Selenium is an awesome free alternative to apps such as Quick Test Pro and the like, providing you with a browser based automation suite for web applications.
Selenium uses JavaScript and Iframes to embed a test automation engine in your browser. This technique should work with any JavaScript-enabled browser. Selenium Remote Control provides a Selenium Server, which can automatically start/stop/control any supported browser. It works by using Selenium Core, a pure-HTML+JS library that performs automated tasks in JavaScript.
In this demo, I’ve used Selenium-RC and Perl to automate the checking of a promotional website called FreeStuffDay where every month you can have the chance to secure an advertised item for free. Instead of me sitting behind a browser checking the availability of free items manually, I’ve written a quick demo script to show you how it’s done from Perl and Selenium-RC.
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Google have got some charting code worth looking at, which basically allows you to create charts by modifying parameters in the query string.
Something as simple as this:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chtt=Tim's%20Beer%20Intake&cht=p3&chd=s:9h&chs=250x100&chco=00ff00&chl=Unemployed|Employed produces this:
Being on holidays at the moment, I’m lacking the um, ‘project’ on which to apply this technology, but am curious to see how functional it is. They give some examples on how to serialize datasets, and I think up to 4095 data points can be used. Not bad for those dashboard type applications …
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On a basic level, the honeybee’s dilemma is a tale of two flower patches. If one patch is yielding better nectar than the other, how can the hive use its workforce most efficiently to retrieve the best supply at the moment? The solution, which earned Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch a Nobel Prize, is a communication system called the waggle dance.
Saw this on Slashdot … The waggle dance
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This video is a play on Pascal’s Wager which really gets you thinking on possible outcomes for a given scenario being climate change … Is it a better bet to accept doomsday predictions for climate changes, or rest on our haunches and let the world pass by? If you haven’t thought about it yet, get onto it. Good find Ted, pass the word and do your bit … 
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If you’re stuck with this error when trying to compile your own apps:
No rule to make target `/System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/config.h', needed by `Makefile'.
You will probably find that your Leopard installation is lacking some necessary files.
If you copy the files from your old(er) installation of perl (5.8.6) you should be able to get around this …
sudo cp /System/Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/* /System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/
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