bc

This has been a gumption killing week for me…

Sunday

The network ports on my old Direct Way 4020 Satellite modem died leaving me entirely without a net connection.

Net withdrawal began.

Monday

Told numerous depressing options for replacing dead modem before managing to get the “upgrade” option without resetting my contract period but with a potential 2 business week delay on receiving the new modem.

Tuesday

Over to sister’s to take advantage of the Hughesnet system I got her last year…

Updated her system, downloaded virus|spyware scanners etc, scanned her machine to make sure no spyware, rootkits, bots on the local network.

Hit the new HughesNet Fair Access Policy (FAP) limit on her “consumer” grade account. FAP throttled my connection to about 2KB/s with no recharge for 24 hours.

Wednesday

Scheduled delivery and installation of new HughesNet 7000S Satellite modem for Thursday!

FAP still in effect at sister’s.

Thursday

Satellite modem installed and net withdrawal symptoms receed.

Back to work!

Friday

Desk collapses onto the floor while rearranging office to discourage Miss Kitty from using my desk and possibly causing additional hardware failures. Fortunately only monitors were involved and were not damaged.

Found sturdy tables at Office Depot to use for work surfaces. (Staple’s tables were crap and staff were no help, but Office Depot’s tables were pretty sturdy and the staff ere very helpful. Thanks!).

Finish rearranging office

Backed up laptop across all other machines.

Saturday

Back to work.

Discovered that my mozilla local mail folder had been wiped sometime on Wednesday…

Realized had wiped all good copies of the mozilla local mail folder.

I hope next week is better.

Spider has been updated to 0.0.2.6. This update adds the command line argument uri as a synonym for url to work around a bug in Thunderbird which tries to process any command line argument named url as a mailto url.

This will allow Spider 0.0.2.6 or later to be used in the “download checker” tool to download, install and report on Thunderbird 2.

Current users of Spider can simply update. New users can install from spider.xpi.

Thanks to Scott MacGregor for finding and fixing the problem.

The latest installment of my automated testing saga is now available at Script Framework. This outlines the components that I have been using in automated testing and provides an example where a build is downloaded, installed, a profile created, an extension installed and a simple test that the extension works is performed.

Spider 0.0.2.5 fixes a permissions problem in remote HTML and XUL invocations of Spider. Thanks to Jason Sutton for the bug report.

Benjamin Smedberg wrote to point out killableprocess.py which looks like a much more robust tool than timed_run.py. I’ll check it out as a replacement for timed_run.py in my framework as soon as I finish the first round of documentation I have been supposed to write about my test framework since … like … forever.

timed_run.py is a modified version of a Python script written by Chris Cooper that manages the execution of external programs with the ability to terminate programs which do not complete within a specified period of time.

Spider has been updated to version 0.0.2.4. This update includes minor changes to the default output messages Spider issues as well as the ability to load browser chrome in addition to normal web pages. I’ve made a kludgey attempt to automate Firefox which simultaneously illustrates the possibilities and pitfalls of this approach. If you are a XUL hacker and have suggestions on how to improve this approach, I would really appreciate your feedback.

/bc

Oops! Spider 0.0.2.1 removes a debugging alert I left in 0.0.2.0. Sorry. Either do Tools->Add-ons->Update or get the new version from here.

Spider finally has command line parameters and going forward should be able to update using Firefox’s add-ons manager. See news and help for the details.