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

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.

…however downloading a preinstalled VMWare image is easier.

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

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.

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.

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.

…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

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.

Die Stadt Stuttgart bietet seit dem 1. März die Möglichkeit online Feinstaub-Plaketten zu beantragen. Ab dem 1. Juli 2007 müssen alle Fahrzeuge, die in die Umweltzone Stuttgart fahren möchten eine solche Plakette haben.

Während zu Beginn nur für Fahrzeuge mit Stuttgarter Kennzeichen Plaketten beantragt werden konnten, wurde diese Beschränkungen inzwischen aufgehoben und es können bundesweit für in Deutschland zugelassene Fahrzeuge Feinstaub-Plaketten beantragt werden.

Pressemeldung auf www.stuttgart.de: Feinstaubplaketten per Online-Antrag

I thought it would be nice to disable a forms submit button once it was pressed once to prevent impatient users from clicking again and again if the post might take longer as expected.

<input type="submit" value="Send" onclick="this.disabled=true"/>

But as I noticed IE6 doesn’t like that. After disabling the submit it cancels the submit of the page – leaving the user on a page with a disabled submit button. How great is that ?

The solution:

After disabling the button you have to submit the form using JavaScript.
So the buttons HTML code now looks like this:

<input type="submit" value="Send"
onclick="this.disabled=true;document.myform.submit()"/>