Tampere was also a good venue. Big enough to offer a variety of place to stay, eat and hang around. But not too big as everything was still in walking distance. The Finnish people also showed their strong side of being gentle during the day and party professionals at night. One exemplary experience: while laying in a park on the “day after” some guy who apparently had too much to drink heavily throws up under a tree. As if nothing happens he opens a can of beer, lights a cigarette and walks away.

The only not so nice thing was the trip home: I had been heavily suffering from delayed baggage on several international trips during the last months. Up to a point where people around me started to switch from pity to amusement. Arrived at Helsinki airport one convenient hour before departure. More than enough time for a passenger to get on the plane. Apparently not for luggage. It arrived two days later. Granted, unlike being hit by this on the trip out it’s rather harmless at home. But I was sad about the tasty Finnish bread I imported (illegally?) being rock solid. And annoyed about the temporary shavers I bought emitting Aloe Vera and vitamin E but cutting my face until I looked like a victim in a horror movie.

Why oh why do airlines manage to screw up luggage transport so much? With all those computerized systems in place. Or because of the computers? I had long added Heathrow and Amsterdam on the list of airports to avoid. But Helsinki? I cannot help but feeling that airports accept way more traffic than they should do in order to get the fees by airlines. Airlines follow and accept too ambitious connection plans. Accepting a certain percentage of people and luggage missing their connections.

Advise for those returning from Akademy: get to the airport early. It’s not such a monster but relative to its size it’s absolutely overcrowded with people going on vacation.

Also time to meet up with KDE contributors I still know and time to meet all the new ones in person. I’m also keen on seeing all the new ways to use spare cpu cycles and laptop batteries for impressive eye candy. Plus learning about latest developments from the alive KDEPIM and KOffice front.

Another reason for me going is the love for my mother country Finland. Tampere is just three hours away from the place I stay at almost each summer of my life. To show it I’m skipping the usual “I’m going to Akademy” banner and paste a picture of Lappajärvi which is my favorite of the >187,888 Finnish lakes.

(Found on supertravelnet.com)

I am particularly looking forward to met Alex who has bravely been running our US customer support base. If you are interested in joining her to run our future office in California please talk to her or me.

* as we know from KDE version 4 can easily mean the square of all trouble caused by the Version 2.0 Syndrome

Last week I still was a bit nervous about the Icelandic volcano preventing me from flying over the Atlantic. I had seen pictures of booths remaining empty at the industry fair Hannover Messe because company crews and equipment did not make it there in time. But airlines schedules seem to almost be back to normal now. I’ll be flying with KLM and Martinair and was relieved to see that my airline KLM has people monitoring Facebook and Twitter for cries for help from stranded passengers.

My suite case is not yet packed, yet. I am obviously doing anything to avoid it. But the pile of things to take with me (like bags with sweet green gummi frogs) is slowly reaching its final height.

The other day a prospect asked me to present a demo of Squish for Mac to test a well known online meeting software (Cocoa) running on Mac OS X. The challenge here is that the application can’t be started stand-alone, which is usually required so Squish can start it to load the hook into it allowing Squish to connect to the application for testing (listen to events, access objects and properties).

In this case the application can only be started via a web browser when starting a meeting.

So I walked over to Rainer, our Mac expert, if he had an idea how we could support that. And to my surprise, he just pointed me to the example “injection” which can be found in “examples/mac” in Squish 4.0 Squish/Mac packages.

This example basically contains one script which injects the mac wrapper (the Squish hook for Squish/Mac) into a running process and makes the application attachable for Squish that way. Be aware that you have to first open the script and adopt the SQUISH_BASEDIR variable to point to your Squish installation directly. Also you may change the ATTACHABLE_PORTNUMBER if necessary which is the port to which Squish can then connect to attach to the application.

In addition, before starting the application you want to attach to (or the parent process which may invoke it), make sure to set the environment variable DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the “lib” directory of your Squish package so the Squish libraries will be found.

Now start (or get started) the process you want Squish to attach to later.

Finally run the injectMacWrapper.sh script and just pass the name of the process, as you can find it in the Activity Monitor, as an argument to the script. You will see some output and once it is done, Squish can attach to it at the given port.

Now open the Squish IDE (the new, Eclipse based of course :-)) and go to Squish->Manage AUTs. There add an attachable AUT, choose an arbitrary name and specify the port which you have chosen (or left untouched) in the injectMacWrapper script (specified via ATTACHABLE_PORTNUMBER).

Now you can go ahead and create a new test script and create a skeleton script function such as (assuming JavaScript)


function main()
{
attachToApplication("AttachApp")
snooze(1);
}


where AttachApp is the name you specified as name for the attachable AUT in the Manage AUTs dialog.

Now set a breakpoint on the snooze line and execute the script. When you hit the breakpoint, choose recording, record interactions on the running process and choose end recording.

Using the same method you can insert verifications, use the Spy, insert more recording snippets, etc.

