Scott Sims

There is a lot of talk about personal data being worth so much to advertisers these days. I recently found links that show what is being tracked for your account.

This one has activity for searches on the internet, maps, and assistant devices.

MyActivity

I also found that your mail data can be searched and any receipt emails are tracked here.

Purchases

I was looking for a way to tap into what is happening with different languages I follow.  Found it!

JetBrains blogs

Do you approach software engineering as a minimalist?

The fastest code is the code that doesn’t run at all.

Running fewer SQL queries is better than running more queries.

Fewer features means less complexity.

Fewer libraries means less complexity.

Fewer tools means less complexity.

Complexity costs time.

Complexity costs money.

Doing nothing is better than doing something useless.

1. git init demo-composer-package
2. cd demo-composer-package
3. composer init
4. composer install
5. composer validate
6. Follow the guide for your php version https://phpunit.de/getting-started-with-phpunit.htm

Use this autoload functionality in your composer.json

"autoload": {
    "classmap": [
        "src/"
    ]
},

It makes your /src classes available in your tests directory so you don’t have to require them.

Today I found this link to the  YouTube Iframe API Reference.  I find this interesting because I think that adding something like a table of contents to a video could be super helpful when if you want to reference the video. For example with instructional videos, a table of contents could provide an overview of video segments you might be interested in. It would let you quickly jump around instead of manually searching the video to find the point that you are interested in.
I used to go to user group meetings to find out the latest and greatest in programming and software development.  I could see this API being used after the video is filmed and adding click points.  I always want to tell friends about something that I learned at a presentation, and with the content links I could share the exact point where I liked the content.
I can imagine if video place markers were sharable then we might have metrics where we can see what points of a video are getting the most interest and shares.

Get the extension

I thought this would be the easy part. Turns out that the new chrome web store only lets you install directly to chrome.

• Go to the chrome web store and copy the link of the plugin you want  
• I chose to get adblock https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom
• Go to http://chrome-extension-downloader.com/ and copy the full link from above and click download extension

Create And Use a profile

• After you download your crx file put it in the same repo as your test. Next create a chrome profile and use the add_extension method.

      profile = Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Profile.new
      profile.add_extension(File.dirname(__FILE__) +"/chrome_extensions/adblock/AdBlock_v2.5.61.crx")

• Now you can use the new profile to with a driver

      Selenium::WebDriver.for(:chrome,:profile => profile)

Trouble Shooting

• be sure that your chromedriver is updated. I used 26.0.1383.0
• chrome  26.0.1410.43
• selenium-webdriver  2.31.0

Recently my team at HomeAway got personal profiles done from http://www.insights.com. It was quite a fun process. Under their categorization, I am a Creative Inspiring Motivator.  This is what came back as my key strengths:

This is might not be a big deal for others who have been going to the lone star ruby conference for a while, but I got to finally hear Matz today.

I snapped a quick picture along with two of my team members from HomeAway. I am the guy on the right.

Matz used his keynote to talk about features to come in the next version of ruby such as  scoped monkey patching, module prepending, lazy mapping, and ruby keyword arguments.

He also mentioned mruby, that is coming soon.  I checked out the source and ran the tests. Here is the source link https://github.com/mruby/mruby/

download the source and run ‘make’ and ‘make test’.  You will then find mruby, mirb in the bin directory.

James,Alan, and myself with Matz.

Have you ever wanted to open a url from the command line on OS X?  Turns out open can do many cool things like that.

open -a ‘google chrome’ ‘http://www.scottcsims.com’

open -a Firefox.app http://www.scottcsims.com

Sometimes a parallel Selenium run might get out of control and you need to close all your browsers, try this one from the command line:

killall firefox

Yes, I know killall is a very old Unix command, but I didn’t know that I could pass it an application name that a OS X has bound to an executable.

killall firefox-bin
or
killall firefox

I like the -a and -e options for open.

Usage: open [-e] [-t] [-f] [-W] [-R] [-n] [-g] [-h] [-b ] [-a ] [filenames] [--args arguments]
Help: Open opens files from a shell.
      By default, opens each file using the default application for that file.  
      If the file is in the form of a URL, the file will be opened as a URL.
Options: 
      -a                Opens with the specified application.
      -b                Opens with the specified application bundle identifier.
      -e                Opens with TextEdit.
      -t                Opens with default text editor.
      -f                Reads input from standard input and opens with TextEdit.
      -F  --fresh       Launches the app fresh, that is, without restoring windows. Saved persistent state is lost, excluding Untitled documents.
      -R, --reveal      Selects in the Finder instead of opening.
      -W, --wait-apps   Blocks until the used applications are closed (even if they were already running).
          --args        All remaining arguments are passed in argv to the application's main() function instead of opened.
      -n, --new         Open a new instance of the application even if one is already running.
      -j, --hide        Launches the app hidden.
      -g, --background  Does not bring the application to the foreground.
      -h, --header      Searches header file locations for headers matching the given filenames, and opens them.

I had a great time attending the Test Automation Bazaar  in Austin. Alister Scott put on a contest to see who could write a program to win Minesweeper.  After checking out what was required, I started coding the Minesweeper robot. Before I noticed, I had spent hours coding tests and methods for the robot.  It was one of the most addictive and exciting code I had written.  I spent about 3 days coding along to get something to win on basic and intermediate level. I spent hours trying to win on advanced.

I ended up winning the Minesweeper Challenge!  I encourage everyone to take a look at Alister’s code.  Alister wrote some of the  best cukes and examples I have seen.  I was very impressed by the time he put into writing unit tests that work on logic only, taking the browser out of the mix.  Thanks Alister for putting on the contest.  If you wish to see what 3 days of coding gets you in a mine sweeper robot you can checkout my code on github.  As I mentioned before I got really engaged with writing this code.  I could have spent weeks tuning and polishing it.  I did have a chance to refractor the code to use Nokogiri instead of the find all elements selenium method to check the game state.  I believe that this might have actually slowed it down.

Sadly to say, I had to withdraw from polishing and tuning the code.  If you want to run my robot checkout the code and run the test “Minesweeper should win” in this file.