Podcast is a file with audio or video content, distributed over the internet. The name comes from iPod and broadcast.

Podcast is a radio show recorded as an audio file, usually mp3. If you record a speech or a presentation (on a conference for example), that is a podcast too. It is really popular to record a conversation among two or more people about a topic. It is also a podcast. If people are not collocated, you can record the conversation using Skype or similar software. If you have something to say, record yourself talking. That is a podcast too.

Of course, if you have the equipment, the will and really really really lot of time, besides the audio, you can also record video. Video recording and editing is a lot more complicated and time consuming when compared to audio, and I will focus only on audio podcasts.

Where do they live?

An example would be handy right about now. If you have Apple iTunes (available for Windows and Mac OS X), run it and click iTunes Store on the left hand side. At the top of the screen that opens, you will see Podcasts, with several options, audio, video and list of podcast categories.

Choose a category among arts, business, education, health, music, technology… Since you are reading this blog, I guess you are into technology. After you choose a category, at the top there will be options for all podcasts, only video or audio. You can narrow down the choice using the menu at the bottom left with subcategories (gadgets, podcasting, software how-to, tech news). There are also several featured providers, like TWiT TV (highly recommended). In the middle of the screen there is Featured section, and at the top right there is See All.

Click it and you will see a list of podcasts. You can choose a podcast and see a list of shows and download an episode. Subscribe does just that. It is free for all podcasts that I have seen. Subscribing is the best way to get all new episodes of a podcast that you like, without having to check if there is something new. Every time there is a new episode, iTunes will automatically download it. There is an option in iTunes settings to check for new episodes every hour, day or week, or to disable it, if you wish.

iTunes Store has search and you can find a podcast that way too.

If you know there is a podcast, but you can not find it in iTunes Store, you can subscribe to feed directly with Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast.

If you do not see podcasts in iTunes Store, check if you are in United States store (there is a flag in the bottom right part of the screen, click it). Unfortunately, some stores, including Croatia, do not have podcasts.

Listen

© Matthieu Riegler, CC-BY-SA, Wikimedia Commons

Podcast is just an audio (or video) file, so you can play it on any device that can play such files: computer, CD/DVD/Blu-ray device, mobile phone, digital camera… The podcasts (especially audio) are the best when played on portable media players, like Apple iPod. I listen to podcasts almost every time when my brain is free but my hands or legs are busy. For example, when working around the house, walking, running, riding a bike or driving a car…

You can copy files downloaded with iTunes (or acquired some other way) to your portable media player. Copying podcasts from iTunes to iPod is really easy. Follow the instructions that came with the device.

Record

Of course, like every true geek, it is not enough just to enjoy a technology, you have to try it yourself. How to create a podcast? There is a few things you should know, but it is not complicated procedure.

For audio recording, regarding hardware, you need a computer with microphone. Lots of laptops have one built in. You can record audio with another device, and then transfer it to the computer. If your computer does not have build in microphone, you can use any microphone that you already own and that you can plug in audio card of your computer. Make sure you plug it in microphone jack, it is similar to headphones jack. If you do not have a microphone, there are cheap ones available. Headphones with microphone for internet telephony will work just fine too. Microphones can connect to the computer with USB too.

If you want to record video, you need a camera. There are cheap web cameras available. Some laptops have them build in. Any camera will do for now.

Regarding software, for audio recording and editing I would recommend Audacity. It is open source. If you do not know what that is, for now it is enough that you know it is free. Audacity is available for all popular operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux).

Let’s start recording. For the beginning, the simplest case. Record yourself.

You do not need to know a lot about audio recording. Choose quietest room, close all windows and doors, turn of telephone. Plug in microphone into the computer, if you are not using build it one. Install Audacity and run it. Click the big red Record button and start talking. If everything is find, after you play what you have just recorded, the sound will be loud and clear enough without a lot of noise. If you hear yourself and you are satisfied with the quality, the biggest part of the recording is done.

Most podcasts that I listen to are 30-60 minutes long, but there are really short ones (about 5 minutes) and really long ones (over 2 hours). For this time I would recommend to record just a few seconds, not more than a few minutes.

