(This article is part of the JMeter Series) While testing a Rails application there was a situation where a background worker (DJB or background task) would get an order to execute and eventually the completed order would appear on a page. Thus we needed to wait for the page to be updated and continue the test after. User Defined Variables I’m predefining used variables here - see “We set up our variables” in the Extracting text from a page and using it somewhere else in JMeter article for an exaplanation why. Read on

(This article is part of the JMeter Series) JMeter’s “HTTP Request Sampler” will read the whole input (the downloaded page, pdf, movie etc.) into its main memory. That means that working with larger (f.ex. movies) files will bring JMeter, the JVM and/or many machines to their memory limits. If you do not not need to do more than making sure that something gets downloaded, then you can “offload” the download work to an outside process, f. Read on

To install: unpack zonal_statistics.tgz under /src/plugins, insert zonal_statistics as new subdirectory in /src/plugins/CMakeLists.txt and recompile Read on

In cartography, it is a frequent operation to set labels to fixed positions, together with the position of the fix point (left/middle/right, Top, Half, Bottom) that is kept constant in case of font change, rotation or zoom. Therefore, three new editing tools to manipulate text labels are now in the QGIS developer version: the move label tool drags text labels to a new position the rotate label tool is for interactive rotation of labels the label property tools opens a dialog that lets the user manipulate the data defined properties of a label (and also the text of the label attribute) All three tools work on the new labeling engine and data defined labeling needs to be enabled for the layer (e. Read on

The Sunday night session of the QGIS hackfest resulted in a new release of the Mapfile Tools plugin. This QGIS plugin allows you to display an UMN Mapserver mapfile in QGIS without running a Mapserver instance. It depends only on Mapscript (apt-get install python-mapscript on Debian/Ubuntu) and allows you to zoom and pan on the mapfile layer. In release 0.6, an output window has been added, which shows error messages and detailed layer information. Read on