Articles July 21, 2011

Twitter from Ruby

Just been looking at Ruby Twitter gem by John Nunemaker during my lunch break.
Looking good so far, got my Twitter Dev key setup and have made a test post from a Ruby script.

1. Tweeting from Ruby
2......
3. Profit!!!

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Articles July 18, 2011

Github

Finally got round to uploading some of my stuff to the GitHub site.
If you want a laugh have a look at my code alastairhm@github ;)

Doodle’s Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Articles July 1, 2011

Google Plus

Having my first look at Google+, so far looks nice.
Need to figure out if you can get a RSS feed of the items you've +'ed?

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Articles June 29, 2011

WATIR makes a tester's life easier.

I am constantly amazed that Watir and Ruby make software testing a web application so easy.
For example finding all the links in a table based on their text starting with a string.

stub = "0 Text"
browser.table(:id,"myTable").links(:text,/#{stub}/).each { |link| puts link.text }

This will return all the links in the table "myTable" with text starting with "0 Text"

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Articles June 23, 2011

Setting browser size and position with watir-webdriver

In working on my automated web app test using watir-webdriver I need to change the window size and move it on the screen.

From asking the question at StackOverFlow.com you can do this with the following commands;

browser = Watir::Browser.new(:firefox)
browser.execute_script('window.resizeTo(800,600)')
browser.execute_script('window.moveTo(0,0)')

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Articles June 23, 2011

Android Argus

Note: 1 of this post’s 3 links are now broken — mostly dead 2008–2013 feed-syndication infrastructure (FeedBurner, Gawker, AOL’s old blog network, Pheedo, Yahoo Pipes). Left as originally published.

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Articles May 11, 2011

Converting scripts from Watir to Webdriver, Table size

I am starting the process of converting my WATIR scripts to use WATIR webdriver.

There a couple of table methods I was using in my WATIR scripts to check the size (rows and columns) of a HTML table.

myTable.row_count
myTable.column_count

These methods don't exist in webdriver so I was looking for a good way of doing the same check.

For rows this seems to give the same result as the row_count method

myTable.rows.length

For column count of the table I've tried converting the table to an array of strings and getting the length of the first row, but the conversion to the string array is taking a while.

myCols = myTable.strings[0].length

After asking the question on StackOverFlow the solution to find the number of columns in the table was to use;

myCols = myTable.row.cells.length

This assumes that the first row has the correct number of columns, which in our application should always be the case.

To avoid rewriting all the unit tests I've extended the Watir::Table class at the start of the script so that it contains the missing row_count and column_count methods.

class Watir::Table
    def row_count
        return self.rows.length
    end
    def column_count
        return self.row.cells.length
    end
end

The unit tests now run unaltered.

If your table has a uniform number of columns for each row then you could check the whole table by doing something like.

        myTable.rows.each { |myRow|
            myCols = myRow.cells.length
            assert_equal(validColumnCount,myCols,"Column count mismatch")
        }

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Articles March 30, 2011

Kensington Orbit Optical TrackBall

Kensington Orbit Optical TrackBall, a photo by Alastair Montgomery on Flickr.

All I need now is a Missile command style game :)

Articles February 17, 2011

FxCamera App

The iPhone guys at work have been talking about a retro camera app for their phones, so I’ve decided to look at what’s available for the Android platform.

The second one I’ve checked out is Fx Camera

FxCamera enables you to take a picture with various effects,

ToyCam (number of colour mode and vignetting settings available with randomizer)
Polandroid (number of colour mode and film type settings available)
Fisheye
SymmetriCam
Warhol
Normal

It works quite well for the ToyCam and Polandroid but the other three modes are more of a novelty than something you’d use all the time. Downside it has a maximum picture resolution of 960 by 640 pixels. It is 1524kb in size and can be moved to the SD card.

Toy Cam Examples

Polandroid Examples

SymmetriCam Example

Doodle’s Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Articles February 15, 2011

Retro Camera App Android

The iPhone guys at work have been talking about a retro camera app for their phones, so I’ve decided to look at what’s available for the Android platform.

The first one I’ve checked out is Retro Camera

The free ad supported version gives you five retro camera types to play with, see example shots below. The application is a fairly chunky 6179 kb but can be moved to the SD card. It has a novel interface which replicates the retro camera but this reduces the viewfinder size which can be a problem.

Doodle’s Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery