GhostDriver 1.0.4, blog migration and blogging too little

Yes, I’m not blogging enough. Yes, it’s a shame that the world can’t read my terrible English on a more regular basis. Yes, I’m lazy. Well, here is a quick update for the few eager souls I have let down. GhostDriver I have release GhostDriver 1.0.4 - “Arghan Div”. It should be released in the upcoming PhantomJS 1.9.2. The code has been merged already into PhantomJS master branch so, if you are really keen on putting your hands on it, just do a ./build.sh of that branch. ...

August 9, 2013 · 2 min · 275 words

I'm off. See you in 2 weeks.

This message is for the few souls that care. This is for the few people that maybe are waiting for me to fix/implement stuff on GhostDriver or PhantomJS (for the latter you have coverage, as the team on that is rich of geniuses - so you won’t miss my average-hood). I’m getting married (crazy, right?) and will be mostly off-line. I should be back from the second week of April. Surely there will be the usual casual-tweet but nothing major. ...

March 28, 2013 · 1 min · 82 words

GhostDriver 1.0.3 is out!

After few months of endless nights trying to figure out what I screwed up and where, I’m finally happy (enough) to release GhostDriver 1.0.3 into the wild. This release is an hardening release: this means that it’s focused on bug-fixing and very little new features have been added. GhostDriver 1.0.3 will be part of the upcoming PhantomJS 1.9 release, do in few days is now part of PhantomJS 1.9.0, and you can download binaries for various platform from https://code.google.com/p/phantomjs/downloads/list. ...

March 18, 2013 · 1 min · 160 words

Me @ Selenium Camp 2013

Selenium Camp 2013 has been a great experience. Not only I hanged out with great people, but, for the first time in my life, I also got to savour a little bit of Ukraine in Kiev. VERY friendly people (really friendly). GREAT food. WELL-ORGANISED conference. What else could I ask for? My talk The title of my talk is Getting Started with GhostDriver (and my experience working on it!). UPDATE: here is the video: ...

March 3, 2013 · 1 min · 121 words

Console++ - enhance your console

I need a logger for GhostDriver but I’m too lazy to figure out how to use a nice, proper logging library. Plus I’m a BIG fun of old-school-debugging: I just substituted all the printf() calls with console.log. So I decide to make every JavaScript developer shiver in disgust and wrote a small library that enhances the global console object. This tiny library is called Console++ and works with NodeJS, PhantomJS and any decent JavaScript runtime. ...

February 18, 2013 · 1 min · 139 words

Spin-down your USB HD and make it last longer

I have built for myself a simple Media Center, based on Zotac ZBOX ID41 Plus, XBMC-Live, Transmission, Flirc and other useful stuff. The idea is having a low-energy consumption machine that I control with a remote. And it has to be always on. One thing I was concerned about is how to deal with my external HD connected to it: I’m of course expecting those to eventually fail if they are always spinning. ...

February 10, 2013 · 2 min · 393 words

Finally, GhostDriver 1.0.0

After ~10 months of work, I finally managed to push the ball forward enough to reach GhostDriver 1.0.0. I won’t lie: it does feel great. It always is to see so much effort mutate into an achievement, even it is such only for me. Before I go any further though, I owe a massive THANK-YOU to the people that through contribution and / or issue reporting have helped me to build a releasable 1.0.0. In particular to Jim Evans, an awesome guy and a bit of a mentor for me: you ROCK Jim, and I think that is true, literally! ...

December 3, 2012 · 8 min · 1530 words

GhostDriver, 90% and priorities

Last few weeks have been HECTIC to say the least. Work on GhostDriver and related PhantomJS improvements has been very intense. We just shipped PhantomJS 1.7, and work for 1.8 is already started (check out the ghostdriver-dev branch I linked above). GhostDriver has reached almost 90% completion for 1.0, and the code is being hardened, thanks also to the amazing work that Jim Evans is doing at spotting issues and, a lot of times, providing fixes. GhostDriver is getting better and better thanks to you Jim. ...

October 4, 2012 · 2 min · 388 words

Look mummy, I'm 80% done!

Let me give you a quick update about GhostDriver, the PhantomJS WebDriver implementation. Yes, it’s 80% ready for prime time (bugs aside)!!! How did I get from 40% to 80% so quickly? Because I decided that, for version 1.0, the commands that relate to the mobile web driver are out of scope. 1.1 or 1.2 will have them. For details, I suggest you check out the spreadsheet I’m using to track progress closely. ...

August 8, 2012 · 1 min · 82 words

BST traversal without stack or recursion (?)

SPOILER: this article assumes quite a lot of things about your knowledge of binary trees and data structure. I won’t spend much time introducing concepts. Deal with it. Some time ago I had the pleasure to meet with Chris Lord, who introduced me to the concept of Binary Tree Traversal without using neither a stack/queue or recursion. The list of requirements that such algorithm has to fulfil: Constant Space: no extra data structure to do the traversal Non-destructive: once finished, the tree needs to be exactly how it was before the visit Sounded crazy initially, but than I looked into it more deeply and discovered, thanks to some pointers from Luca Colantonio, that there is an algorithm in literature that does just that: Morris In-Order Traversal. ...

August 6, 2012 · 5 min · 964 words