If you can hear yourself, but it is not loud enough, play with sound settings of operating system and Audacity. Turn up microphone volume. Turn speakers volume up, maybe the audio is recorded fine, but the reproduction is too quiet.

If you do not hear anything, Audacity probably is not recording from the microphone. Check the settings if input device is set to microphone.

Edit

In most cases, after the recording you do not have to edit the podcast a lot. You can even publish it just as it is recorded. I always at least listen to every podcast before I publish it. I mostly record conversations over Skype and more often that not the delay between question and answer is a few seconds longer that with in person conversation. That is really noticeable if the other person is on another continent. I cut such long pauses. Cutting is the action that you will be performing most of the time. If you say something stupid, cough, telephone rings or if you record a sound that you do not want in the podcast, find it and delete it. If you do not like a part of podcast, you can delete a few minutes. There is no limit. You can delete it all.

Every time you start recording, Audacity makes a new audio trac. Visually, it looks like a new track. Similar example is image editing, where you can have several layers in an image. When editing audio, you can combine several tracks. For example, one track is you speaking, one is music for the beginning and one is music for the end. You can import music with File > Import > Audio.

Podcasts usually have music at the beginning and at the end. Some podcasts have music in the background all the time, but I do not like that. It is really a bad idea if you do not have audio editing experience, because music can be too loud. I think the speech is the most important thing in a podcast.

Please be careful while choosing the music. You can not publish music just like that. As a rule of thumb, you can not publish any music that you have bought. The exception is podsafe music, mostly independent artist that let you publish their music with little or no fee.

If you play an instrument or if you sing, you can record yourself and use it in a podcast. Maybe you know somebody that has a band and you can help a friend to get audience.

When Audacity is started, Selection Tool is active. You can select part of track and edit it, mostly just cut it out. Time Shift Tool is also useful. It moves a track forward or backward in time. If you have tree tracks, like in previous example (speech, music for the beginning and the end), click Time Shift Tool and move music to the beginning and the end, and speech to the middle.

Make sure music is not much louder that speech. If you turn up the volume to hear the speech, when you are in a loud place (traffic for example), when the speech ends and loud music starts to play at the end of the podcast, it can be really upleasant.

If you have recorded more than fits a screen, use zoom options (View > Zoom In/Normal/Out).

Listen to everything you have recorded, and when you like what you hear, make sure you save it.

Audacity saves files in aup format, optimal for editing. It consists of a lot of small files that take a lot of space and can not be reproduced on devices that do not have Audacity installed. We will convert the file to popular mp3 format, but for now we will save it as wav (Windows) or aiff (Mac OS X) file. We are using that format because I want to show you another very useful free tool: The Levelator. In short, it adjustes audio levels (and accepts only wav or aiff files). It is very useful if there are more then one person recorded, and they are not equally far away from the microphone (and hence recorded with different loudness). Or, there are more that one microphone that are not the same (like when you record a conversation over Skype). It is also really uncomfortable for the listener if the sound has to be set to loud so one of the people is loud enough, but then somebody else is painfully loud. The Levelator solves the problem, as far as it can. Nothing can fix bad audio file. It is important to record as good as possible.

Levelator is trivial to use. Run it and drag wav or aiff file to it’s window. It automatically starts working and creates a file with almost the same name, except for the added output.

Wav and aiff files are not compressed and hence are large. They should be compressed, usually to mp3 file. Open newly created file with output in name in Audacity. Go to File > Export and choose mp3. The first time you do that you will have to install mp3 support for Audacity. Follow the instructions. While exporting to mp3 choose Options and select 64 kbps quality. It has proven to be the optimal quality for audio that consists mostly of speech.

After your the first podcast is in mp3 file, you are done with editing. Listen to it and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Publish

Recorded podcast will not get you fame and fortune if it is located only on your computer. You must publish it on internet. If you speak HTML like you have lived there, skip this chapter. If you need help, continue reading.

I would recommend buying the cheapest shared hosting. You should also buy a domain. When buying hosting, ask if you can install WordPress. It has proven to be excellent for podcast site. Your hosting problaby has cPanel with Fantastico script for automatic WordPress installation. If not, it probably has something similar. Even installing WordPress by hand is not hard and it takes just a few minutes. Follow the instructions on WordPress site.

