Yeah, that's what I do. There's only one thing I haven't figured out how to do as a non-admin user: get software updates to check automatically. It's set to check daily, but it never actually does unless I log in as an admin. Not that it's too big of a headache to check once a week manually, but still....
I've done the record/playback thing before, but those tools (good though they are) aren't able to determine intent. What did it mean when I clicked at location (267, 121) and then waited 2417 milliseconds before moving the mouse? And you still have to add pass/fail criteria. Some recording tools simply produce a giant "data dump," in which it's very hard to find where to put your asserts().
One advantage of simply sitting down and writing your GUI test scripts is that you can start from the requirements doc while the app guys are still coding the application you'll be testing.
It can be quite useful to test GUIs from an automated suite. Checking for the pixel-perfect layout is less common, but if the UI spec says, "the graph is above the table," that's relatively easy to check.
What's more helpful is checking things like, "pressing the Foo button results in the Baz dialog appearing." A good automated suite finds the Foo button by caption/control ID/window class/etc., rather than by pixel location. A better automated suite makes it easy to write your test scripts as abstractions, so instead of:
The opponents of equal rights bring that up all the time; they shrilly complain that tolerant people are "changing the definition of marriage."
In reality, the situation is the reverse. Thousands upon thousands of gay couples exist and have built families and shared committed lives together. In other words, they've adopted the lifelong commitment of marriage (they don't get many married-folk benefits from the government, alas).
But the slave states have started rewriting the definition of marriage to exclude these existing commitments. Sort of a prescriptive vs. descriptive definition of marriage.
Even if you want to look at it backwards and say that equal-rights proponents are updating marriage to match the reality of gay couples, I doubt you could say in honesty that they were doing it for political reasons.
Okay. I'm using Rails in the real world and enjoying it, so let me take on your question.
RoR follows the double-edged-sword philosophy of convention over configuration. So, instead of specifying your ORM in a config file, you set up your database table/field names to follow certain conventions. That, in the view of many, is both a pro and a con of the framework.
If you're starting from scratch, and you can name your tables as you please, then it's no extra effort to name them the "Rails way" and save a whole lot of typing in your code. But the downside is that if you have a complicated, non-Rails-like, or legacy mapping, you'll have to do more work to bring it into Rails. Not to say that it can't be done, of course, just that it's extra work.
Rails is also a young framework, so you get all the attendant disadvantages that go with that (lack of buy-in, not as many books/courses available, missing some sophisticated SQL optimizations, etc.).
Please understand, people get really enthusiastic about Rails for a reason -- many find it a pleasure to use. So their enthusiasm naturally becomes superlative-laden exclamations on the Web. But there are plenty of others who use Rails not because it's today's buzzword, but because they've stared its disadvantages soberly in the eye and are willing to accept them in return for the benefits (rapid development, good-enough performance, and an aesthetic that fits the problem at hand).
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Myself, I've always had trouble using Paul as a morality guide. It seems to me that he, too, was just trying to figure out what worked for their community (and even what their community was; did it include Jews? did it include Gentiles?). The early Christians had to figure out what it even meant to be Christian, whom to preach to, what rules to adopt, and so on.
Paul's letters are moving to read, because you really see his conviction to see this thing through. But I don't see his particular decisions about, say, homosexuality as anything more than the opinion of one man. Those doctrinal choices were for another time and place, and it doesn't seem right to apply them now.
In short, Paul isn't Jesus, so nothing says Christians "have" to agree with Paul on any particular topic (e.g., the role of women in the church) to be a Christian.
My main beef with Spatial Nautilus is that I can't figure out how to view a window in a nested list view, with little disclosure triangles like Mac Classic.
Sure, you can right-click and select Browse Folder, but that's not the same thing; that opens a window in a two-pane, Explorer-style tree + icons window. I'd like to see a single-pane window, whose representation looks like a tree (including both folders and files).
Going into a sub-sub-folder and then _getting back_ is the one commonly repeated UI action that takes me longest in spatial Nautilus; either I have to put up with tons of open windows, or use Shift-double-click and then mess with the little nested directory button thingy in the corner.
