So while I wait for WordPress to upgrade, so that I can blog on AdamChristian.com I decided that I would drop by t0asted and throw out an update. This last weekend Matt Eernisse and Jeff Olds were both in town and it was Jacob Robinsons birthday so we all ate some delicious Persian food and wandered from bar to bar in Berkeley.

Saturday we all golfed Lake Chabot (the three above including Mikeal Rogers). One of the nicest golf days I have had since I moved to California EXCEPT for how darn early it gets dark. I really could have forged on for another 3 hours in the perfect temperature. I have some pictures on my phone that I will be uploading to picasaweb.

Sunday we hiked around for Cronkhite, which is one of the most scenic places I know of in the bay area. You are up in the hills on an old army base looking back towards the golden gate and down at the beach. On a nice day, I can't think of a place I would rather be.

Lots of blogging about Windmill and Mozmill going on, currently writing some tests for the Firefox Worker Threads feature which will be released in Firefox 3.1.

Now that I am dilirious and just flat out ranting, life is good, I can't wait for snow boarding season. I am considering the Epic Pass which would allow me to ski some serious pow in Colorado... $89 bucks each way to Denver, is it worth it?

Ahh, now the little duck is bouncing on my dock -- apparently it's time to go blog about some serious stuff over at my grown up blog.

Cheers!

At the moment, I am sitting in the lobby of the Westin Hotel & Spa in Whistler BC. I first must preface this entry by saying that I have had an amazing week, and a great time here. I thank Mozilla for putting on a really cool experience, and I do not regret coming up here one bit. Also in between each of the following paragraphs I was attending some really cool sessions, eating great food and hot tubbing.

Monday we took a flight from Seattle to Vancouver, minus the screaming kids it was relatively painless flight. Meg was planning to meet me up here, and crash in my room... somehow she left SF that morning and still beat me here. I have no idea how that happened. Anyways she was here waiting when I arrived, and I quickly had to check in and get to dinner. Huge buffet with all kinds of delish foods, a pretty impressive spread with a solid bar.

Tuesday was a good day.

Wednesday morning I wake up and turn on the news and find out that the only reasonable road between Vancouver and Whistler (highway 99) has been closed due to a rock slide. Not only was it a rock slide, IT WAS A FREAKING HUGE ROCK SLIDE: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/s ... VNewsAt11. Apparently it wrecked the entire road, and the train tracks and to remove it they will have to BLAST the van size boulders with dynamite. I didn't panic until they told us that it would take a bare minimum of 5 days to start getting the road back open. As you can imagine, poor Mozilla crew organizing all this must be pretty stressed. Two funny things happened as a result of this incident, during the "Travel Update", Mike Schroepfer yell out "Have we determined if Microsoft is responsible for the rock slide?" which under the circumstances broke the intensity in the air. The second was that a bug was logged in the Mozilla Bugzilla which marked the messed up road with severity:blocker, and that we may want to look into convincing Google to "Come pick us up".

Thursday, we woke up to silence, no lights, TV's, dead laptops and the quick realization that the power was out for the whole hotel. As you can imagine, this is a slight problem for a "Tech Conference". I actually slept in a bit later in the nice quiet darkness and caught up in probably a month of lost sleep. In the lobby they had posted that the hotel transformer had been "hit by a laundry truck"... UHM, are you kidding me? The giant green metal box sitting in the woods next to the hotel was "hit by a laundry truck". This HAS to be Micorosoft's doing, I can't image any other way something insane like this could possibly happen. We got to spend half the day without computers or A/V doing presentations off of notepads and then discussing in the dark. This did make for an interesting dynamic, and in a lot of ways was still pretty productive albeit very strange. Fortunately right before our 5:45 presentation of GristMill, our firefox automation framework "Talk" the power came back on so that I could give my sweet demo. I really like doing talks at conferences because people immediately have ideas, and uses for whatever it is you are doing. It's very gratifying to know that people are going to go home and start playing with your stuff.

