QuickPost: jQuery UI 1.7 is out
Very quick post, anyone toying with jQuery UI should be excited to know that 1.7 was released today. Lots of bugs were squished, and compatibility with jQuery 1.3 has been added. So by all means, get there and get developing (or not). http://jqueryui.com/
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Going Beyond Macros…kind of
As the QA guy I'm always looking for tools to automate my testing to make things easier and quicker (not too mention easier to spot problems). My first macro tool was iMAcros for firefox which has to be the coolest thing since sliced bread. Then Drew found Xenu which was like another heaven sent goodie for finding errors and stuff. And of course we have always been using a web checking service to monitor for downtime and the like.
Well, last month I found a pretty powerful tool in order to do all that stuff. I just needed to build it. The tool is called Autoit v3. To quote from their website:
AutoIt v3 is a freeware BASIC-like scripting language designed for automating the Windows GUI and general scripting. It uses a combination of simulated keystrokes, mouse movement and window/control manipulation in order to automate tasks in a way not possible or reliable with other languages (e.g. VBScript and SendKeys). AutoIt is also very small, self-contained and will run on all versions of Windows out-of-the-box with no annoying "runtimes" required!
After learning how to manipulate windows and create a few COM objects I've come up with a tool that I've already used to check the links and search for errors on the sites. So here it is for beta testing and criticism, the Link-O Matic website checker.
it's configurable, supports a proxy, searches for a string on a site's page, has customizable error reporting, and even email alerts. And it even plays the tada wav upon completion.
Missing is documentation so if you have questions you'll have to ask and I have yet to create a GUI so the only feedback it gives is a tray popup box which can be kind of annoying.
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The List
In anticipation of the anticipated growth in popularity of the E-com DevBlog I thought it might be a good idea to mention that we here at Team Awesome have been keeping a list of good things that have at times made us laugh, traditionally this list was kept tucked away in a folder somewhere on each of our desktops only to be revisited when someone makes an addition and emails the change to the rest of us. However I noticed that whenever there was a change that someone wanted made they felt it was necessary to tell me to do it rather than do it and send us all the results. So in order to curb this and at the very least make it easer to share I recently (within' the last 10 minutes) uploaded said list to google docs and shared it amongst those who already knew about it. I have no problem sharing it with anyone who is interested as long as you do two things.
- get me your gmail account
- Remember, it's an honer to be on the list, not a punishment.
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Password Woes
So a few things I've noticed about Passwords here at wonderland are that none of them have the same restrictions/parameters.
Lets start with the Windows Password:
- minimum length: I think it's 6 characters
- Maximum Length: not sure if there is one but there is a rumor floating around that it's 127 chars.
- Special Chars allowed: Yes
- Quirkiness: nothing so far but stay tuned.
Accelerator Passwords (better split this up):
Ecom2:
- minimum length: not sure but I think 6 chars.
- maximum length: haven't hit one yet (up to 11 chars)
- Special Chars allowed: not sure
- Quirkiness: nothing so far.
WCDEV/WC6:
- minimum length: 8 characters
- maximum length: ?
- Special Chars allowed: not sure
- Quirkiness: besides it doesn't match ECOM2? nothing.
iSeries/WCDEV (server):
- minimum length: 6?
- maximum length: at least 10 maybe less my 11 char password failed on me
- Special Chars allowed: not sure
- Quirkiness: if you are trying to log into the file system either through start/run or on a saved link/mapped ip you will have to match up this password with your windows password or you'll be pulling your hair out trying to make it all happen, and you'll still fail. Also Ryan has informed me that Passwords contiaining capitol letters fail on this (I think when trying to access the filesystem) and someone mentioned that a number starting a password is a bad idea (also fails some how).
So to sum it up if you want to make all your paswords match when you change (every 45 days) you will have to keep them between 8 and 10 chars ( or maybe 8 and 8 chars) and you probably don't want to use capital letters AND you may want to avoid starting your password with a number.
On a more exciting note Brett has informed me that Accelerator doesn't force a password change like windows does ( i'm not sure it forces a change at all, and the iseries password can be different from the accelerator password so my suggestion/plan is to use one password for all accelerator logins and then just change the windows and iseries/wcdev password as needed.
if I had the clout to do anything about it all I would but alas i'm merely a drudgen.
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FFox broken image plug in
Update: Brett/Burt has had a problem with this working on his box, so it may not be compatible with some plugins/add-ons.
One of the worst things that I run into is the prettifying that FireFox routinely does to webpages. When you surf, it's a great idea, who likes to see broken image files? But when you are developing it gets in the way and can take an otherwise smashing page, and make it look... uh... well smashed. To get around this issue you used to have to install "greasemonkey" and then grab a user-script in order to force firefox into showing you broken image files. Well luckily those days are over as the other of the original script finally made it a standalone plug in. You can grab the plug in here.
I decided to do a little testing between FF2 (with the plug-in), FF3b5 (w/o plug-in), and a control IE7 (yes using IE7 as a control actually made me cringe, and may have given me a rash). I then created a generic html page with 6 broken img links in it. Here's what we have:
Now as you can see, I have some invalid html (missing alt tag), a couple alt tags with spaces, a few with the alt tags as spaces, you know some ugly things you should never do, and yet we find all the time. Render Time!! Let's start off with our control.
Here's how FF3b5(w/o plugin) rendered this mess:
Notice that it shows up with alt tags showing, and at first glance it looks like it picked up 4 of the 6 images. Upon closer inspection though, you'll see it only saw 3 and prettified the page by removing the rest. Although I gotta say, seeing the alt text looking so plain really throws me off when I'm looking for where an image should be.
And lastly a render with FF2(with plug-in)
We can see exactly what the plug in did. It doesn't show the alt text now, but you at least know that there should be *something* showing up on the page. When it's all said and done, I'd say that this is worth the install, and quite a nice plug in.
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