I've seen discussions about implementing this "spatial tree view," but the consensus seems to be that it's not a desired feature for GNOME. Ah well.
Ned: Well, children, it's Saturday night. So, what say we let our hair down and play "Bombardment"? Bart+Lisa: Yay! Ned: Of Bible questions? Rod+Todd: Yay! Ned: Which version shall it be? Todd: St. James! Rod: The Vulgate of St. Jerome! [Ned looks through the Bible bookcase] Ned: "Vulgate" it is. Todd: [disappointed] Aw.
Well, a few pork-eating, Sabbath-traveling folks quote those same parts of the Bible as justfication for repressing people they don't personally care for. I think that's what the post was referring to.
Either they're laws meant for another time and place (and therefore shouldn't be used as a weapon against modern-day people), or the antique pork and cotton-poly-blend restrictions should still apply, no?
I've even seen "scholars" break Leviticus down rule by rule in an attempt to dictate which specific laws were just meant to apply a couple thousand years ago, and which ones should still be enforced today. Surprise, the "permanent" bans always seem to align with the author's biases against certain groups of people.
...for making CVS not only bearable on Windows, but actually enjoyable.
Disclosure: I had the pleasure of contributing a few modest lines of code to Tortoise, but believe me, it was way cool long before my meager changes made their way in.
Really? I'm not a C++ guru by any means, but it's been a long time since I've had to worry about memory leaks (auto_ptr and its more sophisticated kin), buffer overflows (stringstream), and so on.
I still make plenty of errors -- plenty of 'em -- but these days they're overwhelmingly logic errors, for which I have nothing to blame but my own stupidity.
That said, I much prefer dynamic scripting languages like Ruby. Even though I don't always have the luxury of using them, I like to think they've made my C++ just a little better.
I always liked Mandrake's urpmi stuff in theory, but in practice it seems to break in the same ways old RPM stuff breaks: complaints of missing dependencies (though I thought urpmi was supposed to resolve and fetch those automatically), packages that require mutually contradictory packages (probably not urpmi's fault, but still...), and mysterious refusals to carry out commands. I usually end up having to download and install by hand, and when that inevitably fails, figure out what's missing and download that, too....
I'd love to hear about it if there's some obvious --dont-screw-up switch to urpmi I'm missing....
I've personally seen Win2K crash/hang somewhere between five and ten times on three different PCs over the past two years, including paging hopelessly and unrecoverably; hanging during shutdown; and a few full-on, core-dumping BSODs.
Granted, that's not nearly as often as I saw with Win9x, but still....
Expensive, butt-slow, hard to use, buggy--yeah, what's not to like? And before you reply, yes, these observations are based on my own use of the product and not on some sort of anti-Microsoft stance. Just looking at a table in one of their admin tools makes all kinds of crap fly across the network. I mean really, how many kilobytes of traffic do you need for a simple SELECT statement? I dunno, maybe our DB admins didn't configure it properly, but then why did the vendor design a SQL server whose installation/configuration is so easy to screw up?
I've dealt with the occasional decent product from MS ("Hearts" comes to mind, and maybe IE 5.5 Mac), but SQL Server is not one of them.
I've seen the same sort of progressive slowdown with my Win2K box using NTFS that I used to have with Win98/FAT32, and that's only using about 2/3 of the drive or so. I've never seen a filesystem on Windows that didn't regularly get horribly fragmented and accumulate a noticeable drag on performance (with a resulting return to "health" after defragging).
RTF is about as human-readable as PS. Clean and elegant it ain't. Ever tried to write RTF files for input into the WinHelp compiler (not that such manual monkeying is necessary these days)? par par par curly-brace bunch-of-fonts par par... Yecch!
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Yeah, that's what I do. There's only one thing I haven't figured out how to do as a non-admin user: get software updates to check automatically. It's set to check daily, but it never actually does unless I log in as an admin. Not that it's too big of a headache to check once a week manually, but still....
