Pomme::TAB

Looks like you’d better stay away from the game system of from the owners for that matter:

• Store robbed of five PS3s
• Violence ensues during PS3 launch
• US$89m for a PS3 on ebay
• Man shot in PS3 queue

If the real life news bore you, just have a read at what’s happening in the virtual one Second Life (dubbed Sadville?):

Panic in Sadville! | The Register
Hard lessons for Second Life citizens

Don’t forget to read Bruce Sterling’s comment attached to the article.
It’s a good read.

UK RFID passports cracked: “Cory Doctorow:
UK security experts have cracked the sooper sekure new UK biometric passports. It took 48 hours. With £174 worth of sniffer hardware, attackers can read all the personal information off of any of the three million new UK passports in circulation — and if combined with demonstrated hacks for reading RFIDs at a distance, this could happen from across the room, or even farther. You can then clone the RFID and stick it in another passport (surprise! your identity is now owned by a terrorist!).

The newest Digital TV tuner for mac form Elgato looks very nice.

I like the twin tuner, twin antenna flexibility that allows you to record 1 channel while watching another or to watch one channel using both tuner to increase the digital quality. That suits me perfectly as in my area the DTT signal is quite unstable (sometimes good, sometimes bad, depends on the channel, the weather,…). It is also very small, so you can travel with it packed with your laptop.

Elgato Systems
EyeTV Diversity is powered by award-winning EyeTV 2 digital TV recording software:

* Watch digital terrestrial television (DTT, or DVB-T) on a Mac deep indoors, in areas with weak reception, and at speeds up to 160 km/h.
* Watch and record live TV simultaneously or watch two channels
* Picture-in-Picture.
* Rewind, fast-forward, and pause live TV.
* Browse EyeTV menus in Full Screen mode.
* Record hours of favorite TV shows directly on a Mac’s hard drive and edit out unwanted content.
* Find TV shows using the built-in Program Guide. Includes a free one-year subscription to tvtv valued at 20 euros and a free 30 day subscription to IceTV in Australia.
* Store your collection on an external drive, or burn it to disc.
* Export TV clips and entire episodes to an iPod.

Ok. Remember my post about 2 IT companies in London victim of robbery?

It happened again.
This time the victim is the First tier Internet services provider Level 3 (supposed to be a top dog in term of security given the criticality of its clients applications).

If I count correctly, this is the third time in the same city during a period of 2 weeks.

It’s either a gang as mentioned in the article or a new IT startup who tries to equip itself for free

It could also be a big one who tries to eliminate the competition.

It reminds me an episode of Spooks in which an oil company try to nuke a rival’s head quarter in the City and blame arab terrorists.

In related news, Boing Boing, Digg and Slashdot are reporting that a bomb has been detonated at PayPal/eBay head quarters in California.

And that’s why automated testing of the integration points are very important!

I’m currently involved in a huge project made of multiple components.
To each component corresponds a project team.
My direct upstream dependency is a web API.

In addition to our own unit tests and system tests, we’ve got a set of test scripts that monitor the features we are using. That includes:

• validating the supplier API against their own XML Schemas (Relax-NG in our case) for the API calls used in our system
• If both components use a common set of reference data, a test to check that the data set is the same in the API and in our component

There’s trouble only if the XML Schemas are not updated when changes are made to the API.

As the tests are run regularly we discover changes in supplier’s API quickly. If we don’t have time to make the change in our side (e.g: 5 minutes before a demo) we switch to another instance of the API with the old code (the supplier has a set of rolling instances that guarantees that the previous version of the API is always available on an instance). This is not really applicable with public APIs.

An additional step we have taken is to mock up the results of API calls into static XML. These are normally used for our internal system testing, but if the integration tests with the supplier fails and there isn’t a workable instance of their API, we can switch to the static XMLs (this situation happened once in our project).

This approach will also work with public APIs that output XML like Flickr’s API and Amazon REST service.

Doing a Demo? Don’t Rely on an API: “

Eurobuddy Matt was doing a presentation when there was an API change at GoogleMaps. He’s a quick fella, but I’ve been caught with my pants down.

“

(Via ONLamp.com.)

The first time I was presented Selenium I had the wrong understanding of it.

Few months ago, a group of client side developers organized a talk in our department about testing javascript code. The focus was mainly on jsUnit, but it was also the first time I heard of Selenium. It was presented as an alternative to jsUnit to test client side javascript in a cross-browser way.
For that purpose Selenium acts as a browser plugin that allows one to record his actions on the browser on a particular site and play them back later.
You can also finetune the generated scripts.

In the same time I was starting to think about acceptance testing and automation testing.

Until the Continuous Integration and Testing conference in London, I didn’t realise there was a link between the two.

During that Open Space conference, there was a talk by a guy from Germany.
He was sharing his experience with Selenium for acceptance testing.
Obviously the product he was developing is a web application.
It means that most of features (or business value) are accessible from a web GUI.

This how it became really clear to me that Selenium can work in two way: in addition of the plugin mode for manual record/playback, there’s a driven mode that allow a programmatic control of Selenium. Now we are getting closer to automation
Before going that way, I’ll dwell a bit more on the acceptance testing part of it.
The acceptance tests are the tests that prove the product owner/customer that the software is doing what he has specified. For a web applications, most of the business features are visible on a web interface. Even if for some reasons the business value is invisible (backend features of some sort) it’s often possible to make it exposed on a web interface:

• On an earlier project one of the requirement was that the system should process data within a ceration amount of time. We build a small web application to expose the cycle duration on a web interface. We used Nagios to monitor this value but we could easily imagine that this information can also be captured for acceptance tests.
• Let’s say that you’ve been asked to syndicate your data as RSS feeds. You can use Firefox as an RSS aggregator and test the feeds from there.
• On another project the feature was to import a continuing feed of complex XML documents in a database. The team setup a smart logging and exposed import successes and failure on a web interface.

Now, we can go back to automation.
Selenium can be driven programmatically through a number of platform (java, python, ruby and perl). It uses a component called Selenium Remote Control which is a java server that run on the same platform where a web browser is available.

There’s also a platform dependent API that sensd command to the Remote control using the language of choice.

In perl you can use a CPAN module called Test::WWW::Selenium.

The whole thing becomes really interesting when you combine that approach with the use of FIT (Framework for Integration Testing, which is more than a framework actually), but that’s another story.

and Joy Of Tech has it in comic strips:

Within an interval of 3 days, The Register has reported two robberies targeted at high profile Telecom/Network companies. Oddity of our time or trend-setter?

• Mystery surrounds Easynet ‘robbery’
• Vodafone outage caused by robbery

Interesting concept …

A Single Pixel Camera: “BuzzSkyline writes ‘Scientists at Rice University have developed a one pixel camera. Instead of recording an image point by point, it records the brightness of the light reflected from an array of movable micromirrors. Each configuration of the mirrors encodes some information about the scene, which the pixel collects as a single number. The camera produces a picture by psuedorandomly switching the mirrors and measuring the result several thousand times. Unlike megapixel cameras that record millions of pieces of data and then compress the information to keep file sizes down, the single pixel camera compresses the data first and records only the compact information. The experimental version is slow and the image quality is rough, but the technique may lead to single-pixel cameras that use detectors that can collect images outside the visible range, multi-pixel cameras that get by with much smaller imaging arrays, or possibly even megapixel cameras that provide gigapixel resolution. The researchers described their research on October 11 at the Optical Society of America’s Frontiers in Optics meeting in Rochester, NY.’

“

(Via Slashdot.)