I happen to get a new Macbook Pro this week at work, replacing my couple-year old one. Upon booting it up for the first time it offered me several choices to migrate my data. I chose the Firewire option and plugged my two computers together. After a couple hours of crunching I was delighted to find out that everything (applications, documents, user data) seems to have been migrated over to the new machine. I even had my existing browser history and cookies, my customized BASH profile, etc. It was like a brain transplant from one computer to another but without copying a disk image. There were only two gotchas:
Certificates that enable wifi at work were not migrated
Safari 4 was not migrated (I was left with Safari 3.2.1 on the new box)
I only realized the latter when I noticed that some SMIL animation had stopped working in Safari 😉
There's something comforting about coming back to your blog after spending so much time on Twitter and the like. Twitter is great for learning about new things and sharing links quickly, but writing this entry in WordPress and not having to worry about a character limit feels... cozy. I thought I'd come back to the blog and try to give an update on what I've been doing lately.
Despite the silence on the blog, I've actually been really busy with all sorts of different projects. I think I've got my fingers in too many pies now. And all of them happen to be related to Scalable Vector Graphics. How did this happen? Read the rest of this entry ...
I was playing around with a new project recently and wanted to figure out the complementary color of a given color. All you need for this are the RGB values of the color for which you want to find the complement.
There are lots of ways of specifying a color on the Open Web:
In my spare time I've been having fun contributing to the SVG-edit project this last couple weeks adding really basic features like selection and dragging. The goal is a cross-browser SVG editor that you can embed in web pages that works on any modern browser. My biased definition of a modern browser: native support of SVG. I know there are quite a lot of projects out there that do an online SVG editor already. SVG-edit is still in its infancy, but that's part of the charm I found in hacking on it. Read the rest of this entry ...
I was impressed with the announcement of Google Wave at Google I/O two weeks ago. Thanks to being in attendance, I was able to get a sandbox account and start checking it out. Of course because there aren't a lot of people that I know on there and after getting shinied for a week doing simple things (or sometimes nothing at all), I needed to take a break. But Google Wave led to GWT which led to the idea of automating web application testing.
One of the interesting things about Google Wave is that it was implemented using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT, pronounced 'gwit' apparently). GWT is a Java-based framework that compiles your code to HTML/JS/CSS. Like a lot of folks, I was skeptical about this idea (particularly since none of the significant Google web services were built using GWT). The fact that Google has implemented a major service on top of this toolkit now gives me a sense that GWT has been put through its paces.
Anyway, after the announcement, I adjusted my second day conference schedule so that I could take in the session on Wave and GWT. As part of this talk, they mentioned how they use WebDriver to automate testing of Wave across browsers. I had never really heard about automating web app testing, so I found the notion particularly interesting. Has anybody had any success with Selenium or WebDriver on apps that use SVG or Canvas?
Really briefly I tried to use the Selenium IDE extension for Firefox to run a test on the svg-edit demo. Unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to capture the mouse click/movement on SVG elements, which means it's a non-starter for me at the moment. I signed up for an account with OpenQA and asked an unanswered question. Note that after I asked this question, the svg-edit app abandoned its use of the <object> tag in favor of inline SVG that is programmatically added to the page. Unfortunately this resulted in the same effect: Selenium IDE ignores mouse clicks within SVG elements. Bummer.
I then tried to submit a bug only to find that OpenQA's JIRA was crashing. To report THAT bug I'd have to sign up with an account at atlassian and that's just too many degrees away from where I want to be. No one was around on the #selenium channel in IRC Freenode so I gave up for now. Hot Tip: if you want to build a community, make sure basic things like signing in to your bug tracker work!