There is a plugin for WordPress made for podcasters: podPress. It has Flash player so your podcasts can be played directly from your site. It also has download statistics. Play with the settings.

Wordpress and it’s plugins are not in scope of this article, I leave it to the reader for the homework.

You should choose a license for the podcast. With the license you state the terms of distributing the podcast. For example, you can allow further distribution, it if is non commercial and if you are stated as the autor, and not the distributor. I recommend one of the Creative Commons licenses.

After you cheap shared hosting has no more space left (mp3 files take a lot of space, regardless of the compression), instead of buying more expensive plan, I would recommend Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Leave WordPress at shared hosting (you can not run it on S3) and move all mp3 files to S3. It offers very cheap file hosting. For example, $0.15 per GB per month. You see how cheap that is. You have to pay also for upload to S3 and download from it, but it is also very cheap.

The easiest way to manage files at S3 is with Firefox add-on S3Fox.

After you have set up the web site and created the first post with a podcast, you still do not have any listeners. You can use your usual way of getting audience. Post a link to the podcast site at your blog, or one of the social networking sites that you use, or at a forum that is related to the content of the podcast… You should submit the podcast to a podcast directory. The biggest one is iTunes Store.

Conclusion

Now you know what is podcast, how to find and listen to them, and how to record, edit and publish them. I hope this podcast will help spread the word, both how to listen and how to create them. If you want to find more information on podcasts, I am sure you will not have a lot of trouble with that.

A few days ago it was exactly 5 years since I started working as a software tester. I planned to publish this on the very date, but life happened.

What happened in the last five years? Am I smarter? Or just older? Let’s find out.

Personal

In the last five years I have upgraded LifeOS™ from 26.0 to 31.0, upgraded Girlfriend 5.0 application to Wife 4.0 and installed Son 1.5. I do not use DistanceRunning application so much any more, but I do my best. Drums 1.0 are lost somewhere and Guitar 1.0 is mainly collecting digital dust. No so sure about smarter, but definitely older.

Smarter vs. Older – 0:1

Professional

Five years ago I had a job I did not like. I thought software (programming to be precise) is so cool, and I wished I could develop it for a living. No luck back then.

I still think software is lots of fun, and I live in code as much as I can. But, now I think software testing is even cooler, and I know I was born to be a tester. Not only do I have a job I would do even if I did not have to work, but I get to work from home. A dream I had since I was just a little kid.

Smarter vs. Older – 1:1

Programming Languages

My BASIC, FORTRAN and PHP skills declined a bit in the last five years, but I am sure I would be up and running in minutes if I ever needed them. (Looks like I had a thing for UPPERCASE languages back then.)
I have picked up some Ruby and Watir in the last few years, and I even made it to the Watir core team! Not bad for a simple tester from Croatia, right?!

Smarter vs. Older – 2:1

Web

Five years ago, I had a crappy site with a crappy URL. (In Croatian only. Some stuff is missing because it is archive.org snapshot, but it did not look much better anyway.)
Today, I am all over the place. (I even have a place where I try to aggregate my web presence.) I have a great site with great URL. Five years ago podcasts just started to appear, now I have one.

Smarter vs. Older – 3:1

Watir

I already mentioned Watir, a tool that I use almost every day, and it makes my life much easier. Big portion of this site is dedicated to it. I like it so much I talk about it to anybody that would listen. I even flew across the ocean to meet with people that like Watir.

Conclusion

It really takes a lot of time to write a blog post. No wonder I do not write so much.

Let’s take a look at the final score:

Smarter vs. Older – 3:1

Looks like Smarter won. Maybe another jury would vote differently.

If you remember only one thing from this post, I hope it will be the title:

Test like you do not need the money.

Last week I was at DORS/CLUC 2009. It is three day open source conference in Zagreb, Croatia.

The first day I had a lightning talk titled something like: How did delivering our web application to client look like before we automated tests and how it looks today? It was just an introduction to my Watir talk the next day.

The talk was a lot of fun. I really like to show off how Watir is useful, easy to use and, of course, just cool. This was the first time I did some live Watir coding using Linux and Firewatir and I had some problems, but nothing serious. (I usually use Windows and Watir::IE.)

