micro status / pair programming / parking

My new strategy keeps status messages very short. The limit is
 one main idea, one funny story and (ideally) one screen of text.
 As JG observes, short and frequent works for Seth:[1]
 
 MD finished a MS in CS at UML in December. She has a year to gain
 practical experience and hunt a H1B visa [2]. To remain in the
 country she needs to be working or volunteering. This week, my
 mornings were spent pair programing[3] on MVhub. (yay!)
 
 As a bonus, MD fixed the parking issue. Our official university
 contact said he couldn't get us a permit. Despite my pessimism,
 MD asked the parking people directly for a permit and got it. No
 special juice required. (yay!)
 
 So far, we've made a bunch of small, useful tweaks. For example,
 the automated clicking and typing tests now work on the main
 development server. (http://mvh.omacneil.testing123.net). Before
 they ran only on my laptop.
 
 We are focused on the  automated tests because they found more
 bugs and are simpler to write than the unit tests [4] we've
 written. We're using Test::WWW::Mechanize, which is great once
 you realize you have to $mech->get($url) before you can
 $mech->submit_form_ok(%params);
 
 We're working to pull test data (buttons to push, text to type
 into fields,etc) out of the Perl and into easy to read data
 files. This is not as easy as one would think. For example: XML
 isn't human readable. There are 39 pages of results for the
 google query "xml sucks". I've asked the monks for guidence.[5]
 
 [1]
 http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/03/direct-from-consumer-marketing.html
 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming
 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H1B_visa
 [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_testing
 [5] http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=748952
 
 
 SHORT (tech) PROJECTS for the helpful
 1) Run the all servers first checklist on Lenny running under xen
 1a) Investigate xen / AMD64 / Lenny compatitbility
 2) Investigate launchpad vs trac
 3) Investigate svk vs bzr
 4) get backuppc running