I've done the record/playback thing before, but those tools (good though they are) aren't able to determine intent. What did it mean when I clicked at location (267, 121) and then waited 2417 milliseconds before moving the mouse? And you still have to add pass/fail criteria. Some recording tools simply produce a giant "data dump," in which it's very hard to find where to put your asserts().
One advantage of simply sitting down and writing your GUI test scripts is that you can start from the requirements doc while the app guys are still coding the application you'll be testing.
It can be quite useful to test GUIs from an automated suite. Checking for the pixel-perfect layout is less common, but if the UI spec says, "the graph is above the table," that's relatively easy to check.
What's more helpful is checking things like, "pressing the Foo button results in the Baz dialog appearing." A good automated suite finds the Foo button by caption/control ID/window class/etc., rather than by pixel location. A better automated suite makes it easy to write your test scripts as abstractions, so instead of:
window.find_button('Foo').push; ui.type_text('42')
you can write your own DSL for testing:
app.set_foo('42')
I tend to lump these kinds of tests into the "functional" rather than "unit" category, but maybe that's just me.
Gore definitely uses a Mac. At his keynote on global warming, the presentation software is plainly visible as, well, Keynote.
I thought geek meant fool....
The opponents of equal rights bring that up all the time; they shrilly complain that tolerant people are "changing the definition of marriage."
In reality, the situation is the reverse. Thousands upon thousands of gay couples exist and have built families and shared committed lives together. In other words, they've adopted the lifelong commitment of marriage (they don't get many married-folk benefits from the government, alas).
But the slave states have started rewriting the definition of marriage to exclude these existing commitments. Sort of a prescriptive vs. descriptive definition of marriage.
Even if you want to look at it backwards and say that equal-rights proponents are updating marriage to match the reality of gay couples, I doubt you could say in honesty that they were doing it for political reasons.
How about every accredited study that's ever been done on the issue? That enough empirical evidence for you?
Okay. I'm using Rails in the real world and enjoying it, so let me take on your question.
RoR follows the double-edged-sword philosophy of convention over configuration. So, instead of specifying your ORM in a config file, you set up your database table/field names to follow certain conventions. That, in the view of many, is both a pro and a con of the framework.
If you're starting from scratch, and you can name your tables as you please, then it's no extra effort to name them the "Rails way" and save a whole lot of typing in your code. But the downside is that if you have a complicated, non-Rails-like, or legacy mapping, you'll have to do more work to bring it into Rails. Not to say that it can't be done, of course, just that it's extra work.
Rails is also a young framework, so you get all the attendant disadvantages that go with that (lack of buy-in, not as many books/courses available, missing some sophisticated SQL optimizations, etc.).
Please understand, people get really enthusiastic about Rails for a reason -- many find it a pleasure to use. So their enthusiasm naturally becomes superlative-laden exclamations on the Web. But there are plenty of others who use Rails not because it's today's buzzword, but because they've stared its disadvantages soberly in the eye and are willing to accept them in return for the benefits (rapid development, good-enough performance, and an aesthetic that fits the problem at hand).
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Myself, I've always had trouble using Paul as a morality guide. It seems to me that he, too, was just trying to figure out what worked for their community (and even what their community was; did it include Jews? did it include Gentiles?). The early Christians had to figure out what it even meant to be Christian, whom to preach to, what rules to adopt, and so on.
Paul's letters are moving to read, because you really see his conviction to see this thing through. But I don't see his particular decisions about, say, homosexuality as anything more than the opinion of one man. Those doctrinal choices were for another time and place, and it doesn't seem right to apply them now.
In short, Paul isn't Jesus, so nothing says Christians "have" to agree with Paul on any particular topic (e.g., the role of women in the church) to be a Christian.
My main beef with Spatial Nautilus is that I can't figure out how to view a window in a nested list view, with little disclosure triangles like Mac Classic.
Sure, you can right-click and select Browse Folder, but that's not the same thing; that opens a window in a two-pane, Explorer-style tree + icons window. I'd like to see a single-pane window, whose representation looks like a tree (including both folders and files).