Also, this was the first time I had a workshop (about 3 hours). We spent a few hours doing some basic Watir tests.

It was nice to see what other people are doing and to meet some familiar faces. There was a lot of intersting presentations, and also a lot of presentations that were a bit boring to me. The usual. The best presentation was by Dobrica Pavlinušić on freeing hardware. Topic not really interesting to me, but Dobrica is just the funniest presenter I have seen so far.

There is Twitter #dorscluc channel, Flickr dorscluc2009 tag and #dorscluc channel at irc.freenode.net projected by one projector all the time.

One day he decided to run his existing Watir tests on Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). He was already running them on IE6 and IE7, so he thought that it would be a piece of cake. He fired up one of his Windows virtual machines, installed IE8 and started the tests.

One of the first things he noticed is that file uploads were not working. File upload pop up would appear, but Watir was not populating it with path to the file that should be uploaded. He thought:

I think I know what is the problem. I have already heard that file uploads are not working if user has Windows language set to anything than English. It was something about the title of the pop up window.

And really, IE6 and IE7 had Choose file and IE8 had Choose File to Upload as pop up title.

IE6

IE7

IE8

He added C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\watir-1.6.2 folder (that is where Watir lived on his Windows machine) to his Watir project in NetBeans, and made a search for Choose file. The search found 12 matches in 2 files. Both files were in watir-1.6.2\lib\watir folder. Files were input_elements.rb and winClicker.rb. He said (to himself):

I will try input_elements.rb first.

There he found an ugly long line that contained Choose file three times:

system("rubyw -e \"require 'win32ole'; @autoit=WIN32OLE.new('AutoItX3.Control'); waitresult=@autoit.WinWait 'Choose file', '', 15; sleep 1; if waitresult == 1\" -e \"@autoit.ControlSetText 'Choose file', '', 'Edit1', '#{setPath}'; @autoit.ControlSend 'Choose file', '', 'Button2', '{ENTER}';\" -e \"end\"")

He replaced all three occurrences of Choose file with Choose File to Upload.

system("rubyw -e \"require 'win32ole'; @autoit=WIN32OLE.new('AutoItX3.Control'); waitresult=@autoit.WinWait 'Choose File to Upload', '', 15; sleep 1; if waitresult == 1\" -e \"@autoit.ControlSetText 'Choose File to Upload', '', 'Edit1', '#{setPath}'; @autoit.ControlSend 'Choose File to Upload', '', 'Button2', '{ENTER}';\" -e \"end\"")

He tried file upload with Watir, and it worked! He was so proud, that he decided to share it with the world! Since Watir code recently moved from SVN to Git, it was also a perfect chance to try Git again. Watir code is hosted on Github, so he opened an account there.

He thought:

I will need to download the latest Watir code, make the change there and contribute back.

He found Watir repository and forked it. (It is polite to fork a repository on Github.)

He already had Git installed on his Mac. (Recently he became one of those cool people that use Macs.) He probably installed it a while ago when he tried Git for the first time.

He likes to have the newest versions of any software, so he updated Git.

Then he decided the time is right to download (or clone, as Git calls it) his fork of Watir. Do not make the same mistake he did! He cloned the repository using public clone URL (git://github.com/zeljkofilipin/watir.git). No, no and NO! You should use your clone URL (git@github.com:zeljkofilipin/watir.git) (He wants to say thanks to Bret Pettichord for teaching him that valuable lesson.) He found those links at Github after logging in and forking the Watir repository.

But, before cloning he had to create SSH keys. He found the instructions at Github account page. There was a link with a friendly name: Need help with public keys?. Oh, he needed help!

He followed the instructions. Do not name your files github and github.pub, like he did. Leave default file names, otherwise it will not work. You do not need a passphrase for now. Leave it blank. (He wants to say thanks to Mislav Marohnić for teaching him all that SSH stuff.)


$ cd .ssh
$ ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/Users/zeljko/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /Users/zeljko/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /Users/zeljko/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.


Now he had id_rsa and id_rsa.pub files. He gave contents of id_rsa.pub to Github. (You should keep your id_rsa as a secret. Never show it to anybody. Not even your best friend. Seriously.)

