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Puff, Pant! THAT was not easy! But finally, “normality” seems not too far away. Many things have happened in the recent months: we got married; I helped my lovely wife with the pregnancy (well, she did all the hard work); and, on the 7th of November, we have became parents of this beauty: Leonardo Antonio DE MARINO-SIMOLA Now, we have to slowly learn to live our new life together: while we learn how to be parents, Leonardo will be learning how to be a baby. What now looks like a difficult, consuming and intense task (ask me how much we sleep at night!), will at some point become “daily routine”. A sweeter routine with Leo at the center of it all! ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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: ...

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. ...

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. ...

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! ...

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. ...

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. ...