Category: Writings

QA Automation is always underestimated, especially by those who don’t take part in writing QA automation.

That’s my original quote.

This is a good link for useful Python tips and tricks:
30 Python Language Features and Tricks You May Not Know About

I needed some lists related to area codes. Here is a good site that has lists by state, by number and all downloadable:

www.allareacodes.com

Thanks to this post I figured it out:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17430523/can-we-decode-url-with-nodepad

It’s funny that the simplest answer was not the one accepted and most voted on. Trust me if you need to URL Encode and Decode in Notepad++ this is the simplest way, quote “In Notepad++ under Plugins / MIME Tools you will find URL Encode and Decode.”

Here is another thing I could not find an obvious answer on the web:
Lenovo Thinkpad by default has the function keys assigned to media and other functions: volume, microphone, brightness. For the longest time I could not figure out how to switch it back to the standard Windows FN keys, ie F1 = help, F5 = refresh. I kept hitting F5 and dimming the screen.

Here is how to switch:

Find the FnLk key. On my keyboard it was under the Esc key.
So I typed Fn + Esc and switched it.
Now there is a small LED indicator lit up on the Fn key that I guess shows that I am using default Windows Fn keys.

Here is the most obvious tool to manage multiple remote desktop connections on Windows. Works really well :

Remote Desktop Connection Manager

Just learned this.

If you want to access services from a remote Windows computer:

1. Run services.msc on your local machine
2. When the Services UI opens up, right click on “Services (Local)”
3. Select Connect to Another Computer
4. Populate the information for remote computer. You must have proper access rights to it.
5. Soon, you have the remote services listed right in your local Services UI.

Nice

I was performing an Ubuntu Oracle Java installation. Everything looked good. However I kept getting:
bash: /usr/bin/java: cannot execute binary file

Wasted significant time until I realized that my system needed the i586 version jdk-7u55-linux-i586.tar.gz and not jdk-7u55-linux-x64.tar.gz

That’s all it was.

PhantomJS was suggested tom me time and time again for web testing. The term being something like “dude, it’s a headless browser”. It is actually a cool concept. Good introduction here.. The official web page defines it as : PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with a JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG.

It speeds up the test execution as it does not render the content visually on screen. What this means is that your usual browser (like Firefox) is not initiated and thus not only is it much faster but also might prevent compatibility issues with browsers.

self.driver = webdriver.PhantomJS(executable_path="C:/tmp/phantomjs.exe")

Beware of Windows path slashes. I originally just copy/pasted the location as

C:\tmp\phantomjs.exe

but it did not work in my setup. It did work when the slashes were reversed as

C:/tmp/phantomjs.exe

Windows 7 64bit
PhantomJS 1.9
Selenium WebDriver 2.41
Python 2.7.5
PyCharm Community 3.1.1

Sublime Text has this:
Quick Add Next
To add the next occurrence of the current word to the selection, use Quick Add Next, which is bound to Ctrl+D on Windows and Linux, or Command+D on OS X.
Again, if you go too far, use Undo Selection (Ctrl+U, or Command+U on OS X) to step backwards.

Copy/Pasted from this page
Multiple Selection with the Keyboard

It would be awesome if Notepad++ supported it as a standard function. I am not the first to wish for this. Many many others have asked for it online as well.