Highlighting elements in a Webdriver automated test

So, you use Selenium 2's Webdriver to automate some unit tests in your C# .NET enterprise web application? Me too.  Our list of tests is growing longer and longer, and watching web pages fly by automatically can be amusing - but which element is being looked for, or clicked?  Can you highlight the element before Webdriver clicks on it?

Sharing iTunes apps for free

There are various instructions on sharing iTunes apps between different devices used by different people (linked to different iTunes accounts).  I just discovered how to do it without manually copying files between computers, so long as you can enable "Home Sharing" between your various devices.

Dennis Ritchie

The tributes to Dennis Ritchie won’t match the river of praise that spilled out over the web after the death of Steve Jobs. But they should. 

And then some.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/thedennisritchieeffect/

ASP DX GridView Command Column buttons per-row visibilty

The DevExpress GridView used for showing a list of data objects has a neat Command Column in which you can put a delete button, or edit button (and others).  On clicking this button the related data source event is fired, adding, deleting, or updating the required object.

Command Column showing the Delete button

If only all EULAs were this good!

I installed some MS fonts in Ubuntu recently, and this is the EULA I was presented with:

If only all EULAs were this good!

A Call Centre for Security Software, Condoms, V, and a Melbourne Pharmacy!

Wait... what?

I received a phone call today that went something like this.  I've had these before, but this time I had some spare time to play.  This is the best I can remember, the real phone call went on for nearly 15 minutes, and there was a lot more going around in circles!

Me: Hello?
(Indian) Voice: Good afternoon sir, may I speak with Mr Bootchernaan? [those who know me will recognise my name in there somewhere!]
Me: What about?
Voice: I am calling from Microsoft, and we have detected that your computer is infected with viruses from the information it is sending to us
Me: really?
Voice: yes sir, you computer is infected with viruses and trojans and ...
Me: how do you know this?
Voice: your computer sends us information...
Me: How?

Customising Dates in Evolution

Evolution is Gnome's official email, calendar, contact, & task management software.  ie. I use it daily to check my emails.

I've always had a pet peeve with date formats that look like this:

It's fine when I'm thinking about mail relative to today.  However, sometimes I have to check for certain emails with regard to the absolute date.  For example, "What was all the correspondence to a certain customer on the 21st".  I would quickly scan the date column for 21/01/11, and find there isn't any.  However the 21st was last Friday, which is shown as "Fri 02:42 PM".  There are various reasons why this is not a good thing with regard to efficient human-machine interfaces, however there are also good reasons for a fuzzy date.

Since Linux gives you so much choice (in the right places) it's gratifying to see the option to change the date column to any of a number of presets, or your very own format:

As you can see, I've selected a simple day/month/year format:

Note: the version of Evolution used here is 2.32.1

hop counter

I was playing with traceroute and felt like "rolling my own" hop counter, so this is what I put together in a few seconds:

for ((i=1;i<21;i++)); do echo -n .; if ping -c 1 -t $i somehost.com >/dev/null 2>&1; then break; fi; done; echo " $i hops"

You'll reasonably quickly see a few dots (especially if the router in question doesn't respond to pings) and a final count.  You can of course tweak the options to ping to make it more like traceroute (max wait time, max hops, etc).  The output is something like:

.......... 10 hops

Now, for some reason `traceroute` needs superuser access for the ICMP option, and yet you can do the same with ping.