Theo Moore

I am going to end my subscription to the Mercury Forum Listserv. Recently, someone posted a question and entertained replies for 4 days (or so it seems). None of the suggestions would work, or met their need. The saga unfolded. I finally wrote a detailed reply to help them out. I get “wow that too much code and this would be my last resort”. WTF?? I do 96% of the work and it's too much code??? I felt wildly unappreciated. This happens far too often. If you don't know the location of the “fix it” button, then there must be a better (read as: simpler or “less code” in this case) approach.

I also saw a post that asked what QTP versions support IE7. This is asked a couple of times a week, every other day. There is a fantastic KB article which explains this succinctly. There are tons of forum posts where someone is saying “Look in the KB!” Yet this person found none of that. No, they were to too lazy to look for it. Faster, they think, to annoy the community at large. Few people look in the KB before posting the same insipid question someone else posted.

I will be happy to continue posting here, and might even reply to the occassional genuine question in the forums, but not as a result of the listserv e-mails. I've had it.

Yeah, I finally clicked on the cool graphic located in my blog. It said “5 GB free” on XDrive. Seemed liked an interesting deal. So, I signed up. Some observations:

1. It's free. Free is good

2. It does require an AOL screen name, but that's free, too. Not like I am actually going to use the email address anyway.

3. Our corporate firewall blocks it. Pity, that. I thought it would be a great way to move files back and forth between work and home, and provide a convenient place to put non-secure backups. Ah, well. Such was not to be, I guess.

4. I felt that transfer rate using the web-based interface was a little slow. Not really practical for me as a spare hard drive. I realize this is might be a connection speed issue, but I don't think it is. See a little farther down.

5. I felt like the web interface was little clunky. I need three windows open to move a file? The web interface seems a little heavy for the environment. It's like the MSN chat interface when I'd prefer it to be as clean and light like the GoogleChat interface.

6. It does come with a tool that makes this experience much better. It installs a manager to handle your XDrive under the hood and gives you what is, in effect, a mapped drive that you can access via Windows Explorer and seems to behave more or less like a drive in your box or elsewhere on your network. Interestingly, when I used this plug-in, the transfer speeds seemed better. That said, this particular plug-in troubles me from a security perspective.; not sure I like being connected with what feels like a big, gaping hole in my machine. So, I tend to close it when I am not using it, which sort of mitigates the tool's effectiveness. I know, I know...being a big weenie with my security worries. This is also why it's not necessarily a great idea to use at work, too.

7. It comes with backup software which seems pretty standard and straight forward. Nice idea, though. Back up some stuff to the XDrive where it's “secure”.

8. Just to make the security point even better, it comes with a Share tool that allows you to share your XDrive much in the same way you would share your hard drive in a network environment. This could be rather handy, I think, for some people. However, I just can't bring myself to share my XDrive, given that it's “out there” and not “in here” behind our corporate firewall. I know, I know...weenie again. I am sure that the XDrive folks have been very careful to make it secure.

Overall, I would say this is 4 out of 5 stars. If you need some extra space that is portable and would prefer not to carry a flash drive, this is very practical. If you need a way to share files (large ones especially), this is a good approach. Much easier than an FTP site for this, to be sure. Just be aware of where you are putting your files.

And, of course, it's free! :-)