Paris and the culture shock!

Have you really planned well? Think again, if you don't speak French, you can easily get lost here. After buying like what seemed to be the train tickets to Paris from an automated machine, we accidentally disabled them by walking in out of the ticket protected area of the station! oh boy! €17 down the drain? The people at the kiosk were kind enough to speak English, we were on our way!

The metro system is really good - but only after you get a hang of it. The tickets that we bought were supposed to take us all the way downtown, but not knowing that we were trying to buy a transfer ticket when a proactive old man saw us blank faced at the ticket counter and set us on the right course before we boarded the subway! The people are very nice too! Thanks mystery old man, you saved us some money and a lot of time.

The noise level is amazing, like New York! People are loud and happy - on the subway, on the street, in the cafe! It really reminds me more of Bangalore atmosphere than anywhere else. The subways and the streets are crowded, with tons of people everywhere. Living in the US, we had forgotten how it feels to be surrounded by so many people. Even though we had read about all of this, experiencing it is a whole different matter altogether.

Smoking is as common as chewing gum! Out of the airport, the smell of smoke is everywhere. Both of us being non-smokers, it was a bit overwhelming. The crowded cafes where the tables are so close that if you are not careful, you can knock a glass on the next table (well, Madhu actually did that :) ), it is hard to ignore the smoke right next to you!

People sit at the restaurants for hours, enjoying each others company, with no sense of urgency whatsoever! This was a nice change from our regular lives where going to a restaurant was really just to eat!

We are really liking Paris so far.

And off we go!

Sept 3rd '10 6pm, finally the much anticipated time has arrived, and we are all packed and ready. Can't wait for the flight crew to start boarding and fly out way to Paris.

Paris, Rome, Venice, Pisa - the names that I had heard so many times in my history lessons, and have seen gazillion pictures over the years - The dream is about to come true, and we will be there in person, watching the magnificence of European history (okay, I really mean food) and contemporary culture.

To soak up as much culture as possible, we have decided against driving in Europe. Taking trains all the way, and traveling in public transport should give us a chance to interact with the people, and force us to eat when we are hungry at the local restaurants.

That does not mean that we did not plan! Oh, believe me, we planned like there was no tomorrow. Walking into a strange country may not all be very romantic if we are stranded on the streets looking for a hotel. We have a few long distance trains booked, all the hotel rooms are ready and not to mention the flight to get us to Paris and back to San Francisco from Vienna. It was a long and hard task, one which should not be taken lightly if you are planning such a trip.

I hear the metro system is one of the best in Paris, and we are somehow fairly confident that we can find our way around in France and Italy. We know a few phrases, and we have read about a few gotchas. I completely understand it when people say that French people are easily offended when you start speaking to them in English. It is fair for them to expect foreigners to attempt speak in their native language first, before switching to English. So, I know I have to politely ask if they speak English before I blabber along my question about where the train station is! "Je parle peu le français, parlez-vous anglais?" (Don't quote me on this, my confidence level is as good as translate.google.com)

Seriously, why don't they board already? Signing off!

Estimating and deciphering your Amazon Web Services bills

We started using amazon web services at SpikeSource, and a large machine running in one of the zones just went unnoticed until our monthly bill!

The monthly bill told me that I had run a large machine on the west zone for 110 hours - didn't tell me when! There are no controls on amazon to setup alerts to check if "I have left the lights on"

The usage reports that amazon lets you download have cryptic codes that is not easily understood by just staring at the csv (or xml) - Example below.

Now, it would have been nice if amazon provided me with a better idea on when and where my money went! Something like the graph below would be fantastic!

Amazon does not do that, but we do! These are some screen-shots from our SpikeSource's awswatch service. This service is completely free, and gives you a overall picture of your spendings by the hour, for as long as amazon provides you the usage report for.

You can also monitor your images for cpu, memory, data transfer and disk usage.

If you need a simple cost estimate, we have the simplest calculator you can find to give you a ball-park figure for your

Head on over to http://awswatch.spikesource.com/ and try our service, let us know what you think - It is FREE!

TestGen4Web: A million downloads and counting

Today, my TestGen4Web moved past a million download mark on our developer website. It has come a long way since the original idea of just automating your actions on the browser.

To mark the occasion, Calvin got me ten '100 Grand' chocolate bars :)

A quick word about what the tool does: TestGen4Web is essentially a recorder of your actions on the firefox browser, and can play it back (you know, like your DVR). The extension also comes with a editor where you can create loops, add conditions, parameterize data and load datasets - essentially creating a functional-test. The test can also be run on the command line using a companion tool which I call htmlunit-interpreter and run them without a browser.

The first time I thought of this was at my first job, at which, reproducing a bug would take at least 10 clicks and 5 text box entries. I realized that it really was not an effective use of time (duh!).

Those were the glory days of Internet Explorer, and I wrote a vbscript to open the browser and control the elements in it. The first version was a set of library functions to "click the 3rd link", "enter text in 5th textbox" and so on. Writing such tests was still manual.

When Firefox came out, it brought with it the concept of wrting browser plugins. I realized that these were exactly the carrier I was looking for all along. Running with the same permissions as the browser was exciting, and a similar automation use case came up prompting me to write the first version of 'testgen4web' (short for Test Generator for Web applications).

Now at version 1.1.0 (download here) with more than a million downloads over all the versions, its come a long way. Thanks to SpikeSource for providing me the platform, and thanks to users for .. well, using it.

Here is Keisuke's schematic rendering of the project summary. Published on our developer site.