Now that chain of trust was made, he got the repository to his machine.

git clone git@github.com:zeljkofilipin/watir.git

He saw something like this:

$ git clone git@github.com:zeljkofilipin/watir.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/zeljko/Documents/github/watir/.git/
The authenticity of host 'github.com (65.74.177.129)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 16:27:ac:a5:76:28:2d:36:63:1b:56:4d:eb:df:a6:48.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'github.com,65.74.177.129' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
remote: Counting objects: 13296, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (4837/4837), done.
remote: Total 13296 (delta 8584), reused 11936 (delta 8216)
Receiving objects: 100% (13296/13296), 7.50 MiB | 549 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (8584/8584), done.

He made the changes to the code with NetBeans. That was not such a good idea. But, I will talk about that later.

Then he committed the change to the local repository.

$ cd watir/
$ git add watir/lib/watir/input_elements.rb
$ git commit -m 'Fixed file uploads for IE8'

Finally, he pushed the change back to Github:

git push

He saw something like this:

$ git push
Counting objects: 11, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (6/6), done.
Writing objects: 100% (6/6), 530 bytes, done.
Total 6 (delta 5), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:zeljkofilipin/watir.git
2a244f9..038e96b master -> master

In a blink of eye, he was already at Github looking proudly at his commit.

But, he made one last mistake. (This is the last mistake. I promise. No more mistakes in this story. Enough is enough.) He did not know how to do a diff with Git, and NetBeans messed the whitespace, so his commit was a whitespace mess. Of course, he did not know how to undo. So, he just deleted his local and Github repositories and started over. (He had to wait a bit until he saw fork button again on Bret’s Watir repository.)

This time, he did everything right. After he pushed the change, he was so proud, that he decided to ask Bret Pettichord, the owner of the original Watir repository to merge his change with the original repository. That is called pull request.

Don’t just love happy ends?!

Update: Bret Pettichord points out that instead of deleting local and Github repositories after messing up the whitespace, our hero could undo the change with this:

git reset HEAD~
git push

When I was recording podcasts on Windows XP machine, it was easy to do it using all open source or free software. All you had to do is install Skype (free, voice over Internet), Audacity (open source, audio recording and editing) and play a bit with Windows XP audio settings. To be true, it took me a few podcasts to figure out how to set audio just right, as you will surely notice if you listen to the first few of my podcasts.

A few months ago I got a Mac and I thought it would be as easy to record podcasts there. I was wrong. I have been trying and trying and only a few days ago I was able to record a Skype conversation on Mac.

What was the problem? I installed Skype and Audacity (both have Mac versions) and, to my great surprise, there was no option in Audacity to record both audio from Skype and from my microphone, as there is on Windows XP. I browsed around, tried a bunch of software and could not find anything that would work. At the moment, I think it is the limitation of sound card, but I could be wrong. (I used Boot Camp to install Windows XP on Mac, and could not record all audio even then.)

Then I found a great article, Recording Skype calls on GarageBand with LineIn and SoundFlower (Mac). It showed me that there is a way to record Skype on Mac using only free software. But it got me only 90% of the way. I was able to record both Skype and my audio, but I did not hear Skype audio. Asking a question and not being able to hear the answer is usually a problem in an interview. In the end, I found the solution in article’s comments, but it took me a while (and some luck) to figure out how to fix the problem.

So, how to record a Skype conversation?

Install Soundflower (open source), LineIn (free) and Skype (free).

To record and edit audio, you can use GarageBand (free, I got GarageBand ‘08 with Mac OS X, but you have to pay for GarageBand ‘09) or Audacity (open source).

System Preferences > Sound
– Output: Headphones – Built-in Audio (always use headphones when recording so your microphone does not catch sound from the speakers)
– Input: Internal microphone – Built-in (check ‘Use ambient noise reduction’ and move microphone input volume slider to the right)

Skype > Preferences > Audio
- Audio output: Soundflower (2ch)
- Audio input: Soundflower (2ch)

While configuring Skype for the first use, you should uncheck option that Skype automatically adjusts microphone volume and move the slider to the right, but I can not find that configuration wizard, even after reinstalling.

