I am re-hashing my physics fundamentals with Dr. Feynman’s lectures. Did I mention how I love reading his books? I have great admiration for Dr. Richard Feynman, next only to Dr. Albert Einstein & Dr. Jagadish Chandra Bose.

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Selenium is a high quality open source test automation tool for web application testing. Selenium runs in Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh, Safari on the Mac, with plans to support Safari on iPhone soon. Selenium test scripts are portable, can be run from browsers (using Selenium IDE) or from JUNit or NGUnit (using Selenium RC) etc.. For example, test scripts written using Selenium IDE in Firefox on Windows can run on Firefox in Mac or Linux, without changing any code. Selenium tests run directly in browsers and so matches the end-user experience closely.

There are three variants of Selenium, which can be used in isolation or in combination to create complete automation test suite for your web applications.

• Selenium Core - In Selenium Core the tests scripts (written in HTML) and the Selenium Test Runner (written in Javascript) are uploaded to the same web server that hosts the application you are trying to test. It is a simpler form of Selenium, and suitable for non-developers, but it has some inherent limitations.


• Selenium IDE - Selenium IDE is a Firefox plugin, which includes the entire Selenium Core, allows you to record, play back, edit, and debug tests in browser. It provides the simplest introduction to Selenium and is highly recommended for beginners. You can save the tests / test suite created in xml or html format. However to run them in an automated fashion you need Selenium Remote Control which is described next.


• Selenium Remote Control - The Selenium Remote Control allows you to develop test cases and test suites in Java (supports JUnit & NGUnit), PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl and even .NET. It is the most flexible setup but requires some development knowledge to set up and use.


• Selenium Grid - Selenium Grid allows several Selenium Remote Control servers to be accessed in parallel by Selenium Grid server. This is extremely useful for automated load and stress testing of web applications.

Today we will discuss on how you can easily create automatic test scripts using Selenium IDE and convert them to JUnit tests (which uses Selenium Remote Control) which can be added to your JUnit based automatic regression test suite.
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Extendable (by plugins, …) Static Analysis tools like FindBugs can enhance the security of your Java applications (web as well as standalone or client-servers applications) in several significant ways.

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For regular spammers and sploggers, banning their IP address is a simple and effective way to get rid of them. I will describe three methods here with the simplest at the very end. Let’s take a simple case study. ntoolz.net has been copying my posts with an automated content creation tool and then blessing me with a pingback for his splog content! So I decided to ban him.

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Any PHP based software like WordPress, Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, MODx etc. will serve pages both from http://your-site.com as well as http://your-site.com/index.php. This creates duplicate content for search engines, which may then decide to penalize your site for duplicate content. You can safely prevent duplicate content with the following apache code / directive added to your .htaccess file (or in httpd.conf):

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Arne Brachold’s popular XML Sitemap generator plugin for WordPress may report fewer URL than that exists on your website. This in turn means less URL’s which you are submitting to search engines for indexing.

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We extensively use Tadalist to manage our daily tasks. Previously I wrote about the 5 missing features in tadalist. However I am over the days come to the undeniable conclusion that the most important missing feature of Tadalist is speed.

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GMail overall has a nice spam filter. You can leverage the GMail spam filtering capability even for your corporate emails without paying a dime.

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My most favorite Firefox 3 feature is the automatically generated Most Visited folder on Bookmarks tab. It allows me to quickly browse my important work related websites. The FastDial add-on also provides a similar feature but it does it the Opera way. Whenever you open a new tab / window, it displays your 12 favorite website, which you can just click on to open.

People are reporting that Firefox is significantly faster on slower machines. I don’t feel it as I am on a high-end Core 2 Duo.

What is your most favorite feature in Firefox 3?

Leased Lines historically have been used as reliable, resilient internet and site-to-site data connections. The main benefits have been security, reliability, SLAs, private network and flexible speeds. Leased Lines were also known for high installation charges, long installation times, hefty monthly fees and unreasonable contracts. With the advent of cheap ADSL connections, Leased Lines have become as relevant as dinosaurs except for the most demanding businesses, especially when you can bond multiple ADSL lines to get reliable broadband at a fraction of the cost.

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