Really a cool feature since it allows to attach to processes which have not been started by Squish or been modified for testing (which is many cases just isn’t possible).

A similar functionality is available in our new “Squish for Windows” edition also combine with other Squish editions so one can e.g. automate a Windows GUI started via Click Once from a web site. Of course also Squish for Qt and Java allow attaching to running applications.

I will talk about these features and cross GUI technology testing more in the next postings.

I started out with Qt Developers Days in Munich on October 14th and 15th. The event had a record-breaking number of attendees I believe and we had many interested potential and also existing users visiting our little Silver sponsor booth. It also proved to be a good opportunity to get to know all the new members of the so called “Qt Development Framework” Nokia unit.

Last week froglogic was present at two tradeshows in parallel: Andreas and Roberto exhibited at Eclipse Summit Europe while Jan and I manned a booth at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG). Jan had a safe and rather short trip there from his home in Austin. I, on the other hand, got stuck in Frankfurt because of heavy fog. Got rebooked onto a flight via London Heathrow on the next day. Of course, my luggage did not make it on the plane so I got to complete my emergency set of toiletries.

My wife and me spent the weekend in San Francisco before the US part of Qt Developer Days takes place. Enjoyed the city which was full of people dressed up for Halloween. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether someone really wore a costume or his normal clothes. Went to a show of the musical Wicked - the “untold” part of the 1900 children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

We now moved down south to the conference hotel. It’s located close to San Francisco International Airport. I am convinced that until Wednesday I’ll be experienced enough to tell one type of airplane from the other. But as a beginner I’ll first concentrate on differ landing from starting planes.

Tomorrow Jan and I will use the opportunity to visit some clients in this area. And right after the conference our partner company ICS will provide an open-enrollment Squish training. So lots of activities before I go home.

It was a nice get-to-gether where everybody introduced himself and where we discussed a bit about how we want it to be in the future. We decided to make the meetings on every first Wednesday of the month. So the next meeting is already next week

ETM use Squish to test their SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) software - PVSS. This software is used for controlling complex industrial and infrastructure systems including traffic tunnels, water treatment plants, subway systems, and the new particle accellerator at CERN.

Read the full story at our website.

To get those details, it is sometimes helpful if you could actually see the functions an application calls. When this need arised on the Mac, I used to use the Activity Monitor which has the ability to sample the application. This is unfortunately not very exact since the samples happen on certain intervals, so you are never sure if the relevant functions are actually sampled.

But Leopard includes the DTrace facility and the graphical frontend Instruments. This allows you to trace a lot of internals of the application, including the functions an application called.

For example you can create in Instruments a new “instrument” that traces all Objective-C calls: simply choose “Build New Instrument…” from the “Instrument” menu and choose the “Probe” of type “Objective-C”. In the dialog I also chose to record the data for “Function” and “Module”. Then just select a target application and press the “Record” button and all the Objective-C calls (including the call stack) are recorded in instruments.

Pretty useful.

But you can also record C function calls: just create a new instrument, this time of type “User Process”. If you record now, you get all the C function calls. This is getting really big really fast (and as a result it the application gets really slow). So what you probably want to do in this case is to limit the functions recorded. I was particularily interested in the functions called in the CoreFoundation framework, so I entered in the line edit after the “hits” text “CoreFoundation” and now the instrument only records functions called in that framework.

Since acquiring Trolltech, Nokia is really pushing Qt to all kinds of platforms and devices. This perfectly makes sense considering the gains of having to create the GUIs only once for all different platforms and devices (desktop and embedded) by using the Qt framework.

Historically, and also when looking at our revenue statistics, the Qt market is very important for us. Our automated GUI test tool Squish, which supports testing several GUI technologies such as Qt, Java GUIs, Web, etc. is the leading tool when it comes to automated Qt GUI testing.

We have several customers in the embedded Qt space already. Due to the recent push from Nokia’s side, we decided to offer more dedicated support and resources in this area.

So today we announced that we officially support testing Qt GUIs on the Maemo platform using Squish

In the near future we will add Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile to the list of supported platforms as well.

The event was well attended and almost 30 users groups and projects presented their agenda, work in progress and meeting details. Among them were representatives from Open Streep Map, Ruby on Rails, OpenSolaris, Chaos Computer Club, working groups of local universities and Scribus. The sidux project handed out freshly burnt CDs of their distribution based on Debian unstable featuring KDE 4.2. Being invited for a short address in our function as a company sponsor I used the opportunity to call for all local KDE developers to come forward and unite. Everyone I got to talk to afterwards had reverted to version 3.5 though and currently wasn’t in the mood for any experiments.

Everyone sitting through the presentation marathon was rewarded with a buffet and drinks being served afterwards. A good opportunity to network with members of other groups. The presentations were taped on video as well as recorded by makers of NerdAlert - a show aired by the free local radio station FSK who also conducted individual interviews. So one can expect some online and on-air coverage appearing in the next days.