IP Address Lookup

You can easily get the geographical location for an IP address at http://www.ip-adress.com . It even displays a nice little map, though you shouldn't expect it to be accurate enough to go on a hunt for a hacker with your GPS tracker ;-)

Oracle iSqlPlus

Oracle has a pretty good web based tool for executing queries against the database called iSqlPlus. It is quite similar to Sql*Plus, but is better suited for testers than DBAs. In Sql*Plus, users complained about long lines that would get wrapped, thus messing up the output. Since iSqlPlus works within your browser, it builds an HTML table containing query results with a width just enough to display all the results. It also keeps a history of previously executed statements for the sesson, so you can easily execute a previously executed query.

For a default install of Oracle, you'll generally find iSqlPlus installed at http://localhost:5560/isqlplus . Do add your comments to this post if you've had a chance to use both.

ProBE

The proxy based estimation method is based on drawing upon previous experience with a similar project to get a rough estimate of the time required for building software. Unlike the wideband delphi method, it relies less on expertise and more on historical data. This technique is commonly applied when comparing projects within a similar domain.

Wideband Delphi

The wideband delphi software estimation technique is actually a process where a group of experts arrive at a consensus based on the Work Breakdown Structure. It's simplicity is one of it's greatest strengths and it relies heavily on the experience of the experts called in to make the decision. If there are large differences in the estimates, they resolve it through further discussion and finally come up with the final numbers.

NCover

NCover is a pretty good code coverage tool for .NET. You can use it to determine which parts of your code aren't tested by unit tests, thus letting you know if you need to write more tests.

A common problem identified by code coverage tools is that you have blocks of code that you wouldn't encounter under regular circumstances, such as Exception blocks that are intended to catch unforseen errors or error conditions that occur rarely. Due to insufficient testing for those blocks, you could be releasing some untested code that could result in a bug.

NCover can be run with pretty much any kind of tests - you just need to provide them as parameters to the command line NCover tool or browse to find the executable for the graphical tool so you aren't limited to any single testing framework, such as NUnit.

Sun Java on Fedora 8 has an issue

Fedora 8 has a buggy libxcb package due to which we get the following error when using Sun Java...

java:scb-slib-c:so:scb_slib_unlock:Assertion 'c->xlib.lock' failed.
Aborted.

You can, however, use the default Java that ships with Fedora 8.

Upgrade to FC8

Fedora Core 7 was pretty cool when it was released. I showed all the guys and girls at work how it could do better on fancy effects than Windows Vista when you turned on the Desktop Effects and used Gnome. When the launch of Fedora 8 was announced, I just had to go and get myself one of those. I started off by upgrading my desktop at work from Fedora Core 7 to Fedora Core 8 and it seems to do a pretty good job on some counts. I had to upgrade KDE-SVN for it to work, which was just a matter of typing a "yum update kdesvn". The OpenOffice icons from my taskbar are now missing but the documents that I had placed on my desktop now have thumbnails displayed. There's lots more to it, but I guess I'll write more as I come across it.