Colin Charles: life/movies, recently (april 2008)

This week’s been an interesting one. I’m glad its over.

• My relocation is complete
• I collected my items not on April 1 (when it was supposed to arrive), but on April 2. I had a fun time with customs. Needless to say, it has inspired me to start a Only in Malaysia category on my blog
• On April 1, I paid close attention to ensure my on-boarding process was making the most sense. There are still so many things that haven’t been sorted out, and with my impending travel next week, I’m slowly becoming impatient and its turning me into an angry person
• Public Bank, the credit card vendor of my choice, is annoying the living daylight’s out of me. I’m sure to blog about this saga, the moment its all over (either way)
• The MyOSS meetup was interesting, but what was more useful was the post-meetup dinner. Its time to focus on the more interesting things in life
• Q2/2008 has started. Or Q4 for my new corporate overlords. I have a bazillion things to do, and here’s hoping that I blog more. I have to remember that I work for the community, always. This is what’s going to make this quarter rock…
• Driving the Vios S is nice. Its smooth. Alas, I’m taking over the Iswara in general. Its also a nice car and will continue to serve me well :)
• I’m going to pay close attention to the Malaysian community and government needs, when it comes to the open source world. Finally
• It rains, pretty much everyday from about 3-5pm. Its getting rather annoying. Why? I have to switch the DSL modem off
• Singapore Airlines has made me an Elite Gold member. Its going to be easier to keep it, because I’ll be using SIA and Star Alliance a lot more now. In Melbourne, sometimes you were forced to use Qantas (ick) or Malaysian Airlines (not as ick as Qantas, but ick enough)
• Must do expense reports
• Off to a party tonight. Will make use of the camera. I have a huge shitload of backlog of photos to push online (since November 2007 even)

Enough of this crap rants. I’m glad that it doesn’t get syndicated elsewhere. Its just to remind me, when I look back on the past, I guess…

In the movie world, I caught:

• 2 Days in Paris - funny love story
• Juno - recommended. Storyline is good, actors are excellent.
• American Gangster - recommended, true story even. Can learn trade secrets of successful drug lords - make your “workers” that pack stuff up, work in the nude…
• Poseidon - on cable this one, big nice screen, pity the movie wasn’t much. Emmy Rossum kinda makes it worthwhile though. Young (born in 1986)!

FunnyCoolStuff: Man gets stripper at funeral

Talk about male fantasies. Cai Ruigong hired a fancy stripper for his daddy’s funeral, paying her roughly $160 to do her thing in front of his coffin!

Sure, I found it a bit shocking at first. But then, according to one of the articles, Taiwanese culture is quite relaxed about stripping. And that it’s somewhat common to bring in, to quote Pratchett, these “seam-stressing” ladies; it reels in more mourners.

Anyway, the story goes that Cai Jinlai’s son had vowed to hire a stripper for the final farewell event if daddy-o lived to be a 100.

And that he did. Come to think of it, Cai Jinlai sounds a bit like a raunchy old grandpa; apparently he was an ardent fan of strip joints and used to travel around with his buds, visiting various clubs.

Where does this man get his energy from? He passed away at the age of 103 after a three mile walk into town to vote.

Colin Charles: Selenium at the MyOSS meetup

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

WingLoon: Create a Stand Out Favicon Using IcoFX

Do you notice that I have change my blog’s theme? Thanks to Nurudin Jauhari, the WordPress Theme designer. I am currently using one of his WordPress theme, Padangan. This theme works perfectly with WordPress 2.5 and version 1.3 is the latest stable version. I decided to change the default favicon for this theme. Thanks to the award winning freeware icon editor, IcoFX.

IcoFX is designed to be the all-in-one solution for icon creation, extraction and editing software. It works perfectly for icons in Windows XP and Windows Vista as well as Macintosh OS X. It is a small software (less than 2MB) packed with more than 40 effects plus custom filters. With IcoFX, you can easily convert your favorite images to icons and vice versa. It support multiple files using batch processing for importing, exporting and extracting. You have the power to create icon libraries or change icons inside exe files with IcoFX. Lastly, you can use it to create a stand out favicon for your blog or website. Follow the simple steps below: -

1. Run the IcoFX software.
2. Open your preferred image to be converted to icon.
3. Choose your preferred colors and size for the icon. I select True Color + Alpha Channel (32 bits) for colors and 16 x 16 for size.
4. Once your image is open, you can go ahead to create an icon from your image with a simple click on the OK button.
5. Save your icon as favicon.ico and upload to your blog or website.

Source: IcoFX

Raymond.CC: Get a 90 Days Trial Instead Of 30 Days for Kaspersky Internet Security

I got an email from Ramakant, asking me if there are any antivirus that works beyond the 30 day trial period. The reason for trial version is for you to try out the product before buying. If you’re satisfied with it, you can purchase the subscription to continue using it. If not, simply uninstall it and look for a new software. A normal trial version of Kaspersky Internet Security is only valid for 30 days. Once the trial period has expired, you won’t be able to update its virus definition and it won’t clean any virus that is detected on the computer. You are then left with only 2 options. Uninstall Kaspersky Internet Security or spend $79.95 to purchase a 1 year subscription.

I found out that there is a way to get a 90 days trial period for Kaspersky Internet Security instead of the normal 30 days. This will give you more time to evaluate Kaspersky Internet Security.
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