Disqus - Latest Comments for bertrandom

Re: Microsoft Band Overview/Review

bertrandom — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 17:21:55 -0000

Is there a way to export a gpx track from the GPS trace? How long would the battery last if you just GPS traced all day?

Re: Fall 2012 Mix

bertrandom — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 02:11:03 -0000

I'm in the This is My Jam API beta, here's your history in JSON format: https://raw.github.com/gist...

Re: Learning New Things

bertrandom — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 01:54:17 -0000

Selenium and Selenium RC are actually really good if you can get past the fact that the documentation is all over the place. The Firefox extension, Selenium IDE:

http://seleniumhq.org/proje...

is key because you can record entire workflows, which you can export to a variety of formats and tweak as needed. This makes writing functional tests really easy because you can hit Record, and manually run through a testable action, for example:

Login as a test account
Open the URL for a photo
Fave the photo
Sign out of the account
Open the test accounts favorites
Check for the existence of the photo in the DOM

Then you could export this to PHP and add stuff like checking the database if that favorite row actually exists, etc. The other cool thing about Selenium is that you can have Selenium RC running on different machines, like a Windows box (or a virtual machine running windows), and it can run through the same tests on a variety of different browsers, like IE7 or Chrome for Windows, etc.

Re: Random Thoughts on Twitter

bertrandom — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 14:29:31 -0000

If you had a dollar for every time someone tells you they don't "get" Twitter, you'd be making money in a very strange way.

I didn't "get" IRC back in 1996. I got bored one night a few years ago and took out a CD that was an archive of tape backups. Let me break down that format shift for you, because I think it's a nice juxtaposition - I tape backed up a Quantum Bigfoot drive into 10 250MB Colorado Tapes and then a few years later I burned those on to CDRs in batches of 3 because I knew it would probably be the last time I had a floppy disk controller. Anyways, that CD contained a working snapshot of my BBS a couple months before I took it offline. Feeling nostalgic and kind of curious if it would work, I loaded up Dosbox and started the batch file, did a local login and it told me that there were new posts on the message boards. Sure enough, I found the last thread and it was me arguing with about five of my users about IRC with them telling me they were switching over and thinking about quitting BBSes and me saying that it was just instant gratification and that no one really put any "effort" into IRC. I had a tiny burst of Jason Scott-esque sentiment and grabbed some ANSI art that someone had drawn for when you first connected and this amazing exchange, and then turned it off.

So, yeah, I think that argument has been going around a long, long time. But I think I'll still be on the other side of that argument. I think your blog posts are well-written and you obviously spend a decent amount of time crafting them. But would you say that ten of your twitters are equal to one of your blog posts? 100? Would you ever print a year's worth of your tweets into a hardbacked book?

I remember when that Facebook's Terms of Service uproar was happening, one of the snarky comments was (I'm paraphrasing), "Like you were going to write Ulysses on your wall?" I laughed, but he kinda had a point.

Re: random($foo): Online Tools for A New Small Business

bertrandom — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 02:49:27 -0000

Adobe Acrobat Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze) is a pretty polished collaboration tool with video/audio conferencing and whiteboarding and there's nothing to install, each user just needs to have Flash. Kinda pricey, though, I believe it starts at $39/month.

I use the free version of Toggl (http://www.toggl.com/) for time tracking, it has a desktop client.

I also have the usual love/hate relationship with Basecamp.