Colin Charles Agenda

This week’s been an interesting one. I’m glad its over.

• My relocation is complete
• I collected my items not on April 1 (when it was supposed to arrive), but on April 2. I had a fun time with customs. Needless to say, it has inspired me to start a Only in Malaysia category on my blog
• On April 1, I paid close attention to ensure my on-boarding process was making the most sense. There are still so many things that haven’t been sorted out, and with my impending travel next week, I’m slowly becoming impatient and its turning me into an angry person
• Public Bank, the credit card vendor of my choice, is annoying the living daylight’s out of me. I’m sure to blog about this saga, the moment its all over (either way)
• The MyOSS meetup was interesting, but what was more useful was the post-meetup dinner. Its time to focus on the more interesting things in life
• Q2/2008 has started. Or Q4 for my new corporate overlords. I have a bazillion things to do, and here’s hoping that I blog more. I have to remember that I work for the community, always. This is what’s going to make this quarter rock…
• Driving the Vios S is nice. Its smooth. Alas, I’m taking over the Iswara in general. Its also a nice car and will continue to serve me well :)
• I’m going to pay close attention to the Malaysian community and government needs, when it comes to the open source world. Finally
• It rains, pretty much everyday from about 3-5pm. Its getting rather annoying. Why? I have to switch the DSL modem off
• Singapore Airlines has made me an Elite Gold member. Its going to be easier to keep it, because I’ll be using SIA and Star Alliance a lot more now. In Melbourne, sometimes you were forced to use Qantas (ick) or Malaysian Airlines (not as ick as Qantas, but ick enough)
• Must do expense reports
• Off to a party tonight. Will make use of the camera. I have a huge shitload of backlog of photos to push online (since November 2007 even)

Enough of this crap rants. I’m glad that it doesn’t get syndicated elsewhere. Its just to remind me, when I look back on the past, I guess…

In the movie world, I caught:

• 2 Days in Paris - funny love story
• Juno - recommended. Storyline is good, actors are excellent.
• American Gangster - recommended, true story even. Can learn trade secrets of successful drug lords - make your “workers” that pack stuff up, work in the nude…
• Poseidon - on cable this one, big nice screen, pity the movie wasn’t much. Emmy Rossum kinda makes it worthwhile though. Young (born in 1986)!

I was at yesterday’s MyOSS meetup, and the topic was on the Selenium Web Testing Framework, presented by Yuen-Chi Lian. Here are some notes, and hopefully the slides and code make it up to the website soon.

- Java guy, who is a MyJUG guy
- Employed by CustomWare Asia Pacific, and is experienced in JIRA, Confluence, and Mule (are they an Atlassian reseller?)
- He started web development using PHP. Didn’t do unit tests then. As he started to do web development again, 2 years ago, he found that JIRA guys used Selenium to test their web UI. He started Selenium, last week :)
- A Common Web Development flow: analysis, design, development, then its testing… Unit test, integration tests, and acceptance tests using Selenium
- for web UI testing, Selenium helps you invoke a JavaScript method, rather than clicking a button to trigger it… These tests can be recorded and scripted. You can do it in a simulated browser environment, or use a real user agent
- He hasn’t tested Sahi yet, but he thinks its better than Selenium, based on the blogs that he’s read
- Selenium can be integrated with Continuous Integration (CI)
- Lots of examples using Java and Ruby
- Imagine doing FOSS development, on the Windows platform. It actually looks scary…

Overall, a rather basic talk, with a highly motivated/dedicated speaker. This being my second talk that I’ve attended on Selenium (last year at the Ruby Conf), and now, its pretty cemented in my head that I’ve got to make use of it, the next time I write a web-front end. Oh, it has great Firefox integration, with the Web Developer Tools plugin…

After that, it was off to Pelita for dinner. This ended up becoming supper, and there was lots of chatter… Drive home was eventful - on the way to Puchong, to send KageSenshi back, got pulled over twice - once for a license inspection, once to find out where we were headed. Odd. This has never happened before.

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