Feb 17 2012

How to prepare for a 30(b)(6) deposition as a corporate witness

Category: people — Ulrich Palha @ 11:17 am

Corporate Deposition

Patent litigation is on the rise, on average increasing 5.6 percent annually since 1991 [1], so there is a greater probability that the profitable company you work for is already, or will soon be, in a patent infringement lawsuit.

When this happens your company will typically receive a 30(b)(6) notice and will have to select witnesses for a corporate deposition so that the plaintiff’s attorneys may obtain discovery. Your corporation’s attorneys know that corporate witness selection is critical, that a good witness isn’t necessarily the person with the most first-hand knowledge[2], but also someone with better ability as a witness, more credible and articulate, and more comfortable with aggressive questioning[4] .

Witness selection is critical.[2]

If you meet these criteria, you may find yourself selected as 30(b)(6) witness. The rest of this article gives you a sense of what to expect in this role.
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Feb 09 2012

Are you sitting yourself to death at work and home?

Category: people — Ulrich Palha @ 11:20 am

Sitting six or more hours per day in your leisure time can increase your chances of dying up to 40%[1]. A growing body of research[1],[2],[3] shows an association with increased sitting, both at home and work, and mortality, even if you are exercising regularly.

If you work in the information technology industry or almost any other job in an office setting, you probably sit for most of the day, whether it is time spent in front of the computer, in meetings or sitting down for lunch. Add to that the sitting while commuting, watching TV or browsing the internet at home, while reading, or in conversation and you could very well be sitting for over 9 hours a day (the British average over 14 hours per day[4]).
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Jan 13 2012

A Guide to the Best Htaccess mod-rewrite Resources on the Web

Category: server — Ulrich Palha @ 1:30 pm

Overview

In one of my earlier posts I covered basic use of .htaccess and mod_rewrite. If you have shared hosting using Apache and want to create SEO friendly URLs, redirect old URLs to new, stop image hotlinking, restrict access to your site’s content or any one of the many things that are demanded of you as as a webmaster, then .htaccess and mod_rewrite offer you this and a whole lot of other functionality.

But all this functionality and flexibility has its drawback: complexity – Apache Mod_Rewrite Documentation

Fortunately, there are a number of good resources on the web, and a couple of books that help you understand all you need to know about .htaccess and mod_rewrite
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Jan 06 2012

Evaluating your tests using xUnit Test Patterns Refactoring Test Code by Gerard Meszaros

Category: Uncategorized — Ulrich Palha @ 9:56 am


I did not get any feedback on the approach I had used to write a Data-Driven test that depends on the output of another Data-Driven test, so I decided to do a self-evaluation using the excellent xUnit Test Patterns Refactoring Test Code by Gerard Meszaros.

Goals of Test Automation

First I looked at the overlap between my test requirements (below) and Meszaros’s Chapter 3: Goals of Test Automation.
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Dec 23 2011

Using TestNG to write a Data-Driven test that depends on the output of another Data-Driven test

Category: java,open source,test — Ulrich Palha @ 3:50 pm

Testing Requirements

I have a number of web services that return a status code and an XML payload. For each of these web services, I would like to write tests that meet the following criteria:

  1. Test requirements
    1. Verify that the web service returns the correct status code based on the inputs (testWebserviceStatus)
    2. If the status code is correct, then I would like to verify 1 or more properties of the payload. Every property is independent, so I would like to have each property verification run as a separate test (testWebserviceProperties)
  2. Other requrements
    1. The ability to add/remove the list of web services to test and add/remove the list of properties to verify for each service without updating the test code.
    2. If testWebServiceStatus fails, then its associated testWebserviceProperties should be skipped
    3. The test report should clearly show the success failure of each testWebservice/testWebserviceProperty test along with the web service/property that was being tested

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Dec 16 2011

Java library performance optimzation using local references to final members: should you use it?

Category: java — Ulrich Palha @ 9:37 am

Mysterious java idiom

While I was browsing through the java.util.concurrent source code, I noticed widespread use of the following idiom

    private final ReentrantLock mainLock = new ReentrantLock();
        ...
        //local reference to final member variable
        final ReentrantLock mainLock = this.mainLock; 
        mainLock.lock(); 
        try {
            ...     
        } finally {
            mainLock.unlock();
    }

Given that member mainLock is final, I could not understand the benefit of declaring a local reference. Continue reading “Java library performance optimzation using local references to final members: should you use it?”

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Dec 09 2011

HTML Parsers and other libraries: don’t write your own till you know, and have tested, what already exists

Category: java,open source — Ulrich Palha @ 3:53 pm

It seemed simple…

I needed to extract some HTML content for one of the projects I was working on. It seemed easy enough to retrieve the content and parse out the title tag, so I quickly threw together the following code to retrieve the title tag. Continue reading “HTML Parsers and other libraries: don’t write your own till you know, and have tested, what already exists”

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Dec 02 2011

Make your code snippets easier to read with a simple, flexible syntax highlighter

Category: blog — Ulrich Palha @ 1:21 pm

Overview

If you include code samples in your online posts, are hosting your own WordPress or other CMS/blogging solution, and are looking for a way to make your code easier to read with syntax highlighting, line numbers etc., then you will definitely want to read on.
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Nov 26 2011

Improve your site’s SEO with Basic URL rewriting/redirects using mod_rewrite in .htaccess

Category: .htaccess — Ulrich Palha @ 12:19 am

Overview

If you host your own site with shared linux hosting using Apache, and you are interested in SEO, then there is good chance that you will  want to rewrite and/or redirect your URLs. One of the ways to do this is to use .htaccess.  I will cover a couple of the common examples that I have come across recently together with a detailed explanation of each

Keyword Rich URLs

Lets assume that you have a book application that you currently access via http://www.mysite.com/books/index.php?id=1590595610 and you want to transform it to a keyword rich URL format like http://www.bigsite.com/Definitive-Guide-Apache-mod_rewrite-Guides/ep/1590595610. This change is relatively easy and can be done by adding the code below to a file called .htaccess that you place in the root folder of your www.mysite.com domain.
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Nov 19 2011

How to run your Java application as a windows service using Commons Daemon Procrun

Category: java — Ulrich Palha @ 1:40 am

Overview

Apache Commons Daemon is made of 2 parts. One written in C that makes the interface to the operating system and the other in Java that provides the Daemon API. Both Win32 and UNIX like platforms are supported, but for this article I will only focus on the former and show you how to use Procrun to run your java application as a windows service.

Prerequisites

If  you want to run the sample application, you will need Java 6 and Maven installed. GIT is also recommended.
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