LineIn
Input from: Build-in Microphone: Internal microphone
Output to: Soundflower (2ch)

GarageBand
Audio output: Built-in Output
Audio Input: Soundflower (2ch)

Create New Podcast Episode > Male/Female Voice > Monitor: On
Make sure you turn monitor “On”, or you will not hear the other person speaking. I heard my voice with about one second delay, so the next time I will try “On with Feedback Protection” instead of “On” setting.

Audacity
Output: Core Audio: Built-in Output
Input: Core Audio: Soundflower (2ch)

Preferences > Audio I/O > Playthrough > Hardware Playthrough: Play new track while recording it > check
With software playthrough I heard my voice with about one second delay, but it was fine with hardware playthrough.

Start Skype conversation and when you want to record, click ‘Pass Thru’ button in LineIn and click record button in GarageBand or Audacity.

Software versions I used:
Mac OS X 10.5.6.
Soundflower 1.4.3
LineIn 2.0.3
GarageBand ‘08 4.1.2 (248.7)
Audacity 1.3.7
Skype 2.8.0.324

The day after Spletne Urice #106 I spent the whole day at Web::INDUSTRIJA 2009, a small trade fair in Zagreb, Croatia.

Nice people from linux.hr got a booth there and asked a few local open source groups if they would like to join them. One of the groups they asked was a group I am member of, ruby-hr (Ruby Croatia).

I planned to be there a few hours, but my boss said it is fine with him if I spend the whole day there, so I went for that option.

There was about ten booths, a pretty small trade fair. Linux.hr team were handing out some Ubuntu CDs, and since I do not know anything else, I was showing people how Watir works. I guess I showed Watir to about 10 people that day. Not bad.

Since Ubuntu has live CD, I tried it on my Mac, and it worked fine. Wireless was not working, and Linux gurus said that Ubuntu probably does not have drivers for my hardware.

There is also a funny story. I was entering the fair and saw a big penguin walking around. Of course, it was one of the linux.hr team, so he approached me and said to follow him to our booth. So, I am walking behind a giant penguin, and at the entrance they ask me if I have a ticket. I said: “I am with the penguin“, and to my surprise they just let me in. I newer thought that knowing a penguin can get you any benefits.

For more information and images, take a look at the article on linux.hr, and there is also a few twitter posts.

At BarCamp Zagreb 2009 after my Watir talk Jure Cuhalev asked me if I will present Watir it in Ljubljana (Slovenia) at Spletne Urice, weekly gathering of Slovenian geeks held in Kiberpipa. Of course, I said: “Yes!”.

Slovenian and Croatian (my mother tongue) are similar, but not similar enough to understand each other, so the talk was in English.

About ten people arrived for the talk, as I expected, but it was a bit more formal that I expected. They pointed reflectors at me, gave me a microphone and said they are recording audio and video, and that there is live video stream. In about a week there should be video file of my talk on their site. As I understood, they also prefer to ask questions at the end of the talk, but I prefer when questions are asked during the talk. It makes it more dynamic. I do not think that the purpose of a talk is to show all slides and say what I prepared, but to answer people’s questions, even if it moved the talk in the direction I did not plan it to go.

I talked a bit about Watir first, and then about Taza, as an example of Watir framework. I chose Taza among other frameworks simply because it had the best documentation.

As I like to do it, most of my talk was live coding. I would like to thank Marko Mrdjenovič for holding the microphone while I was coding. My live coding went pretty well while I was in pure Watir, but when I switched to Taza (I am not really familiar with it) I had some problems. With some luck and help from the audience, I was able to get to the end of my Taza example.

After the talk, I took a look (and a few pictures) at their museum of old computers. Most of them are functional and powered up, as you can see from the pictures. They even have my first computer, Sinclair ZX Spectrum. If you looked really closely, you would see a tear in my eye while I was looking at it. I spent a lot of time playing with it (while I was a kid, not in the museum).

After the museum I joined the rest of the people in a bar where they were drinking beer, but I had to drink tea, because I had to drive for almost two hours to get home. We had a nice but short chat, because it was getting late and I had to head home.

My slides are here:

For my reference, these are links to Spletne Urice #106 at Spletne Urice and Kiberpipa sites.

