Problem

If you’re attempting to use the Java AWT Robot to help automate tests, you may find it convenient to log in via remote desktop to watch the tests execute and verify they work well. You may also find that they work fine while you’re watching them but then inexplicably start failing whenever you aren’t. Basically your test is an angel from Dr Who.

What’s most likely happening is that when you disconnect from the remote desktop session, the console on the Windows box is left in a locked state and you need to enter the user password before you can resume interacting with programs on the main display. Since the AWT Robot is doing a very effective job of acting like a user, it also can’t interact with the programs you’re intending and instead is interacting, probably quite ineffectively, with the login dialog box.

Normally applets run in a security sandbox, much like JavaScript, but with signed applets those restrictions are lifted and the applet can do anything. At least, that’s the theory – in practice most implementations leave a security manager instance installed but with significantly reduced restrictions (such that most programs will never be affected by them). To get around these remaining restrictions, applets can remove or replace the security manager:

System.setSecurityManager(null);

Having set a null security manager though, you will start to get NullPointerExceptions in Firefox on OS X when you try to call Java methods from JavaScript (via LiveConnect). Basically, Firefox is assuming that there will always be a security manager in place. To get LiveConnect working again, rather than setting the security manager to null, simply create a new security manager that allows everything:

One of the things Ephox is contributing to TinyMCE is a build farm to run the automated tests in various browsers which winds up publishing it’s results for all to see. This has been pretty interesting to set up and there are a range of different approaches. Matt Raible posted recently about his experiences using Selenium with Sauce Labs. I had initially looked into that as well, but was worried about a few of the issues Matt hit and TinyMCE had already written a lot of tests using QUnit rather than Selenium.

The new Ephox Enterprise TinyMCE site has now gone live, a result of our new partnership with Moxiecode, the company behind everyone’s favorite open source editor TinyMCE. I’m really excited about the potential of this partnership and have really enjoyed the opportunity to work with the Moxiecode team so far.

What We’re Adding…

We think we can bring a lot to the TinyMCE community, the things below are just where we’re starting.

I’ve been trying to solve this problem pretty much since Aperture 3 came out with it’s Places/GPS support. Every time I added location information to a photo, it wound up being tagged as where I really took the photo but also a completely incorrect, but consistent location (for me it was always The House of Binns in Scotland). Location information pops up in so many different places in Aperture and displayed in so many different ways that it was really hard to track down what was going on – sometimes it would have the first part of the place name right, but then had the country incorrectly shown as Scotland.

Once upon a time, the state of the art for building software projects was to have a continuous integration server so your builds were repeatable, reliable and performed in a controlled environment. As a bonus they also ran a whole suite of automated tests so you knew that what came out was at least reasonable quality.

Those days have gone.

These days, it’s far more common to have a build and test farm churning away to handle the volume of tests, various different modules and projects that are all built separately and of course the requirement to run the tests on a huge variety of different platforms and environments. VMWare has been a big help in this area for quite some time, effectively letting teams build a private cloud before it was cool to call it a private cloud. Now with the growing availability of public cloud instances, it makes a lot of sense to stop buying and maintaining hardware and simply move the whole system into the public cloud.

Anyone who’s done much work with JavaScript has probably discovered that the selection APIs are completely different in Internet Explorer vs the rest of the world, what comes as a bit more of a surprise once you start using them in anger is that FireFox is actually quite different to all the other W3C compliant browsers in an important way as well.

If all you ever want to do is retrieve the selection or you only want to work with ranges rather than selection, you’ll probably never encounter this, but as soon as you use window.getSelection().addRange() you’re going to get bitten. The difference is that FireFox will preserve whatever range you give it precisely as you original created it. The other browsers won’t.

This has been said before but apparently even really smart people aren’t listening. So here’s my top two tips for job applications:

1. Tailor your résumé. If you’re applying for a JavaScript job, highlight the JavaScript experience you have first and foremost. Even something as simple as the order you list skills in makes a difference – if JavaScript is at the end of a list of skills, it’s probably not a priority, if it’s first it makes it seem more important to you, so you seem more qualified.
2. Get a blog, make it look good, fill it with good content.

The corollary to number 2 is that you should set your FaceBook page to private – it never seems to be what you want to have turn up. It’s surprising how many blogs have relatively good technical content but look terrible. Even if you’re not going to be applying for design jobs, having a decent layout without broken images is always helpful.

I’ve always known you could do a lot of programmatic stuff with Amazon but I’ve simultaneously been too lazy to actually look into it in detail and never really needed to. However, I’ve stumbled across instructions for auto-mounting an EBS volume which turns out to be very handy, and leads on to the particularly awesome right_aws ruby gem.

Lots of useful looking stuff for working with EC2, S3 and EBS volumes that I can see me taking a lot more advantage of in the future.

Ephox EditLive! is now part of the IBM cloud offering on Amazon Web Services. EditLive! OEM edition is bundled in the cloud offering of IBM WCM. This means you can now quickly run up a new instance of IBM’s WCM system on Amazon EC2 and configure it to use EditLive! as the editor.

If you want to take advantage of the extra benefits of the Enterprise Edition (track changes, commenting, accessibility checking, image editing and more), you can install that as normal once the system is running. Currently Ephox doesn’t have per-hour pricing through Amazon but you can contact our sales team so they can discuss the options available.

One of the common examples of the limits of Maven and other “strict” build tools was how difficult is to concatenate CSS files together as part of the build. It’s nice to be able to split CSS files up to categorize things but the extra HTTP requests really slow down page loads, so the build should concatenate them back together. What I’ve come to realise though, is that building a custom concatenation script is just another instance where people are reinventing the wheel in build systems, and getting less power as a result.

From yield thought – On The Fear of Reading Code:

When I was learning to program someone told me that I should try to read as much code as possible. Budding genius that I was, I thought this was advice for stupid people who needed to learn from their betters. I thought the only reason to read code was to pick up tricks from it.

How wrong I was. The real reason to read code has nothing to do with learning from the programmer who wrote it.