Where I’m @

20070711

Wrestling with Selenium
We’re trying to use Selenium IDE in our brand spankin’ new QA phase of development (what a concept!) and it’s a steep curve. The basics are easy enough, and explained perfectly well at OpenQA, Selenium’s maker, or in one of a number of good tutorials. But it took us a while to complete the perfectly reasonable quest for a command reference. That is, we’re running into problem we find with tools from time to time (most often, but not always, with open-source projects), viz., that the information exists to get you going, but it’s terribly distributed, not from authoritative sources, and even in the aggregate not comprehensive. It also becomes more fragmented the more advanced it gets; noobs can get started, but advanced documentation is only for specific troubleshooting. Not that we have time to take on this task, either.

Update: Changed link destination for the command ref, as we found what may be the always-current one, with more poking around.

Labels: browsers, development, frustration, open source, testing, tools

20070703

Making IIS Play Nice with Apple Media
Naturally, IIS 6.0 does not serve certain media by default. Notably, it does not serve MP4 or M4V files OOTB. Once again, it pays to let other people solve your problems for you. We didn’t even need to think about the solution, much less come up with a working one. The same answer was in a posting to a low-traffic French forum and on the Apple Streaming Servers Users mailing list. While taking this approach doesn’ build our hardcore 1337 geek skillz, it does get the job done.

Labels: GRB, iis, media, streaming, webservers