Update: audio and video of my talk now available at kiberpipa.org.

I few days ago I was at BarCamp Zagreb 2009. I wanted to talk about Taza, “an opinionated browser-based test framework”. I heard about it at AWTA 2009 and I wanted to learn more about it, and giving a talk is a great way to learn. I did not have enough time to prepare my presentation, so I had some broken code even when I got there. I decided to skip a few presentations until I fix it.

I am sorry I skipped Ivica Kartelo talking how he became the most important person in Croatian web industry. I was outside of the room where he had his talk and the people were laughing so loudly I had a hard time concentrating on my broken code.

I fixed the code just in time to see Mislav Marohnić talking how marketing and $$$ are great, but some of us create code. He shared some tools his team uses.

The next slot was marketing talks in both rooms, so I skipped it and tried to concentrate for my talk, because I was next.

The same as at BarCamp Zagreb 2008, I have chosen the smaller room (there were two rooms, smaller and bigger), because I knew there will be just a few people interested in testing and Watir there. To my great disappointment, I was not able to connect my computer to the projector. I moved my presentation to organizers’ computer, but I was not able to show the code and run it. I invited interested to come and see it at my computer, but the time was up. I said I will show them the code and how it runs outside, but then I guess I forgot to do it, because I do not remember showing the code to anybody. Maybe no one was interested.

I do not think my talk made a lot of sense to people. I asked how many were familiar with Ruby or Watir and saw just a few hands. I guess a talk about testing framework would be too much for the crowd like that. I gave my introduction to Watir talk last year, and organizers kindly said it would be better to do something else this year, so I choose Taza. Maybe that was not such a great move.

This is my presentation. I hope I will have some time in the near future and update it with the code.

After my talk two people approached me. Alex (American living in Italy, or Italian living in US, or some other more complicated combination) asked some general questions about Watir, and Jure Čuhalev asked if I would talk about Watir in Ljubljana, Slovenia. That was a surprise. I am all for it! I hope we will be able to arrange it in the next few weeks.

I planned to skip the next slot, because there were again two marketing talks. Also, I got a call from my ruby-hr team to join them for a beer. It was to crowded at their table, so a few of us sat separately and had a nice talk.

After the break I heard Ivan Guštin asking us why didn’t we still switch to Linux desktop. Interesting talk about advantages of Linux desktop. I was using Linux at home for years. Then I got Windows machine from my company. I used that for years. Recently I got a mac from my company. Now I use that. I like open source. I just do not care about operating systems. They are just a tool. I use what I have.

Next I saw Goran Peuc destroying the interface. Interesting talk about good and bad interfaces, and how the interface should be minimal.

Vlatko Kosturjak was talking about Open Web Application Security Project. It is always interesting to hear security ninjas talk.

Zoran Dominković talked about sharing and privacy on the internet. That got me thinking. I share a lot, but I try to keep some privacy. I hope I am choosing the right mixture.

Vlatko Kosturjak talked how he used favicon.ico to get statistical data what software is used on the internet. Very interesting approach.

Stjepan Zlodi was talking about development for small screens. They are gaining popularity because of phones with browsers and netbooks. I have been reading his blog for years. I wanted to introduce myself and just say hi after the talk, but I guess I forgot (the same as the last year).

The last talk was Goran Peuc on banks blocking development of web design. He showed us some horrible internet banking web applications that Croatian banks have. So true. Also, he talked about redesign of insurance site his company just finished.

To sum up, it was great to see some interesting talks, and to talk about Watir once again. Still, networking is the best part of such (un)conferences.

AWTA 2009 was a lot of fun. At Notes from AWTA 2009 you can find a lot of images, notes, podcasts, blog posts, presentations, twitter feed…

It was great to finally meet in person a lot of people I knew on-line for years. I have learned a lot how other people test. Also, Austin and Texas were very interesting to explore. I think all is already said about AWTA 2009. I just hope I will be there the next year too.

AWTA 2009 Sunday

Blogging again!

I had to travel a long way to get to AWTA 2009 in beautiful Austin, Texas.

To see what is going on, the best place is #awta Twitter channel.

I am twittering, posting images, blogging and podcasting like crazy.

AWTA 2009 Friday