Work is too busy to blog at the moment so that's why my posts are less frequent than usual. At home I'm either very tired after work, or else I'll have Malaysia homework to do which leaves less time for words.

This week I decided to refactor my automatic download / extraction programs to make them more robust and less susceptible to un-notified errors. This need came from the fact that I realised the stupidity of users, most of which don't bother to notify you when there is a download error. People do not realise that if they don't notify me I would not know what is going on with my automatic programs. At last I decided that I had to make the programs themselves notify me if they decide to take a day off.

Now I've filled batch files with ERRORLEVEL trapping and added job failure notification in my scheduling program Automize. From experience it's much better to get e-mailed when the program is not working rather than when it is, because as time passes you start to unconsciously disregard success emails. The problem with this approach is that if the job is not run in the first place then you're not notified. It would be a great idea if a daily report can be sent at the end of the day so that at a glance you can identify the status of each job.

Hand in hand with this issue, this weekend I got interested in testing programs and frameworks. This whole testing thing is an integral part of extreme programming. It seems that the most common Java testing framework is Junit. JUnit is an open source unit testing framework, but it is extended to different variants of Java programming (like Cactus for JSP and Servlets and JUnitPerf for testing performance and scalability)

As a last note on computing, there is a good article about passwords or their lack of, in this new blog.

Yesterday we watched Gothika (review) starring Halle Berry and Penelope Cruz. At least the film proved slightly better than the newspaper articles. The first part could have been much more interesting but at the end of the second part the story gets interesting. 2.5 Stars.