When working on Selenium tests, do you appreciate a traditional IDE-based approach to debugging, with a GUI that lets you set breakpoints, step through your code line-by-line, inspect variables, and evaluate expressions on the fly?
Here's a .gif to illustrate what I mean:
Have you also tried WebdriverIO (the ...
Do you have a burning desire (or a mandatory policy) to make your Ubuntu machine lock its display when you step away?
Or do you have a fondness (maybe a burn-in desire?) for a time when screensavers had other uses?
If so, this post describes how I installed XScreenSaver (and ...
Keeping a Markdown ordered list in proper working order has always been tricky for me. I always seem to end up up with indentation characters that reset the next item back to the number 1.
Here's how to make a list containing paragraphs without the list item numbers resetting ...
(tl;dr: This post describes how to build a Docker image for running Python GhostDriver/PhantomJS tests in a container.)
In a previous post I described how to set up an environment to run automated Selenium WebDriver tests using the Ghostdriver/PhantomJS/Python web testing stack.
But these days ...
When using Selenium WebDriver, you might encounter a situation where you need to scroll an element into view.
By running the commands in the following steps, you can interactively try out a solution using Google Chrome.
My usual habit ...
This post documents how to set up an Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit machine with everything you need to develop automated tests with Selenium-WebDriver, Google Chrome, and ChromeDriver, using the Python 2.7 release that ships with Ubuntu.
These steps might be useful to someone in the near term, and perhaps ...
GhostDriver is a fantastic tool, one which I've been happily using for a while now (and have briefly written about before).
I feel it's worth mentioning that troubleshooting GhostDriver tests can seem like a challenge in and of itself if you're used to having a browser GUI ...
While working on a stackoverflow answer about Sikuli today, I noted that installing Sikuli on Ubuntu 12.04 isn't a one-step process - there are a few dependencies that need manual intervention before you even install it.
Here's the rundown of the steps that worked for me to get ...
These days I'm accustomed to having the 7z command available on Unix-like systems (thanks to the p7zip project).
On top of that, 7zip is always one of the first utils I install on any Windows machine I work with.
So as an exercise in cross-platform style (or just for ...
Today I had the chance to briefly explore Bugzilla's API.
I used curl to experiment with the XML-RPC API a bit - in the end I just scratched the surface of what's possible, but it was interesting nonetheless.
Here are a few examples of things you can do:
Today I wanted to check the notBefore and notAfter validity dates of an SSL cert installed on a remote server.
I immediately wondered if there was an easy way to use the OpenSSL command line tool to accomplish this.
And there is - you just have to pass the output of ...
I was interested in seeing how quickly one can add a lightbox gallery to a Rails app nowadays.
As it happens, there's really not much to it, especially when using the fancybox-rails gem.
This post describes how to bring up an existing image viewer app (the "gallery-after" app from ...
Need a place to experiment with PostgreSQL, but not in the mood to set up the server locally?
Then try out the free dev plan on Heroko Postgres. No configuration or credit card required.
Creating a DB and manipulating it with the psql CLI can be done in just a ...
GhostDriver is a project that lets you write Selenium WebDriver automation tests that run using the PhantomJS headless WebKit, instead of a traditional web browser.
Put another way, PhantomJS can replace Firefox and friends in your WebDriver scripts - and it doesn't require a display, so testing complex web apps ...
My last post was about executing small Java programs from within vim, without leaving the editor to manually open a shell.
The goal was to rapidly execute example code for your own edification, or when showing code to other people - basically any time you need a Short, Self Contained, Correct ...
For instructional purposes (either when experimenting on your own, or when demonstrating code to others) it's always useful to be able to run snippets of code in a REPL, or a similar environment allowing fast turnaround in the edit/compile/run cycle.
When using Java, other IDEs offer ways ...
Say you're on the console on your Raspberry Pi, and you want to take a screenshot. But without X running, what does one do?
Simple: Use fbgrab. To install it, just:
sudo apt-get install fbgrab
Pass fbgrab the name of the virtual terminal/tty you want to snapshot, and ...
Lately I've been looking for reasons to use OmniGraffle for diagramming.
And with the steps to set up static web hosting in S3 (as mentioned in my last post) still fresh in mind, it seems like a good time to document what I did. And the steps are simple ...
New year, new hosting stack! This blog is now brought to you by Octopress, hosted on Amazon S3, instead of Blogger.
After spending some quality time with the tools I used in the move from Blogger (Octopress, S3, Route 53, git), I feel like the proverbial new pair of glasses ...
A while back I was interested in writing some Ruby code that used functions from the Windows IUIAutomation COM interface.
But since IUIAutomation is a custom COM interface that doesn't implement IDispatch, Ruby's Win32OLE module won't work with it.
And I wanted to avoid using a C ...
Not too long ago I needed to write some test setup code in C# to check for open IE windows.
The idea was to kill any running IE instances before entering the main portion of the test case - and just for reference, I wanted to record the URL that each ...
netcat (or "nc" on the command line) is a useful tool for many reasons.
One common test automation task I've found it handy for is polling a port, waiting for a service to start responding.
While there are many ways to do that, using nc is a handy way ...
The curl command line tool is a great addition to your toolbox when working on web-related testing projects.
It's difficult to add up all the ways curl is useful for testing tasks. Here's an attempt at documenting a few simple scenarios.
OSX ...
Inaugural post!
Big news - Selenium 2 was released a few days ago:
http://seleniumhq.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/selenium-2-0/
This is a big deal, considering the impressive results Selenium 2 can yield, not to mention the time and effort that went into the project.
So, what better way to ...
