Jerome's Blog

I've been looking around for a new laptop for a while now, and I finally decided on the MacBook Air. Specifically, the 2014 13 inch model, 128 GB SSD, 1.4 GHz Core i5, 8 GB of RAM. It's by far the best laptop I've ever owned, and I couldn't be happier with my purchase. The decision to buy a MacBook Air was a tough one. There are a lot of great laptops available right now, and the MacBook Pro with the retina display was pretty tempting. Ultimately it was the light weight, long battery life, decent performance, stylishness, and price of the MacBook Air that influenced my decision. Here's the list of laptops I was looking at: MacBook Pro MacBook Air Asus Zenbook Acer Aspier S7 HP Envy HP Spectre Toshiba Kirabook Lenovo Yoga Pro 2 Microsoft Surface Pro 3 Dell XPS  I was leaning towards something light, such as an ultrabook, but I didn't want to pay much more than $1000. For me, it's hard to justify that much money on a laptop. I've boug

In my previous post  I linked to some basic JMeter test plans, as I was just getting comfortable with JMeter. Sine then, I've found a way to make the scripts more maintainable by using user defined variables. Here's the link to a simple script that uses variables. The syntax for referencing a variable in JMeter is ${VARIABLE_NAME}.  What I like to do is add a user defined variables config element to the top of the test plan and put all the settings in there I'd like to tweak. For example, URL's, timeouts, etc. All in one place at the top of the script. This makes it easy to tune scripts, e.g. to test different pages, to tweak the number of users, etc.