Lebensqualität

Bodo Wartke beschreibt besingt in seiner MacLife-Kolumne eindrucksvoll und unterhaltsam die Vorteile eines Macs.

(Don’t) Give up on Vista

Hilarious !

“Upgrading to an older, more familiar experience”

If you have been “upgrading” (from Vista to XP) lately you most certainly will have lots of fun watching this, this and this.

LEGO instruction-sets

Did you play with LEGO when you were a kid - well, I did.

Recently we took the big box full of LEGO out of the attic and we had lots of fun with it. However - I noticed that some of the instruction-sets where missing and was reminded that some of them got lost due to whatever reason.

When back there was no easy way to get another copy of an instruction - surfing the web I found a website within minutes.

So if you find yourself in the situation of looking for an instruction-set go to the Brickfactory and browse their archive.

Installing Ubuntu is easy…

…however downloading a preinstalled VMWare image is easier.

Hint: the password for the administrative user is “ubuntu”

Selenium: Verify submit button is disabled after first click

To make sure a forms submit button is disabled after it is clicked once, a Selenium test should look like this:

click	_button
verifyNotEditable	_button	true
waitForPageToLoad	50000

The button will be clicked (without waiting). Then it verifies that the button is disabled. Finally we wait for the next page to load.

Assinging a permanent drive letter to an external USB drive

To have my external backup USB drive always use the same drive letter I used these instructions found in Knowledge Base of SyncBack - the backup software I use.

Selenium Testing with Prototype AJAX

If you are using Selenium to test your web application and you are having some AJAX in it, you may know that the waitForCondition assertion is your friend.

According to the Selenium documentation it:

Runs the specified JavaScript snippet repeatedly until it evaluates to “true”.

With this you can define your own condition which defines the end of an AJAX call.

Since I am using Prototypes AJAX mostly, I found this standard waitForCondition quite helpful:

waitForCondition

selenium.browserbot.getCurrentWindow().Ajax.activeRequestCount==0

30000

It waits until all ongoing AJAX calls are done and then continues. While this might not be suitable for all places it is definitively better than using the pause command.

“Agile Produktentwicklung im Neuen Web”

…ist eine hervorragende Diplomarbeit zum Thema Agile Softwareentwicklung.

Die Arbeit ist in 3 Teile unterteilt: Der 1 Teil beschreibt das sogenannte “Neue Web”. Wesentlich spannender fand ich den darauf folgenden Teil, der sich mit der Methodik der Agilen Entwicklung und deren Vorteilen befasst. Es werden verschiedene Ansätze gezeigt und auch deren Nutzen anhand von Beispielen belegt (45 Prozent aller zu Beginn gewünschten Features werden niemals genutzt).

Im letzten Teil wird die zuvor erwähnte Theorie anhand es eines Projektes (bemite - Online-Anwendung zur Zeiterfassung) in die Praxis umgesetzt. Der komplette Entwicklungsprozess wird dabei erläutert.

Das Dokument ist sehr gut geschrieben und macht Spaß zu lesen - das entstandene Projekt kann sich sehen lassen.

via: ThinkPHP /dev/blog

Zend Core 2.0 does not work with PEAR

Trying to install Zend Platform 3 for Windows I was surprised to see that it requires Zend Core 2.0 now. Ok, so it removed my installation of XAMP to give this one a try.

Unfortunately the trial ended soon. My first step after running the installer was to try to install some PEAR packages using go-pear, which does not work. Problem reports and a workaround can be found in the Zend forum.

PS: The sad part is, that this problem was already reported with the beta version of Zend Core. But apparently PEAR is not that important to Zend, so this error still exists in the final version as well.