Electrolux India has very carefully hidden its service center number on its website. The only option you have is to drill-down to the local customer service center. Unfortunately the number given for Ms. Millenium Service Center for South Kolkata (033-24573470 / 24451120 ) doesn’t work. I had to hunt down a certain executive to finally find the real phone number for booking complaint across India.

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Google search bot (Googlebot) parses robots.txt file to find excluded sections of the site like any good webbots. However unlike the other bots, Google bot behaves differently when you have a section for all bots (*) as well as a section specifically for Googlebot.

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Allen from CenterNetworks made a startling discovery. It appears FriendFeed show the same 9 friendfeed users as default every time a new users signs-up. While it is excellent for the elites like Robert Scoble & Jason Calacanis, others are left behind.

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Yahoo! spent the July 4 weekend in discussions with its lead adviser, Goldman Sachs, and potential bid partners including Time Warner in a desperate bid to defend itself from shareholders meeting on August 1 to vote on whether to re-elect their board.

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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.

I am seriously looking to delve into quantum electrodynamics. It is really an intriguing subject.

One of the lesson I took away from my reading is to have more fun, be less serious about what you are doing and positively accept the fact that you are really doing it for the fun of it. We often get so wrapped up in our work that we forget that it is all for nothing, in the end it is - from “dust to dust”. Or as it is more aptly said the world is probably an exercise ground for our mind and consciousness.

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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Firefox download manager is still flaky, even after three major versions. Often the download stops for no apparent reasons. At least in version 3, you can safely stop and then resume the download, which works as expected.

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WordPress, in recent versions, have forces the display of WordPress as the generator in meta tags along with the version information in the header of your WordPress blogs - <meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.5.1" />. Unlike previous versions there is not easy way to remove it. Unless WordPress is using that to provide support (which it doesn’t), I don’t see any good reason for providing that extra bit of help to hackers, do you? Here is a simple plugin which will remove the WordPress generator meta tag along with its version information.

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Newer versions of WordPress (2.3.1 and above) adds two extra lines to your blog header. They are:
<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://blog.taragana.com/xmlrpc.php?rsd" /><link rel="wlwmanifest" type="application/wlwmanifest+xml" href="http://blog.taragana.com/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml" />
You need them to use Windows Live Writer to write to your WordPress blog. However many, like me, do not use Windows Live Writer. For them such headers are simply junk and add to the size of their pages (and download time) without adding any value to them or to their users. For such bloggers (majority I presume) here is a simple WordPress plugin (Angsuman's Windows Live Manifest Remover WordPress plugin) which removes these two header links from your WordPress blog.

Download Angsuman's Windows Live Header Remover Plugin, rename the file to angsumans-windows-live-header-remover.php, upload it to wp-content/plugins folder of your blog and activate it from Plugin Management screen. It requires zero configuration. It does one thing and does it well - remove these two useless headers from your WordPress blog.

Technical Note: There is a similar WordPress plugin which does the same thing. This plugin works differently in that it doesn't add the code directly to the plugin body but to the 'init' hook. This ensures that this plugin will remain compatible with future versions of WordPress as it doesn't depend on the relative order of execution of the plugins versus the default WordPress filters. Sounds complicated? To put it simply - Install the plugin and then forget about it forever. It will continue to serve you (your blog) in the background for a very long time.

You can get more free WordPress plugins here.

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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