I mean, it's almost with sadness that I am uninstalling Opera, but something happened a while back, and all political arguments aside, I'm just as happy with Firefox. You see, I really liked Opera Unite, which embedded a web server inside the Opera browser. All sorts of potential in that idea, although realistically, this allows you to operate an intermittent file server. For testing purposes, however, it meant I didn't need to run a separate web server. Anyway, water under the bridge, Opera is no longer supporting this feature.

At a time when people appear to be switching back to Firefox from Chrome because newer builds of Chrome are apparently slower... I might start running the Aurora stable nightly builds of Firefox. I have a love/hate relationship with Firefox. At the moment, because Firefox is providing the only decent SVG support for mobile devices, I love it again, even though the only mobile device I have is Android, and I like Chrome for Android a lot. I just have no room for Opera.

Weblit-tle Town of Festivity, lend me your voice!

Hey!

Okay, look back to the start of November if you want the back story, but in a nutshell, Hallowe'en came and went and I managed to read a sum total of one creepy story online - although I know for a fact there were others - because my kids were already into the chocolate, and I was prepping a knight and a butterfly princess for further looting. So I sent out a request to the WebFic/WebLit community requesting that for the next big holiday season, ChristaKanzaNukkahTurkey, we get ourselves together and record a collection of festive tales, which we will then publish as public domain or Creative Commons NC for all to hear. People responded, and now that NaNoWriMo is done, the time has come.

So here we go.

Please send your seasonal tale to piers.hollott at gmail dot com, following these specifications as closely as you can manage:

• Easy on the swears. For my kids - they may be listening.
• 1000 words ~ 10 minutes, which is the length we are looking for.
• If possible 256 VBR mp3 would be ideal. I would like to put the collection on Internet Archive, and because they archive a lot of live recordings, they tend to be contiguous, meaning all files in an archive are similar in nature. If you are using GarageBand on a Mac, the best bet is to use the default setting (I have no idea what this is, but it will keep all Macusers consistent).
  
• Zip up your mp3 with a text version - I'll organize these as necessary, so word, text, even html are fine - not sure if I'll use them, but it would be good to make the archive searchable.
• Please include your name as you would like to be attributed and any other supporting info you might wish to include in a separate text file.
  
• Deadline Dec 18th or ASAP. I know some of you have already begun, and others have been busy with other things, so just let me know if this is a problem.
  
• I'm sure I am forgetting something, so comment if you think I have omitted anything.

The only thing I know I am leaving out here is artwork, which is not essential, but if you have any ideas, let me know.

Thanks,
Piers

Project CaseBook:

CaseBook is a collection of XML Schema, XSLT and XQuery which allow you to model an application's controls, pages and states at a high level in an XML document, then use this model to generate documentation for manual testing. Information can also be skimmed out of Bugzilla (or any issue management tool with an Atom feed). CaseBook is intended to fill a need for an easy to use knowledge-base for quality assurance data. I began this project as a way to replace a number of Word documents that were constantly out of date.

I am currently in the process of adding CaseBook as an open source project on SourceForge, under GPL.

Because a CaseBook knowledge base can be implemented using exclusively XML technologies which are freely available, it is by design a very extensible solution, as opposed to less abstract approaches to generating testing documents. This is intended to provide a mid-range between storing testing data as unformatted data (ie word) and using a costly solution.

The CaseBook Schema can be used as is with a XML-friendly editor like oXygen or StylusStudio for transforms, or can be staged on an eXist database equipped server (my preference).

Watch this space for more updates.



- Currently listening to WOXY's coverage of SXSW 2007 - wish that I was there right now.




She, Sir - It's my way of staying connected