Selenium Remote Control (RC) is a test tool that allows you to write automated web application UI tests in many programming languages against any HTTP website using any mainstream JavaScript-enabled browser. Selenium RC is a powerful and simple framework for running (scheduled or manually) automated UI centric regression tests for web applications / services. Here are few simple tips for Selenium RC java client. I used JUnit for tests. You can use NGUnit too.

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Ever since we installed Comment Guard Pro, anti comment-spam plugin on this blog, it stopped over 1 millon spam comments (1001011 spam comments were blocked by Angsuman’s Comment Guard plugin in 335 days 8 hours 38 minutes. 99.338 % of the comments received during this time were spam.) so far (look in the right sidebar for latest stats). The pro version of the plugin is now being tested on this blog and other sites.

In Comment Guard Pro have developed multiple layers of defense to stop all kind of comment spams - spams submitted using comment forms (robotic or by humans), pingback spam, trackback spam and referrer spam.

Comment Guard Pro is a modular plugin where each module acts as independent spam filters. Many modules are developed with technologies developed in-house. Others leverage best existing technologies out there. You can also develop and add your own modules as well as share it with others.

So far it is all-green on QA front, only minor defects and enhancements.

UPDATE: Comment Guard Pro has been released.

Cross-browser and cross-platform testing is a bane as well as a requirement for web applications. Consider Internet Explorer on Windows. There are two major version 6 & 7, not to mention still used 5.5. You need to either use different machines or multi-boot machines or use hacks to run them simultaneously or virtualization software like VMWare; not of them are really easy to setup and use for common web developer. Then you have Opera & Firefox (we develop in Firefox so it gets tested first in our case). Did I mention testing on Mac with Safari, Firefox and other browsers? Oh, and don’t forget Linux too. Are you feeling overwhelmed? Let’s see how you can solve most of these problems.

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I have significantly improved our site performance in the last month. I did all the site optimization steps by the book, found a lot of new things and fine-tuned existing ideas. There are a couple of good ideas I am yet to implement like using Lighttpd server instead of Apache 2.

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I was watching the mysql queries using mytop just before our server went down. In a flash I realized the cause of our persistent server load problem. I have also come up with an elegant solution which I will implement in the next few days.

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All I really want is to store a very large Hashtable with more reads than writes. It should be able to deal with more than 8GB of data. The key will be a String of limited length. I want it to be extremely fast on read-access, stable with sudden shutdown and other issues beyond our control and with very low CPU usage. The leading contenders in my mind are:
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In short there is none. Translator Pro / Gold uses an intelligent caching engine to cache the translated pages. However it can happily co-exist with other caching engine like wp-cache 2 or WordPress’ object cache. While such engines will not help Translator plugin in any way as it is optimally cached by design, they may help serving the original (untranslated) blog pages.

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Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro 5.0 will be released on 13th June.

Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Gold (32+1 Language translation) will be released on 13th June. This is a limited edition release. Only 100 copies will ever be released. Each will cost $100. Existing users of ATPP will be offered a discounted price of 80$ for upgrading ATPP to ATP Gold. ATP Gold will come with array of features targeted for popular blogs. Advanced load distribution and load protection measures will be provided.

Please advance book your copies for ATP Gold now by sending me an email ( angsuman [at] taragana [com] ) or commenting on this post to let us know about your intention (your comment may not be published but will be processed). This is a one time release only. Unlimited free upgrades will be provided.

Existing ATPP customers will receive their upgrade within June 30th. We are providing web based access to your plugin which can be downloaded at anytime from our website (url will be released soon). This will be in addition to email based update. In future any upgrades will be on the same date as general release for all existing customers.

Our products have been extensively tested on variety of browsers and operating systems. We test various themes and compatibility with third party plugins. In short we go the whole nine yards to make it a high quality product for you.

Remember with Taragana products (ATPP & ATP Gold) you will get unlimited free upgrades. You will also receive free support for 6 months. In short we will make it work on your blog, we won’t leave you hanging midway as with many open source products. You get what you pay for. Our success is defined by your success and satiisfaction.

Update: Please book your copies now as they are running out fast.

We are currently processing huge amount of sensitive corporate data for a Fortune 500 company as the first phase of a project. You have to be very careful in data processing, much more than any standard programming effort. Here are few tips you may find useful when programming to process sensitive data in bulk. Get your best (wo)men on the job.

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Mantis is popular php based defect tracking application which works on top of RDBMS like MySQL and PostgreSQL. Recently I ported our Windows based Mantis installation to Linux. It used MySQL as backend. Here are the steps:
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