I recently reinstalled the operating system on my computer and thus had to re-install all my applications and development environments.

While I was configuring my web environments I was getting some weird errors when I was trying to access one of my local sites. The error wasn’t really descriptive of the problem, but looking at the error logs I found this:

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/home/adrian/www/site.dev/.htaccess Invalid command 'RewriteEngine' perhaps misspelled ...

At first it was a little confusing, because I know that RewriteEngine is a valid command, but then I remembered that it is included by the mod-rewrite module that doesn’t come by default with apache. Installing it on Ubuntu is very easy, you just need to input this command on a terminal:

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sudo a2enmod rewrite

And you will need to restart apache for the changes to take effect:

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sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now RewriteEngine is a recognized command for your .htaccess files.

It is well known that creating a batch file in Linux is an easy and enjoyable task, but right now I find myself in the necessity of automating some tasks on windows so I will need to learn how to do this on windows.

In windows batch files generally have a .bat extension, so I will start by creating a file: examplebatch.bat and trying a very simple command:

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dir

Now if I navigate to the folder where my batch file is (let’s say C:\Adrian\Batch) I can execute the batch file and the dir command will be executed:

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C:\Adrian\Batch>examplebatch.bat

C:\Adrian\Batch>dir
Volume in drive C is OSDisk
Volume Serial Number is C252-78D4

Directory of C:\Adrian\Batch
04/18/2012  08:42 PM    <DIR>          .
04/18/2012  08:42 PM    <DIR>          ..
04/18/2012  08:43 PM                 3 examplebatch.bat
               1 File(s)              3 bytes
               2 Dir(s)  186,052,022,272 bytes free

Creating and applying patches using git is a task relatively easy to do. I will show how it all works using an example scenario.

Let’s say we have a main repository with just one commit on it:

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adrian@laptop:~/repository$ git lg
* ff4c135 - (HEAD, master) first commit (2012-04-12 19:14:39 -0700) <Juanito>

That repository has been copied by other people that are working on the same project. Now lets say that I am the one that cloned the main repository and did some work on it:

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adrian@laptop:~/copy$ git lg
* be3ec44 - (HEAD, origin/master, origin/HEAD, master) Third commit (2012-04-12 19:16:28 -0700) <Adrian>
* 1551977 - second commit (2012-04-12 19:16:00 -0700) <Adrian>
* ff4c135 - first commit (2012-04-12 19:14:39 -0700) <Juanito>

This post is a continuation of Python Sequences.

Concatenating Sequences

You can concatenate sequences using the plus (+) operator:

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>>> [1, 2] + [3, 4]
[1, 2, 3, 4]

Multiplying Sequences

You can multiply a sequence by an integer number to repeat it the specified number of times:

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>>> [1, 2] * 3
[1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2]

Sequences is the name that python gives to a data structure that contains a “sequence” of elements, each with a numeric consecutive index. The sequence is very similar to an array in other programming languages. The first index number is 0 and they increment by one as elements are added.

Sequences can contain numbers, strings, other sequences, etc…

Creating a sequence

You can define a sequence like a list of elements separated by commas and listed inside square brackets ([]):

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ages = [13, 15, 22, 23, 56, 12, 33]

Python has a lot of ways to represent strings, so it is useful to be familiar with them in case you ever find them in any python program.

Ordinary Strings

These are probably the most commonly used strings on python. You can enclose them using single or double quotes (‘ or “) and you can use a backslash to escape characters or to print special characters like a line break:

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print "Hello\nWorld"
Hello
World

print 'Hello\nWorld'
Hello
World

print 'This is a backslash: \\'
This is a backslash: \

I want to start by thanking Mike Foster (http://mfoster.com/npp/SessionMgr.html) because with out his well written notepad++ plug-in and his instructions to compile it I wouldn’t have been able to develop this plug-in. I thank also François-R Boyer for helping me when I was stuck(http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus/forums/forum/482781/topic/4977590)

What the plug-in does

This is a really simple plug-in that copies a file to another location at the moment you save it. The reason I needed this extension is because I need to deploy my PHP applications using maven to download dependencies so the folder where my version controlled application lives is different than the folder where my executable application lives. Having this extension allows me to work always on my version controlled folder and having the changes immediately applied on the executable application folder.

After writing my post: Running Selenium 2.0 / Webdriver tests, I was thinking how could I make a test suite so I could run all my functional tests with just one command. In this post I am going to explain how I used Java classes to do this.

This post is highly based on Running Selenium 2.0 / Webdriver tests, so if you feel you don’t understand what I am saying, please read that post first.

Selenium is probably the most popular web functional testing automation tool out there. Functional testing means testing your application as if you were a user (clicking links, entering information in fields, etc…). And thanks to selenium this can be automated.

Recently selenium released a new version (2) that is basically a merge with another project called WebDriver. This merge provides developers and testers with a very neat Object Oriented interface to interact with browsers easily from Java.

In this post I am going to explain my first successful experience with Selenium 2 / Webdriver (I had some unsuccessful experiences in the past). I couldn’t have made this post without the great help of http://www.qaautomation.net/?p=263, so thanks a lot to qaautomation.net for their awesome post.

This is my second article about the Python programming language. And what we are going to learn today is handling user input from the console.

Python makes getting user input from the console very easy. For this purpose we can use the input function, which has this structure:

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input([prompt])

This function only takes the prompt as an argument, which would be the text that the user would see before the console goes into input mode.

To store input from a user into a variable you can simply assign the return value of the function to a variable like this:

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userInput = input('Give me a value');

With that little information we can make a little program that will get a number from the user and print it’s square.