Going into a sub-sub-folder and then _getting back_ is the one commonly repeated UI action that takes me longest in spatial Nautilus; either I have to put up with tons of open windows, or use Shift-double-click and then mess with the little nested directory button thingy in the corner.
I've seen discussions about implementing this "spatial tree view," but the consensus seems to be that it's not a desired feature for GNOME. Ah well.
Ned: Well, children, it's Saturday night. So, what say we let our hair down and play "Bombardment"?
Bart+Lisa: Yay!
Ned: Of Bible questions?
Rod+Todd: Yay!
Ned: Which version shall it be?
Todd: St. James!
Rod: The Vulgate of St. Jerome!
[Ned looks through the Bible bookcase]
Ned: "Vulgate" it is.
Todd: [disappointed] Aw.
Well, a few pork-eating, Sabbath-traveling folks quote those same parts of the Bible as justfication for repressing people they don't personally care for. I think that's what the post was referring to.
Either they're laws meant for another time and place (and therefore shouldn't be used as a weapon against modern-day people), or the antique pork and cotton-poly-blend restrictions should still apply, no?
I've even seen "scholars" break Leviticus down rule by rule in an attempt to dictate which specific laws were just meant to apply a couple thousand years ago, and which ones should still be enforced today. Surprise, the "permanent" bans always seem to align with the author's biases against certain groups of people.
Hence the old joke about the homeopath that died of accidental overdose by drinking a glass of water.
Disclosure: I had the pleasure of contributing a few modest lines of code to Tortoise, but believe me, it was way cool long before my meager changes made their way in.
I still make plenty of errors -- plenty of 'em -- but these days they're overwhelmingly logic errors, for which I have nothing to blame but my own stupidity.
That said, I much prefer dynamic scripting languages like Ruby. Even though I don't always have the luxury of using them, I like to think they've made my C++ just a little better.
I'll have to give mkd9.2 a shot, then. Thanks for the advice.
I always liked Mandrake's urpmi stuff in theory, but in practice it seems to break in the same ways old RPM stuff breaks: complaints of missing dependencies (though I thought urpmi was supposed to resolve and fetch those automatically), packages that require mutually contradictory packages (probably not urpmi's fault, but still...), and mysterious refusals to carry out commands. I usually end up having to download and install by hand, and when that inevitably fails, figure out what's missing and download that, too....
I'd love to hear about it if there's some obvious --dont-screw-up switch to urpmi I'm missing....
Somebody beat me to it. Curse my high viewing threshold....
Supposing two elks bore down on you together? No, they'd have to have be on a line...
I've personally seen Win2K crash/hang somewhere between five and ten times on three different PCs over the past two years, including paging hopelessly and unrecoverably; hanging during shutdown; and a few full-on, core-dumping BSODs.
Granted, that's not nearly as often as I saw with Win9x, but still....
Maybe the French government just doesn't want people confusing e-mail with enamel. :)
Expensive, butt-slow, hard to use, buggy--yeah, what's not to like? And before you reply, yes, these observations are based on my own use of the product and not on some sort of anti-Microsoft stance. Just looking at a table in one of their admin tools makes all kinds of crap fly across the network. I mean really, how many kilobytes of traffic do you need for a simple SELECT statement? I dunno, maybe our DB admins didn't configure it properly, but then why did the vendor design a SQL server whose installation/configuration is so easy to screw up?
I've dealt with the occasional decent product from MS ("Hearts" comes to mind, and maybe IE 5.5 Mac), but SQL Server is not one of them.
I've seen the same sort of progressive slowdown with my Win2K box using NTFS that I used to have with Win98/FAT32, and that's only using about 2/3 of the drive or so. I've never seen a filesystem on Windows that didn't regularly get horribly fragmented and accumulate a noticeable drag on performance (with a resulting return to "health" after defragging).
I knew you were going to say that.
RTF is about as human-readable as PS. Clean and elegant it ain't. Ever tried to write RTF files for input into the WinHelp compiler (not that such manual monkeying is necessary these days)? par par par curly-brace bunch-of-fonts par par... Yecch!