Using QTP to Connect to an Oracle Database with Instant Client

by Geoffrey Rodgers
Need a light-weight ODBC connection to an Oracle database for you QTP scripts? Oracle Instant Client is just the ticket, assuming you have Oracle version 10g for your database. Please read the information provided by Oracle to make sure Instant Client is right for your needs.
The Instant Client Driver

I’m not going to rewrite everything provided by Oracle, but I will quickly say (for those of you that did not click on the above link) that Instant Client is a very quick installation and contains less overhead than the full client software that was previously required to connect to an Oracle database using something other than the Microsoft ODBC for Oracle driver.
Instant Client Driver Setup:

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More photographic evidence of the Birthday Bonanza!

After a busy weekend or partying, house-cleaning, and hosting, Brandy and I went to relax at the theaters. We obviously went to see “Get Smart” according to the title of this post. Here is a brief synopsis:

Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) is a CONTROL Analyst who dreams to be a field-agent, working alongside his favorite agent, Agent 23 (Dwayne Johnson). CONTROL is then infilitrated by KAOS and compromises the identities of all current field-agents. So the chief (Alan Arkin) promotes Smart to the field as Agent 86 and teams him with the beautiful and deadly Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway). It is up to Agents 86 and 99 to thwart KAOS and save the world from certain destruction.

Ok, so there’s the premise of the movie. Since it is based off the comic screwball TV series, I was expecting a series of goofball sight gags and a Maxwell Smart that was equal parts Michael Scott (The Office) and Evan Baxter (Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty). However, I was pleasantly surprised to see Carell play Maxwell Smart as the straight man and not the incompetent boob. Not to say he wasn’t funny, which he was.

I would say overall that Get Smart was a good summer comedy, but definitely not one for the ages. The throwbacks to the original series were quaint and obviously treated with a respectful nostalgia. I don’t think this is one of Carell’s best performances, because it didn’t require him to stretch himself. It was safe, but sufficient. Anne Hathaway brought an elegance to the film as a fashionable, yet strong agent. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has certainly come a long way from “The Scorpion King” in this flick. It’s really hard to not like any of these characters. But, my favorite actor in this film has to be Alan Arkin. He steals pretty much every scene he is in. And let’s just mention this… the cameos were great… with the exception of Bill Murray’s odd casting choice. I’m still scratching my head over that one.

All in all, Get Smart is good summer comedy. It will not be the best film of the year, nor will it make it to your top 10 comedies of all time. What it is, though, is satisfying film… just don’t expect the sun, moon, and stars. 7/10

Brandy and I invited several folks over to the house this weekend to celebrate our birthdays. It was a lot of fun and a big thanks to everyone who came out for the shenanigans.

We fired up the grill and pulled out the drinks for all of our guests. However, I completely underestimated the amount of food I had planned to cook. We planned for 2 hamburgers a person as well as corn on the cob and roasted potatoes. MLONF brought along additional hamburgers as well as chicken. Now, I do not have a small grill, but let’s say it took me 45 minutes to an hour to cook all the food on the grill.

We had three varieties of hamburgers:

1. Pre-made normal beef patties. Yummy!
2. Ground beef and Ground pork mixed with onions and slight seasoning. Yummy +1!
3. Ground beef and Ground pork mixed with onions, chipotle peppers, and an assortment of spices. Yummy +2!

For our 17 guests, we ended up with 35+ hamburgers, 12 chicken legs, 16 ears of corn, and 4 small pans of potatoes. This does not include the pasta salads, barbecue weenies, fruit salads, and desserts. Needless to say, we ate well.

Speaking of cake, Christian baked us a special Birthmeh Cake.

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Well, the Accord has made another milestone. 100,000 miles. It is still running strong too.

