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API testing with Cucumber
In our project we have a REST API using JSON that is used both internally by our mobile clients and offered externally to third parties. Since we were consolidating all functional testing to Cucumber,...
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Dump World on failure
One of the most important aspects of test reports is that when something fails, you can easily debug what went wrong. Splitting tests into logical, small tests that exercise a single functionality in...
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Documenting Cucumber steps
One of the great things in Cucumber testing is that as you go along, you start to accumulate ready step definitions, which makes writing new tests even faster. Several times I’ve actually been...
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Android Torture
Okay, this is my first rant post. It’s 5:30 in the morning and I’m writing a blog post thanks to my new-and-shiny Samsung Galaxy S3. I was recently force-upgraded from my Nokia E7 because its...
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No-nonsense ASCII chart
There are a lot of ASCII charts floating around the Internet. However all of them seem to have a few fundamental problems: They include the whole ASCII set in the chart and cram too much information...
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Switching to Linux Mint
This is a description of my migration from Ubuntu to Linux Mint 14. As this was my work laptop, there are some additional requirements that need to be met by the system. In particular, I review:...
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The Gimp is dead, long live the Gimp!
I have been an avid user of the Gimp for well over a decade now. I started using it in the mid 90′s around version 0.60. I was promoting it to my friends as a great image manipulation tool, and recall...
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Benchmarking Amazon micro instances
Amazon t1.micro instances are the most affordable EC2 instance types. Their distinctive feature is that while allowing short bursts of high CPU power (around double that of a m1.small instance), but...
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CoffeeScript vs. TypeScript vs. Dart
Software often requires two or three iterations before you get it right. In our case this led to starting a rewrite of our hybrid mobile application. It had been developed over several years by a...
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Simple image devignetting
After Before With the prevalence of smart phone cameras today, they are often used instead of scanners as quick digitization methods for documents. Unfortunately this leads to excessive vignetting...
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Shifting time in JavaScript
Many applications use the current time in their functionality. For example, they can show data for a certain period of time or show the current date within the application. Writing functional tests...
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setImmediate, MessageChannel, postMessage broken on Internet Explorer 10
The JavaScript setImmedate function has been proposed and promoted as a faster alternative to setTimeout(fn, 0) (and cleaner than postMessage). While the HTML spec clamps setTimeout(fn, 0) to a minimum...
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Testing visual appearance with Cucumber + Watir
One of the great things about Cucumber and Watir is that it allows you to write functional tests that are decoupled of the UI. By using page objects, the definition of how the UI works is decoupled...
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Modifying the pace of audiobooks
I’ve recently started listening to audiobooks. They’re a convenient way to enjoy books on your way to work or while driving. After listening to Mika Waltari’s The Egyptian, I took on The Hunger...
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CoffeeScript woes
I recently wrote a piece comparing CoffeeScript, TypeScript and Dart. For the UI component of Wellmo, we decided upon using CoffeeScript. While this has been a great leap from JavaScript, we’ve had...
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Using Spark with MongoDB
I recently started investigating Apache Spark as a framework for data mining. Spark builds upon Apache Hadoop, and allows a multitude of operations more than map-reduce. It also supports streaming data...
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Hybrid app testing using dynamic DNS
Hybrid apps simplify implementing cross-platform mobile applications in many ways. You only need to write the HTML once, and it should work on all platforms. However, you still need to test those...
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Backup KeePass2 database on Linux
There are several instructions on how to use the KeePass2 trigger mechanism to create a backup of your password database when saving the database. However, all of the instructions I found were for...
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When to hard-code
Hard-coding is generally considered an anti-pattern and abhorred by experienced developers. Input and configuration data should be externalized from the code, or at the very least parametrized to a...
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Benchmarking AWS t2 instances
A couple of years ago I did some benchmarking on the AWS t1.micro instances. The t1.micro was AWS’s first performance burstable instance type, which are appropriate for non-continuous CPU usage. The...
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