survive this long with CVS on KDE.