Thursday night dinner we jumped on the gondola and headed up to the top of the mountain for a pretty rockin shin dig. A beattles/elton john/other cover band was playing, it was snowing outside, and they put on a huge spread. John Lilly talked, Mitchell Baker talked and after many toasts and rounds of applause Shrep went up and clearly fighting his emotions, thanked everyone for the last few years.

A wise sage told me, that when you go to a conference/event it's always a good idea to make a list of the people you want to worm your way into a conversation with. So this time around, I made my list. During the day people have been crazy running around all over, but last night people were a bit more relaxed and in a social mood so I had the chance to introduce myself to some folks and have a couple conversations I had been waiting to have all week.

Today is friday, its 11:58 AM, my float plane was supposed to take off at 11:45 AM... clearly this is a problem. The word I was given was that the planes couldn't fly because of the high tide and that the planes weren't able to land safely at the moment. Well, the way I feel about this is that we basically have tides mapped out like clock work... someone booked a flight to leave at a time when they would be landing during an unsafe high tide? I don't think so. There is a massive cloud cover, but mostly I think it just makes sense that the trend of insanity would continue.

I am feeling a little bit burned out, pretty tired, sick of eating, drinking, and talking frankly. Please someone send your private jet and get me the hell out of this beautiful, tree covered resort town before I do something insane like deciding to go backcountry snowboarding on the glacier in the middle of the summer!

Please leave your base.

Tonight we released Windmill 0.4, easy_install -U windmill .

Since the OSAF shake-up we have been very distracted with all kinds of things, and if it hadn't been for the community asking for features and actively using Windmill it wouldn't have seen a fraction of the attention that it has. Over the last four months we have worked with lots of you out there in the community stepping up our browser compatibility, python compatibility, IDE usability, Performance basically every piece of the project has become better because people have made themselves heard and there is nothing quite so motivating as an active community.

We have maintained our accessibility in #windmill on freenode and are glad to see more and more users there every day. Right now we are in the process of slating the bugs/features that will go into Windmill 0.5. Please feel free to make your voice heard in this process as well.

This release contains a revamp of the IDE, fixes for usability in IE, major performance tweaks, tweaks in the server for continuous integration and a whole slue of bug fixes that you can go view at http://windmill.osafoundation.org.

Thanks for your continuing interest, involvement and support!

Yesterday we pushed out the 0.2 release of Windmill to the eagerly awaiting world of QA. (If you want it installing while you read on, 'easy_install windmill')

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Windmill, it is a framework we have built at OSAF for automating tests against our Web Calendar User Interface. In other words, it’s a slick way to save yourself some time by creating tests that will insure the quality of your web page as you are developing them. We at OSAF have some very advanced needs for the project, so the more you use it, the more you will discover all of the other features that make it as impressive as it is.

A few months ago Windmill became an official OSAF project and has been gaining steam every since. After a long period of working out glaring adoption blockers we came out of stealth mode to present at OSCON in Portland and are now actively building our community.

We have made the setup process as easy and well documented as we possibly can, and encourage anyone interested to install windmill and give it a try. We do our very best to respond to all outside feedback, and make ourselves available in the IRC channel (#windmill on Freenode) to solve all your Windmill issues. OSAF takes openness in it's projects very seriously and we are committed to making the project easy for you to get involved, and encourage outside contributors and feedback.

This release includes many new features and bug fixes:

- Windmill Unit Tests, for all your future contributors out there to make sure you didn't break anything!
- Browser launcher support for Safari and Firefox Linux, no more manual proxy configuration.
- Lots of performance and stability improvement, say goodbye to those t-box hangs.
- The assertion explorer tool, now point and click to create your assertions.
- Javascript tests, write tests in Javascript to test deep down in that app's source.
- Commenting in all of the test files, including JSON.
- Windmill support for testing against localhost
- Fully functional WIndmill Integrated Development Environment in all the browsers.
- Controller additions of many wait and assert functions, get better control of your tests.
- Convenience features including automatically giving you the correct focus when working in the IDE, smarter logic in the DOM Explorer.
- DOM serialization, you can now pause your tests and get the state of your page on command.
- Cross domain, frame and window recording and testing
- And much more...

