More on that Case Playoff Win

A fine article Sunday in the PD regarding the 21-20 playoff win by Case over Widener. The Observer chimes in as well.

A remarkable 4th quarter with a 97 yard touchdown pass for Case to take a 15-14 lead midway through. Case would score 18 points in the 4th, with the final 6 coming after Widener scored with 1:27 left in the game.

After Widener missed the 2 point conversion, Case drove the field converting a 4th and 10 and a 4th and 13 before a 4th down with 7 seconds left at the Widener 7. They were able to convert and punch the ball into the endzone as Sophomore QB Dan Whalen completed a remarkable drive with a pass to Jeff Mayer.

This is not even close to the Case I remember...the last winning season they had was in 1991...when I was waiting to see if I would be able to get into school. I think they had four wins one year when I was there which was "huge".

Case won't be able to keep coach Debeljak for long if he keeps this up...but he is crucial because he "gets" Case. Stuckey sure didn't when he was there. Debeljak is clearly working within the system of Case and working to make sure his kids are prepared for the game as well as prepared for class. If Terry Pluto's (formerly of the Beacon Journal) column from Friday's Plain Dealer doesn't put into perspective the job Debeljak has done, then nothing will. This guy is coach of the year in D III. No doubt in my mind.

This week will be interesting for preparation for Wabash with the Thanksgiving holiday. There should be fewer tests and papers due at this point since finals are just around the bend. Wabash (a liberal arts college for men), likely does not have the same challenges in organizing practices around o-chem study groups and lab classes.

For those who were at the university in the early to mid 90s...you're likely as shocked as I am with the success. You're probably not quite sure how to say "Go Case!" because there was little reason to before...but what the heck....

"Go Case!"

Wow, Case Wins!

I don't know if the video/audio will remain available at the University's athletic site in archive form (hint, hint...it needs to), but Case's 21-20 victory over Widener was shocking.

A team, no one expected to be in the playoffs, whose players were more concerned about O-Chem tests (love those weed-em out classes), goes out and takes case of business at home against Widener with a 2-minute drill drive at the end of the game to win.

Case takes on NCAC champ Wabash next week.

Using TestNG to drive "eyeball" testing

Second of my Best of Internal Blog (BoIB) series originally posted on 9/6/2007 and updated 11/14/2007

In my daily job, I do something that NBC would consider "green". I digress, but wasn't that an awful promotion last week? I help large companies save paper (and money) by presenting documents they would normally send to their customers through the mail. 99% of these documents are bills.

During my time working with various documents, I developed a tool based upon the testing framework TestNG. This tool allows us to look at a "cycle" of documents and test various things on each of them. We need to be sure that we're presenting each item to the user as it looks on their paper statement. It is most useful when we have a client who cannot generate an edge case test file for us due to the legacy nature of the billing system.

I had an opportunity to dredge it up again. The code for this tool is over two years old, but works relatively well with little fanfare. It grabs a list of identifiers from the database for each document, generates a URL to each document and then browses the HTML document using HtmlUnit. However, I recently found it has a new use.

The latest use is PDF testing. Some of our clients use a document format from IBM known as AFP. It's a high speed printer format, but it is similar to PDF in many ways in that it describes where on a page to display text. It is possible to generate a PDF document from and AFP document using a number of tools.

So how can the document tester help? Simple, create a special test class that is setup to archive the PDFs for each statement to disk.

Here's the test method inside TestNG (obviously I'm not repeating all of the bootstrappy type stuff that gets the URL to the document)

@Test(parameters = {"filePath"})
public void testGetPDF(String filePath) {
 List formList = theDocument.getForms();
 Iterator formIterator = formList.iterator();
 // 1st Form gets the PDF
 HtmlForm myForm = (HtmlForm) formIterator.next();
 HtmlInput myInput = myForm.getInputByName("viewDocument");

 try {
   Page newPage = myInput.click();
   WebResponse resp = newPage.getWebResponse();
   ByteArrayInputStream pdfStream = (ByteArrayInputStream) resp.getContentAsStream();
   ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
   File pdfFile = new File(filePath + this.theDocumentID + ".pdf");
   FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(pdfFile);
   int count = 0;
   int data = pdfStream.read();
   while (data > -1) {
     count++;
     baos.write(data);
     data = pdfStream.read();
   }
   baos.flush();
   baos.writeTo(fos);
   baos.close();
   fos.close();
   pdfStream.close();
 } catch (Throwable t) {
   org.testng.Reporter.log("Throwable: " + t.getMessage());
   t.printStackTrace();
 }
}

Pretty neat! Now you get a directory full of PDFs that you can archive and ship off to your customer, or browse yourself. It sure beats a manual process of click and reload, and assures a proper test of using the actual application to generate the document. You could obviously save HTML or CSV files as well, but they can be tested using classes within the testing tool, which is obviously more efficient. This is simply making "eyeball" testing a bit faster.

Career Aspiration Killer #1 (BoIB)

First of my Best of Internal Blog (BoIB) series originally posted on 8/23/2007:

You Tube.

Right around the 4:21 mark in this clip:

Sure it's seven years ago...but that kisses any thoughts of political office away doesn't it? :)

Now if I could only find those clips of me at wrasslin events from back in the day.

Recent Blog Silence

Thought it was time to offer some insight as to why the postings here have been few and far between over the past year.
There are two major reasons, the first being a young family at home which takes up a lot of time. This is not the main reason, however. The main reason is, I've been focused on Enterprise 2.0 efforts at work.
At work, I administer a TWiki and Roller site for our greater team. What started out as a little experiment five years ago with a wiki has become a bit more now. Most of my blogging has gone into writing business specific posts that have too much insider information in them to be posted online.
I've decided that it's time to bring some of those posts externally. As I have time, I'll be taking posts, cleaning them up by removing specific internal examples and names and entering them here. Some of them were actually pretty good entries!
So as I have time, maybe once a week or so, I'll be picking a "best of" post, cleaning it up and dropping it on here along with a date as to when I originally posted it.
I hope you will enjoy.

Some Ohio Colleges Are Still Undefeated

So, yes, Ohio State decided to choke this weekend. But there are still some undefeated Ohio teams still playing....in Division III.

As expected, Mt. Union is undefeated at 10-0 entering the playoffs. But look who else is 10-0....someone completely unexpected.

No wait for it...it couldn't be...but it is! Ye' Ol' Alma Mater is undefeated?!?! Look at the #2 seed in the UW-Whitewater Bracket.

Yes, it's true, the geeks have risen. Case Western Reserve is 10-0. It's not called Case anymore...thanks to ancient alumni changing the name back from something that was marketable...money talks and all that (and in 30 years, the "young" alumni will fix that)...but I digress.

Out of the depths of University Circle, the mighty mighty Case Spartans are 10-0. Who would have expected this!

TrophyManager TrExMa Transfer List Hack

OK, one more GM script for TrophyManager.

This one extends the TrExMa hack for all players on the Transfer List. GKs are included as well using the ideas from the forum.

This should be handy due to the National Team releases and many of those players are quite pricey at 50M. Might as well get the most bang for your buck.