Trying to find every excuse not to cut the grass … including apparently closing some browser tabs.

• Interoperability – Standardized Test Information Interchange has me so full of ‘meh’ as to be hilarious. Commercially driven standards rarely are and/or I am just too much of an open source person to accept this model for standards development
• Licensing in a Post Copyright World – important
• How to Make Async Requests in PHP is php specific in its solution, but has some interesting bits about socket establishment that applies to other ones as well
• Adding Comments to JSON feels like a hack. Buts a clever hack.
• Maven Release Plugin: The Final Nail in the Coffin takes great joy in removing part of the maven environment from their workflow. And really, who doesn’t?
• Open Sourcing a Python Project the Right Way is nice … though of course, as with everything else these days, it has some Github specific isms. You can do it the right way with hg and bitbucket of course… and that is disclaimed in the article
• Headless Watir using both HTTPUnit and PhantomJS
• Implementing HTTP Status Codes in WebDriver, Part 2: Achievement Unlocked – umm, part 2?
• PhantomJS + Plugins + AWS + BrowserMob Proxy – proxy all the things! Including headless things.
• Mastering the Craft is a good reminder, but also, eBay has its own customized version of eclipse? Guessing this is one of those ‘at scale’ solutions

Brain fried from PyCon Canada 2013 and ‘some’ browser tab is misbehaving which means its time to start closing some of these.

• Patchwork seems like an awesome idea, but at the same time, I’ve had to work in heavily monkey-patched RoR apps before…
• Evolving syntax is PHP specific in its examples, but the ideas transfer
• Roslyn + Selenium: Scripty C# Powering Browser Automation – some C# voodoo?
• It’s like 10000 knives when all you need is a Spoon – or specifically, this particular spoon which is yet-another-android-automation-tool. See comments for a bit of discussion re Appium which seems to be the currently best marketed solution in this space
• Planet generator has absolutely nothing to do with automation, but is just cool
• TestSpicer could be cool if it is massively flushed out
• Compatibility changes in IE11 Preview is going to break things I fear, for instance the readyState stuff?
• PyCon Canada 2013 decks are now up
• Implementing WebDriver HTTP Status Codes, Part 1: Challenge Accepted – is interesting in that it uses Fiddler
• Links are not buttons. Neither are DIVs and SPANs – this, a million times.

A ‘should be scripting, but brain stuck in neutral so closing some tabs’ edition of the Smattering.

• The slippery slope isn’t automation related, but if your employer does these things I’d suggest logging a bug and then finding an ethical job
• Why Package Signing is not the Holy Grail – crypto / security is hard. Also, I have a signed package for you to install…
• PHP and Async requests with file based sessions could be a way to speed up a PHP site. Which in turn reduces the amount of time your scripts take to run
• Canadipsum, eh? just because. (eh)
• Using CodedUI testautomation without UIMap files brings Page Objects to CodedUI
• Continuous Delivery Workshop With Neal Ford (@Neal4D) – a Retrospective – yup, the hard part is not the technical bit, but the people parts
• librarian-puppet says You can all stop using git submodules now which is good enough for me
• Highlighting the element before any clicks: A foray into the AbstractEventListener — the event listener stuff is something I need to sort out.
• phpci is built specifically for php apps, and doesn’t pretend to have the features something like jenkins does
• Beware subclassing Ruby core classes – there are likely parallels in other languages as well.

Apparently today’s ‘wait for an email’ task is to whittle down the smattering queue some more.

• I won’t even pretend that FOAAS has to do with automation, but makes me laugh. Also, depending on how crappy your place of work is, it might not be SFW
• PHP RFC: Importing namespaced functions is interesting if you are writing your scripts in a Functional manner. In PHP. In a future where it gets accepted and implemented.
• Measuring Web Page Load Times using JMeter — and read the response articles too for clarification / elaboration
• I kinda like that Se suites are making their way into large projects such as Moodle’s functional-test-suite repo. But at the same time it worries me when it hasn’t had a commit in 10 months. Suites should likely change even more than the app code it exercises
• jasmine tactics screencast — on the long list of tools I should learn
• Introducing the Mogotest Jenkins Plugin – hurray for more pipeline integration points
• The DOM isn’t slow, you are. — set the phasers on snark, and then read it anyways.
• Cross-Browser, Event-based, Element Resize Detection – edges are sharp.
• There is No ROI in Social Media Marketing – read this, and now read it again swapping in Functional Automation everywhere
• Now Available: Pocket Guide to Colour Accessibility could, in theory, be translated into a set of ‘rules’ to validate pages against since we can the colour of elements and their computed css values.

A Sunday Smattering? Sure!

• Solution to the Selenium with Firefox 22 Issues and How to Report Issues – Open Source is hard. Supporting Open Source’s infrastructure is harder — by a large margin
• frequests – asyncronous HTTP Requests; not sure where I would use this, but…
• why I don’t touch crypo – again, don’t. touch. crypto
• Five reasons why you should quote attribute values in HTML5 – for the record, you should do this in HTML 4 as well.
• All the ‘Write The Docs session videos — a conference I couldn’t afford to attend, and likely don’t have the time to watch the videos now
• Automated Testing of HTML5 Canvas Applications with Selenium WebDriver – more and more important…
• Solving window.onbeforeunload nasty prompts
• pytest-poo for when your tests are, erm, crappy
• Tada! Here is SlimerJS! – like PhantomJS but for Gecko. I think.
• Did I select the right element? is a neat trick for highlighting things — even if the escaping of the code didn’t seem to survive formatting