Any documentation you may need is available at our website, http://windmill.osafoundation.org and if you find any areas that could use improvement we encourage you to signup and add to the WIKI.

Other documents you may want to jump to:

- Windmill Mailing List
- The Windmill Book Index
- Installing Windmill
- Logged tickets
- Source Repository

Last Thursday Mikeal, Dan and I made our way down to Google to do a Windmill presentation for the Python fanatics as well as anyone else interested in what we were doing (BayPiggies is a Python Users Group in the Bay Area). We found at OSCON that any presentation with the word AJAX in it seems to attract more people than you would expect.. hopefully many of them had an interest in Web UI testing, Python, Javascript or just really cool calendaring software.

I wore my OSAF t-shirt to open the gateway for as much evangelizing as I possibly could. The presentation started at 7:30, was done at about 8:30 and we were busy conversing until around 10:30. Apparently there was enough interest to keep us yacking with people for two hours.

Tomorrow we will be posting the presentation slides, which were a doctored and updated version of our OSCON presentation. Additionally tomorrow lunch will be the deciding point on whether we can release Windmill 0.2 without feeling too fearful about glaring bugs. In a relatively comedic and usual fashion, I was making checkins up until the second before the presentation actually started. Unfortunately one of the problems I thought I had fixed still did show up in the presentation.. fortunately it was relatively unimportant. Of course Friday morning I got a much more solid fix in, so we should be all set for any further presentations. As we have had a lot of interest in San Francisco from people who aren't so keen on a drive down to the South Bay and back, we will probably work out a way to do a presentation up here.. so keep your eyes on the mailing list of you are interested in that.

Part of our audience included Jason Huggins the now Google employed creator of Selenium which was started to reach many similar goals to that of Windmill, and has gained a very large community. Selenium was part of the inspiration for Windmill and if you browse our source you will see snips of Javascript here and there where I either used pieces of their code base, or concepts based on things I saw in their code base. One of the things that was pioneered by Selenium was this concept that not only can you fire an event attached to a DOM element on the page, but you can also simulate this without a user by pretending to be a user, or artificially firing these events. This simple concept has lead to a world of Web UI automation and is growing huge amounts everyday.

After the presentation we had a few minutes to share war stories as Jason ran into most of the same very difficult engineering challenges provided by working in a Javascript platform, while trying to do things that aren't common place and really only surface when you try to do things that weren't really intended to be done. It was a really interesting conversation for me, because we got to compare a lot of architectural, and technological decisions that both projects had to make. This gave us the ability to compare how these different decisions have panned out, as well as what priorities drove these decisions and why. There were a lot of big decisions that we compared especially as we were presenting at the Bay Piggies and chose to build our service in Python, which was something Selenium initially considered but wound up in a Java environment. I really appreciated all of his feedback, input and wish him the best of luck with Selenium and the big goals and expectations Google has for the project.

I was again excited for the solid turnout, all the feedback and responses by everyone. I am glad to say that I had a few conversations with people just about the status of OSAF and the exciting and interesting state we are in finally getting a usable project out the door and into the hands of the public. It was especially exciting for me to walk around the room at the end of the presentation and see that many of the people in the room had windmill running and were playing around with the test recording functionality. This means that basically anyone who can figure out easy_install and walk through our docs can figure out how to get the project up and start playing with it. This is an obvious key to getting users, because if they can't get the thing up to check it out there is a pretty small chance they will be putting any time in contributing or giving us useful feedback.

Go give it a try yourself!
http://windmill.osafoundation.org/trac/ ... ndmillBook

or jump on the mailing list to keep up on what's happening.
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/ ... ndmill-dev