Colin Charles Agenda

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.

Technorati Tags: selenium, web app testing, web qa, qa, ruby, rails, java, myoss, meetup

I’ve found Twitter to be an amazingly useful web service. So useful, that I’ll dedicate a blog post to them. If you haven’t already read Anything Could Happen, do yourself a favour and get reading. Its an interview with Evan Williams, who founded both the ever popular Blogger, and now Twitter.

Tim Bray, brings up the general idea that succeeding in this world, is all about being first, no matter what. Its where the community is at, right? It doesn’t matter if there are better, competing services, its where the community has gathered, and who’s first. Time to Market or Time to Twitter?

Its probably true. Twitter has had its fair share of problems, mostly around scaling their application. Yet, people stick with Twitter, no matter what. The community of users have already got a vested interest (all previous “tweets”, favourites, a community of friends, et al) and there’s no point recreating it in Pownce or Jaiku. I’ve got accounts on those two other services, and I pretty much never, ever user them beyond the initial review period.

In other news, I found this tip to be useful:
curl -u username:password -d status="so, you can make twitter updates via the command line and curl?" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

Even comes back with about 19 lines of output, in XML, telling you that your update has been successful. Shows that you’ve updated from the web, in terms of status. Now, if only I had ubiquitous Internet access everywhere…

Technorati Tags: twitter, evan williams, command line, interview

Illegal downloading
It seems like March has clearly become a dark time for illegal downloaders. With Exetel in Australia willing to disconnect offenders, following on what seems to have started on in Japan and Sweden (where the ISPs can give to the courts, information on suspected file sharers). The United Kingdom is not far off. Encrypted P2P would seem like the way to go, along with port randomisation, and maybe even using tunnels?

Bloggers to pay a more important role in Malaysia?
It seems that the newly appointed information minister, Ahmad Shabery Cheek, wants to have a meeting with bloggers, as they play a role in nation building! They surely played a role in brining down the coalition. The important thing is that they’ve realised that they, the government of the day, will not control bloggers. Nothing to realise really, that’s what the MSC Bill of Guarantees provides: “7. Ensure no Internet censorship.”

Zimbra, and quality
Upgrading Zimbra has scared me in the past. This time, another problem cropped up with the ill-fated 5.0.3 release, which was pulled almost immediately. Good thing 5.0.4 has also been released. I cannot wait to have “online backup” in the open source version.

Bloggers feel more connected?
Recent research in Melbourne show that bloggers feel happier and more satisfied with their friends. Swinburne University studied new bloggers, and found that within two months, bloggers felt more socially connected, and generally felt part of a community. However, its not all bells and whistles — bloggers might also be more psychologically distressed? Or maybe, they’re just MySpace bloggers ;)

You weren’t meant to have a boss
Paul Graham tells us that having a boss, isn’t the natural scheme of things. Reading the sub-heading, on Trees, definitely makes a lot of sense. A bold statement, yet true: “You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.” I can already say I can feel myself resonating with it. As always, a good piece of advice: “A lot of people in their early twenties get into debt, because their expenses grow even faster than the salary that seemed so high when they left school. At least if you start a startup and fail your net worth will be zero rather than negative.”

Technorati Tags: illegal downloading, p2p, bloggers, internet censorship, zimbra, quality, social, community, boss, startups

My friend Ditesh, is performing the tireless task, of following and updating the list of countries voting on Microsoft OOXML, at The Last Lap. If you’re interested in the freedom of document formats, this is a list you should keep a close look on this week. The comments feed is also particularly interesting.

In other news, today is Document Freedom Day. Have you freed your documents yet?

Technorati Tags: ooxml, odf, document freedom day, microsoft, ditesh kumar

Dear Lazyweb,

Is the best way to backup Mac OS X Leopard, Time Machine? Will it give me full, reliable restores, in case all goes to hell?

On Linux, I use rdiff-backup, which is a phenomenal tool, that is quick and easy to use from the command line. Its restores are proven (even across Linux distributions). Do I need to bother with it on OS X?

Is Time Machine space efficient? My Macbook comes with a 250GB hard disk, and the largest 2.5″ disk I can buy is a 320GB disk, and that’s currently what I use for Time Machine backups (no, I will not carry a 3.5″ disk for backups – I travel a lot).

Thanks

Technorati Tags: lazyweb, backups, time machine, macosx, leopard, rdiff-backup

In a mere eight days (March 29, 2008), the vote for the fast-track of ECMA-376 will have to be concluded. In the APAC region, the Participating (“P” member countries) countries are Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Korea, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore. Back in September 2007, Australia and Malaysia abstained, while Singapore voted to approve, and the rest, voted to disapprove.

So, will there be a change in votes, come eight days? India, has chosen to lead the pack and say that they still disapprove (much kudos to Venky for this information).

I’ve largely not followed the debate, but seeing Doug Mahugh’s blog posts, and how he seems to act rather immaturely, I can only hope that PIKOM, and naturally SIRIM look at the previous abstain vote, and decide to change it to a disapprove. Naturally, that’s not the only reason (that in itself will seem childish) – its just that the OOXML specification seems largely incomplete, despite the 8,000+ pages that exist out there (I’m including edits in the specification in that number).

Now, back to the real point of this. I challenge an adult to read, the following entries, and tell me if Doug doesn’t seem childish:

• PIKOM Meeting in Malaysia – Note the misinformation on the “IBM’s side”. It seems that Microsoft views that everyone anti-OOXML must be from IBM (its not only this blog post, I’ve spoken to Microsofties who utter the same corporate line). How untrue. This is not an IBM agenda against Microsoft – please wake up. Please do read the comments, because its really useful to the entire blog post
• An “open standards” meeting in Malaysia – This one takes the cake, clearly. I simply love the conspiracy theory on how Doug was removed from the meeting. Problems with Yoon Kit and Ditesh not showing up on time, and them waiting 30 minutes? Sure, it was bad form to be late, but being late happens everywhere, even in the US, Doug. I’m surprised that he also adds Madam Tan (from MAMPU) into the conspiracy mix. Its just an amusing read, something that maybe you’d have read in a Nancy Drew novel, when you were eight.

Naturally, one must read Yoon Kit’s response to all this childishness. Its interesting (but not surprising) to see that Microsoft goes through great lengths, to sully the standards process. But Yoon Kit brings up an interesting point.

Can someone, not from the nation, participate in a standards discussion, with having the nation’s interest at heart, over their companies interest? I believe its generally impossible. Its similar to applying to go work in the military/army – the requirements are simple, in that you have to be a citizen of said nation. After all, in war, where do your loyalties lie?

Anyway, the next eight days will be interesting. But if you’re to look at the antagonist behaviour in that blog post, I am just so glad that no matter what happens in the next eight days, MAMPU has opted to drop Microsoft Office from their stable of machines by year’s end, and the government agencies can only follow suit, and back ODF. Naturally, I’m hoping from an abstain to a disapprove, but I shall not count any eggs before they hatch (this analogy seems weirder, during the Easter vacation).

And… if you believe the Microsoft FUD about OpenOffice.org 3.0 supporting reading/writing of OOXML, and support should equate to a standard, that is an untruth. OpenOffice.org needs to support file formats that are out there in the wild. It supports reading from WordPerfect 5.1 documents (via libwpd), does that make WordPerfect’s document format a standard? No.

The opinions here in no way reflect the opinions of my past, present, or future employers. Standard blog disclaimer applies to this post.

Technorati Tags: brm, ecma-376, ooxml, odf, india, doug mahugh, standards, document formats, pikom, sirim, yoon kit, opendocument, microsoft