Hiccupps

The other week I found myself locked out of our shed and subsequently learned more than I ever expected to about Yale locks, or night latches as I now know they're called. The image at the top is a pretty standard night latch. It is opened from the outside with a key and from the inside with the handle. The latch (the gold tongue on the top left image) is sprung, which means that simply closing the door will push the latch onto the striker plate and into the box (both top right), locking it.  A deadlock which stops the latch from moving can be applied from the inside using the button (or, more correctly, the snib ). Night latches are an old technology, insecure, and make it easy to accidentally lock yourself out. The snib helps with the last of these by being able to hold the latch back inside the body of the lock. This means that even if the door closes, the latch can't engage and the door remains unlocked. Which is nice to know, but my problem was that I couldn't get in ...

David Högberg tagged me on a thread about teams in the Rapid Software Testing Slack the other day. I've paraphrased the conversation here: Our team has expanded to include groups working on many different products. I'm thinking of starting a Testing Community of Practice with a Slack channel and perhaps a monthly meeting. I'd like to share things like articles, how we test our applications, interesting bugs, what we've learned, the business problems our products solve, who our users are, and so on. Looking for thoughts, ideas, advice, articles, etc. I've spoken to David about this stuff in the past, and I'm an agreeable kind of chap, so I started listing some of the things my team at Linguamatics has done over the years until it became apparent that I had quite a lot to say and I'd be better off typing it up in a proper editor and posting it somewhere other than Slack. So here it is. -- 00 -- Our setup is a little different to the scenario above in that w...

This week I wanted to monitor several pieces of software that talk to one another via HTTP and HTTPS. All are running on the same machine, three are Linux services, and one is a standalone script. I was interested in being able to see all of the communications between them in one place, in time order. I know a couple of ways of capturing this kind of data: proxying and network sniffing .  My default approach would be to have the applications configured to proxy via Fiddler running on my laptop inside the work network. Easy, right? Err, no, because I had forgotten that the machine in question is on a network that isn't considered secure and firewalls prevent that connection. In my proof of concept experiment, the standalone script just hung failing to find the proxy I had specified. Interesting behaviour, and I later reported it, but not what I needed right then. Next! As all of the software is on the same machine, capturing network traffic int...