The Selenium Core team (of which I'm a sometime member) released version 0.8.0 last week.

Highlights include:

• a "multiWindow" option which places the application-under-test in a separate window, allowing testing of "frame-busting" apps;
• more reliable page-load detection for popup windows;
• new cookie-management actions;
• a run-speed slider and "Pause" button which replace the old Run/Walk/Step radio-buttons;
• many bug-fixes and stability improvements;
• tested against latest versions of Firefox, IE6, Opera, Konqueror, Safari and WebKit.

The multi-window layout option is a great step forward, since it was a limitation that prevented many people from using Selenium.

You can download the new version at:

http://release.openqa.org/selenium-core/0.8.0/

(Yes, the documentation and website still suck. Sorry.)

The project I'm currently on uses Rational ClearCase to manage it's source-code.

Now, I'm sure there are many great things about ClearCase. Not that any spring to mind. (Wait, here's one: it keeps ClearCase administrators in a job! Whew, I knew there had to be a silver lining somewhere.)

What I can tell you, though, is that it sucks for agile, team development. So, I've wrapped a script around the ClearCase command-line, to make the wannabe Subversion user in me feel more at home.

(Ruby: the glue that doesn't set).

The result is BasketCase (at RubyForge). It's still very much a work-in-progress (and when I no longer have need of it, will likely become a work-in-abandonment), but I hope it may provide a glimmer of hope to anyone else who finds themselves in a similar predicament.

By the way, the less observant of you may not have noticed that the name is a clever play on the word "rational". Geddit? Oh, nevermind ...

I finally got off my backside and added an RSS feed.

QDox-1.4 has been released. Go get it.

DogBiscuit looks crap in Internet Explorer. Unbelievably, today is the first time I've browsed this way with TheBorg's OneTrueBrowser (I'm typically a Konqueror/Firebird user). Under IE, the entry titles gradually creep to the left! By about 2-pixels/entry, from what I can tell. Weird. Better do some CSS debugging.

Digging into it, it looks like I've hit the Magik Creeping Text bug. Removing the border-left on the blog-entries fixed it.

Phew ... lucky no-one reads this stuff!

A new feature in RubLog allows "global" URIs for articles to be constructed using WikiWords. Such URIs use just the base-name of the article - not the whole category-path - and so make links less likely to break if the category hierarchy is re-organised.

PragDave makes a valid point: categorisation is kind of artificial and arbitrary, and may be prone to change. Actually, even with only a handful of articles here on DogBiscuit, I've already been tempted to re-categorise :-)

The RubLog feature works by allowing links using just the last part (the "basename") of the article ID. If the same basename is used in multiple categories, this may result in collisions ... RubLog solves the problem by presenting all the matching articles. One problem here is that the user has no way of knowing which article is the "right one", ie. the intended destination of the link.

Categories as meta-data?

Another approach might be to capture categories in article meta-data, rather than using the file-system structure, e.g.

    Subject: Dealing with Recategorisation
    Category: /Tech/Projects/Eyaw
    
    A new feature ...

This way, articles can be filed into a directory structure that stays fairly constant (e.g. directory per day?), and so can be used to form "permanent" links. Categories are laid "on top", and it could even allow for an articles to be cross-filed in multiple categories. Holy dueling taxonomies!

On the downside, it becomes harder to see the category hierarchy, and modifying it potentially involves editing a whole bunch of files. Bother.

So, I'm messing around trying to craft a weblog CGI-script using Ruby. I've been very much influenced by blosxom, and by Dave Thomas's work on RubLog ... but I needed a good excuse to play with Ruby, so have started to hack together my own.

Basic features I'm after include:

• Wiki-esque markup
• Easy hyperlinking
• A simple, file-based data-store
• Easy navigation

But rather perversely, I'm not prepared to trust file mtimes to specify posting dates. Instead, I'm going to pull meta-information from the file "header". Sample input looks something like this:

    Subject: entry title
    Date: 13 Apr 2003, 11pm

    Here's the content ...