Inspired by grunt-qunit-serverless and its approach to running QUnit tests in grunt without the overhead of running connect, I setup my own implementation which combines pieces from grunt-qunit-serverless and grunt-contrib-qunit to create a minimalist approach to testing with QUnit from Grunt.

The main goal I had was to make it simpler to setup when converting an existing suite of manual QUnit tests to an automated Grunt-based environment. In doing so I wanted to keep console output to a minimum. Honestly, all I really care to see is that either everything passed, or that these specific tests failed. This way you don’t have to comb through the logs to find which errors you had and can spend more time fixing them.

I’ve still got some tweaking to do on the setup options to make it a bit more Grunt-esque but a working and awesome version of it is already up and good to go. Feel free to check it out here: http://npmjs.org/gotdibbs/grunt-qunit-minimalist or on GitHub at https://github.com/gotdibbs/grunt-qunit-minimalist.

Please drop a comment if you have any feature suggestions, or, make a pull request!

This entry is going to be one of several in a series where I’m going to upgrade my desktop PC from Windows Vista to Windows 7. In this first round, I’m going to explain why I’m offering this story as well as start off with choosing an edition of Windows 7.

Background

To start off with, you should know when it comes to data. I’m paranoid. All of my music, videos, and documents are backed up as best as possible on my budget. Music and videos get duplicated out to my home Server 2008 box and all of my documents get the royal cloud treatment through Live Mesh. What can I say, when you lose all of your documents due to a hard drive crash once, then again to a bad configuration, you get paranoid. Data recovery is a painful and tear-jerking process. Therefore when I realized that I’m going to be upgrading my desktop to Windows 7, I also realized that its time to lay out a plan.

If you’re as paranoid as me about data loss, and as nitpicky about having everything work as me, then hopefully you’ll get something out of my experience in upgrading from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7.

Round 1 – Choosing an Edition

First I’m going to have to select which edition of Windows 7 to run on my PC. I know that I’m going 64bit because that’s simply the way technology is going and I’m currently running 64bit Vista already. To those afraid of the 64bit transition let me offer this: 64bit operating system’s have been around long enough now to the point where the problems of “olde” are no longer an issue. It is a rare occasion where you cannot find a 64bit driver. Even some of my older hardware have recently released 64bit drivers. Now I believe that I’m going to go for Windows 7 Professional. I have been running Vista Ultimate, and have not really found a personal need for all the features found in the Ultimate edition. I’m not a huge user of Media Center simply because I stream all my media out to my Xbox 360 or just use Windows Media Player for anything I’m watching locally on my PC. As well, with Windows 7’s improved Anytime Upgrade feature, all of the components for Windows 7 Ultimate will be installed with Windows 7 Professional in case I do decide to upgrade at a later date, meaning I don’t have to be as paranoid and do a clean install in order to upgrade.

Result:

I’m going to start downloading Windows 7 Professional and research through a couple more of the differences in the feature sets of 7 Professional vs. 7 Ultimate just to double check my thoughts.

Next Time

For my next entry, I’m going to start looking at drivers for my PC and all of its peripherals to make sure their Windows 7 counterparts have been released and are working considering Windows 7 doesn’t officially release to public until October 22, 2009. Drivers will play a major role in my upgrade considering my setup includes a mix of brand new hardware, ancient hardware, and infrequent configurations of that hardware. My main concern being my RAID 0’d hard drives that I plan to install Windows 7 on.

I’ve been having a fun time dealing with Windows Server 2008 this last year or so since I first got it up and running for PING. I just recently moved and forgot to forward the ports on my router again, so the website has been down for several days. Doesn’t help me to notice either considering I do all my work on it at home so I never know if the outside world can really see any of the sites I have served up off of the box. I’m slowly getting better at dealing with Windows Server ’08 and will try to keep everyone enlightened with my trials and tribulations of running an enterprise server out of a small apartment