Some stats:

1. Purchased: September 9th, 2001
2. Days to hit 100,000 Miles: 2467 days (6 years, 9 months, 2 days)
3. Average Miles per Day: 40.535 miles

And, yes, apparently I thought it a good idea to snap this picture as I was heading to my house. I could’ve waited, but I was in the moment. I, however, do not condone driving 42 miles per hour and taking a photograph of your odometer.

Today is the little hellion’s birthday. I had my doubts that Lily would still be with us at this time, but I must say she has made marked improvements in behavior over the past 2 months. It could be that we have started treating her more like a tiny dog than a hyperactive feral, but tame, cat.

In the course of the last year, Lily has kept us up at all hours of the night, tormented Bosco and Maggie relentlessly, discovered that feather dusters are the scourge of the Earth, developed a talent of leaping 6 feet in the air for a sitting position, and learned to sit on command. But, most importantly, she has become much more mellow, limiting her feral outbursts to only a few short bursts at night. Yay for us!

Happy Birthday, Lily!

If you couldn’t tell from the title of this post, I was a little less than pleased with my time spent with the latest, and hopefully last, installment of the “Indiana Jones” franchise. I knew going in that I should keep my expectations low, because let’s face it — George Lucas hasn’t had a great track record when it comes to bringing back beloved movie franchises from my childhood. Wow — I had no idea what to expect, but what I got wasn’t it.

First off, some positive notes. It was great to see Harrison Ford back in action wielding the legendary whip and donning the infamous fedora. He definitely not the action star he used to be, but I wasn’t expecting him to be either. Shia LeBeouf handled his character as well as he could have. Both actors did quite well, provided the schlock they were given. The musical score was a total throwback to the original series - great! Spielberg can create some amazingly beautiful shots. The ant sequence was entertaining as well.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get to the meat of the matter. I figure I’ll present my complaints in a bulleted format.

• The script was just pitiful. It was said the powers that be were waiting for the perfect script to come along — I’m wondering why they stopped waiting. Since when did Indiana Jones become a sci-fi character? As my friend Christian mentioned, the plot seemed to fit around action-sequences as opposed to the action fitting around the plot. Moving along…
• Did we need the gratuitous crotch-shot, and I use this word loosely, joke?
• I was not aware that George of the Jungle was a part of the Indiana Jones mythos.
• Gophers? Monkeys? Aliens? Really?
• I wasn’t aware that Cate Blanchett’s character was supposed to be psychic until well after the movie was over.
• Many of the action sequences left me bored. There were several times I found myself just staring at the screen wondering why I wasn’t more involved with the story. There was little to draw me into the film and make me really truly care about the adventure that was being spoon-fed to the audience.

This was another reason to dislike George Lucas, or at least what he has become. Without his vision, we wouldn’t have such fond childhood memories, but did he really have to come back and spit on these memories? The acting was decent, the visuals were appealing, the score was exciting, the story was terrible, the dialog was bland. Would I recommend seeing the movie? Yes, but in the comfort of your own home. That way, you won’t feel bad when you want to turn it off and go do something else.

I have been using QuickTest Pro for several years now and have just discovered a simple, but highly useful, feature. In dealing with ActiveX controls, there are many times when the ActiveX add-in for QTP just doesn’t full recognize an application object.

Using the ObjectSpy, you can select the object in question and see all the runtime properties and methods available for the object. For the longest time, I had been using the GetROProperty() method to retrieve the values of the properties. However, I’d not considered how to execute the methods of the objects, as I never needed to do that.

It turns out that you can access the methods, and properties, of the object with this simple code snippet:


VbWindow("frmWindow").ActiveX("testObject").Object.methodName()
VbWindow(”frmWindow”).ActiveX(”testObject”).Object.Property


Happy Testing!

How to Make a Color Image Look Like a Sketch in Photoshop

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

A sketch is a free hand drawing. In Adobe Photoshop, you can add a sketch effect to any color image or photograph and give it an artistic feel, or perhaps trick your friends into thinking you’ve suddenly become an amazing sketcher.
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