Category Archives: Making Life Easier

Counting strings in a file: Ruby vs Windows Command shell

Posted on August 20, 2010 by Nat

This is not the usual material that I put up, but I’d like to immortalize an event that demonstrated yet again the beauty of Ruby for basic file manipulation, especially in contrast to doing the same in a Windows command … Continue reading →

Posted in Making Life Easier, Mistakes, Ruby, Tools | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

IronRuby vs. Gherkin – a temporary fix

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Nat

IronRuby doesn’t currently work with the latest versions of cucumber. This is a known bug and is a real pain. There is a work around, and it’s kinda rubbish: don’t use any versions of cucumber > 0.6.3. After that version, … Continue reading →

Posted in IronRuby, Making Life Easier, Ruby, Tools, cucumber | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Testing a website on different versions of IE

Posted on May 12, 2010 by Nat

So, no matter how much you argue that it’s an ancient, irrelevant browser; there’s no way you can wriggle out of having to test your web app against IE6 on WinXP. But… trying to find a machine with it lying … Continue reading →

Posted in Automated Testing, General Testing Stuff, Making Life Easier, Manual Testing, Tools | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

How to show all cookies for a page

Posted on May 12, 2010 by Nat

It’s not always that you can test a website from the comfort of Firefox + Firebug + FireCookie. When you have to use another browser where checking cookies isn’t so much fun (er… that’s all of them but firefox), you … Continue reading →

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How to clear IE cookies on the command line

Posted on May 10, 2010 by Nat

If you want to clear IE cookies on the command line, here’s what you’re after: RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 2 More options available here: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows/clear-ie7-browsing-history-from-the-command-line/ Bookmark to:

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How to connect to an Oracle database in IronRuby

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Nat

After spending a few hours trying to connect to an oracle database in ironruby using various gems, I gave up. None of the gems out there would work, each for a different reason. It was time to write my own … Continue reading →

Posted in Example Code, IronRuby, Making Life Easier, Ruby, Test Data, Tools | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Testing redirects with ruby

Posted on April 10, 2010 by Nat

Testing redirects from a web app is simple enough – make a request and check the response code making sure it’s a 301, 302 or whatever you’re expecting. The test you end up writing isn’t nice idiomatic ruby though. So, … Continue reading →

Posted in Automated Testing, Example Code, Making Life Easier, RSpec, Ruby, Tools | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment