The audience just before my talk. (DORS/CLUC 2013 photo gallery hosted at Wikimedia Commons.)

Yesterday I gave How MediaWiki, software that runs Wikipedia, is tested talk at DORS/CLUC 2013 conference. The talk consisted of a few parts, each lasting a few minutes.

Part One

A few words about myself. I have showed this web site, contact page and DORS/CLUC 2013 article (I was liveblogging).

Part Two

Short version of Quim Gil’s How to hack on Wikipedia talk (sources: FOSDEM 2013, MediaWiki).

Part Three

Short Selenium + Ruby live coding demo. The example at the talk was slightly different.

I have first opened a test site manually, clicked Print/export link (sidebar at the left hand side) so Download as PDF link appears. I have then click Download as PDF link and showed that Download the file link should appear (after a while) at the page that opens.

Next we did the same with Selenium. I like irb for live coding, so the first step is to open it.

$ irb

I like Watir API better than the official Selenium Ruby bindings (selenium-webdriver gem) so the examples use watir-webdriver gem.

> require "watir-webdriver"
=> true 

Open Firefox browser.

> browser = Watir::Browser.new :firefox
=> #<Watir::Browser:0x..fb91ac5c833bf0a86 url="about:blank" title=""> 

Go to the test site.

> browser.goto "http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/"
=> "http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page"

Click Print/export and Download as PDF links.

> browser.a(text: "Print/export").click
=> [] 

> browser.a(text: "Download as PDF").click
=> [] 

Check if Download the file link appeared.

> browser.a(text: "Download the file").exists?
=> true 

Close the browser.

> browser.close
=> true 

Now, do the same thing in Chrome, just because we can.

> browser = Watir::Browser.new :chrome
=> #<Watir::Browser:0x..f91396bcbed26c69e url="about:blank" title="about:blank"> 

> browser.goto "http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/"
=> "http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page"

> browser.a(text: "Print/export").click
=> [] 

> browser.a(text: "Download as PDF").click
=> [] 

> browser.a(text: "Download the file").exists?
=> true 

> browser.close
=> true 

Please notice that except the line that opens the browser, everything else is the same.

Just for fun, let’s do the same thing in PhantomJS.

> browser = Watir::Browser.new :phantomjs
=> #<Watir::Browser:0x..fbff7276034352be4 url="about:blank" title="">

> browser.goto "http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/"
=> "http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page"

> browser.a(text: "Print/export").click
=> [] 

> browser.a(text: "Download as PDF").click
=> [] 

> browser.a(text: "Download the file").exists?
=> true 

Before closing the browser, let’s take a screenshot. Screenshot of a headless browser? There is a joke here somewhere. If only I could find it.

> browser.screenshot.save "phantomjs.png"
 => #<File:phantomjs.png (closed)>

> browser.close
=> true 

PhantomJS screenshot

It would be crazy to type this stuff all the time, so let’s create a script that we can just run. I have executed Click on Download as PDF link scenario.

From pdf_readonly.feature file.

Scenario: Click on Download as PDF link
  Given I am at random page
  When I click on Download as PDF
  Then Download the file link should be present

The scenario failed.

$ bundle exec cucumber features/pdf_readonly.feature:9
Using the default profile...
..F

(::) failed steps (::)

timed out after 15 seconds, waiting for {:text=>"Download the file", :tag_name=>"a"} to become present (Watir::Wait::TimeoutError)
./features/step_definitions/pdf_steps.rb:15:in `block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'
./features/step_definitions/pdf_steps.rb:14:in `/^Download the file link should be present$/'
features/pdf_readonly.feature:12:in `Then Download the file link should be present'

Failing Scenarios:
cucumber features/pdf_readonly.feature:9 # Scenario: Click on Download as PDF link

1 scenario (1 failed)
3 steps (1 failed, 2 passed)
0m48.241s

The problem is that the test waits 15 seconds for Download the file link to appear, and sometimes it takes longer. This time it took longer and the test failed.

Part Four

A short overview of the complete browser test automation solution that we have developed. The code is hosted at Gerrit (qa/browsertests) and there is Github mirror (wikimedia/qa-browsertests).

We use RVM to manage Ruby versions and gemsets.

.ruby-version file.

ruby-2.0.0-p0

.ruby-gemset file.

browsertests

We use Bundler to manage project dependencies.

Gemfile file.

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'chunky_png'
gem 'cucumber'
gem 'net-http-persistent'
gem 'page-object'
gem 'parallel_tests'
gem 'rake'
gem 'rspec-expectations'
gem 'syntax'

From Gemfile.lock file.

GEM
  remote: https://rubygems.org/
  specs:
    builder (3.2.0)
    childprocess (0.3.9)
      ffi (~> 1.0, >= 1.0.11)
    chunky_png (1.2.8)
    cucumber (1.3.1)
      builder (>= 2.1.2)
      diff-lcs (>= 1.1.3)
      gherkin (~> 2.12.0)
      multi_json (~> 1.3)

...

PLATFORMS
  ruby
  x86-mingw32

DEPENDENCIES
  chunky_png
  cucumber
  net-http-persistent
  page-object
  parallel_tests
  rake
  rspec-expectations
  syntax

We use Cucumber (features folder) as a tool for communication between people that know what needs to be tested and people that know how to write browser test automation code. Cucumber is one of the really important tools in our toolchain.

I have showed Cucumber code for Click on Download as PDF link scenario.

From pdf_readonly.feature file.

Scenario: Click on Download as PDF link
  Given I am at random page
  When I click on Download as PDF
  Then Download the file link should be present

Then I showed how Given I am at random page step is implemented.

From search_steps.rb file.

Given /^I am at random page$/ do
  visit RandomPage
end

As you can see, the implementation is trivial. RandomPage is also pretty simple.

From random_page.rb file.

class RandomPage
  include PageObject

  include URL
  page_url URL.url('Special:Random')

...

end

URL module is simple too.

url_module.rb file.

module URL
  def self.url(name)
    if ENV['MEDIAWIKI_URL']
      mediawiki_url = ENV['MEDIAWIKI_URL']
    else
      mediawiki_url = 'http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/'
    end
    "#{mediawiki_url}#{name}"
  end
end

I have explained that we use the Page Object pattern and page-object gem. Page object pattern is another important tool. It allows us to write maintainable code.

A slightly more complicated step is When I click on Download as PDF (feature file, step file).

From step file.

When(/^I click on Download as PDF$/) do
  @browser.driver.manage.add_cookie(:name => 'vector-nav-p-coll-print_export', :value => 'true')
  @browser.driver.navigate.refresh
  on(RandomPage).download_as_pdf
end

From page file.

class RandomPage
  include PageObject

  include URL
  page_url URL.url('Special:Random')

...

  a(:download_as_pdf, text: 'Download as PDF')

...

end

We use Jenkins continuous integration server. It is also one of the important tools. Jenkins that runs our browser test automation is hosted by CloudBees at wmf.ci.cloudbees.com.

I have showed a job that is sometimes failing because of the timeout problem that I have mentioned previously. I have showed a couple of nice Jenkins features, Test Result Trend chart and Build Time Trend chart.

Test Result Trend

Build Time Trend

Then I showed a build that failed and test results saying timed out after 15 seconds, waiting for {:text=>"Download the file", :tag_name=>"a"} to become present.

I have ended the talk with showing Sauce Labs (Selenium in the cloud) job for the failed Jenkins job. Sauce Labs job has logs, screens shots and video of the entire test.

Part Five

There were a few questions from the audience, and I did my best to answer them.

Part Six

At the next break I was handing out t-shirts, pens, stickers, badges and talking with people about my talk and related things.

I think this is the first time I am doing live blogging. I am at DORS/CLUC 2013 conference. Coming to the conference, I was reminded how much I enjoy working from home. I have spent half an hour in a bus that was slowly crawling through the rush hour.

I got conference badge and a bag of marketing material that I will recycle as soon as possible. The t-shirt looks nice but low quality. I have found a nice place to sit with power cord nearby (there is really a lot of power cords around) and started the day. Looks like the venue has only open wireless so I have decided to use wireless tethering from my phone.

The conference is single track, my preferred number of tracks. I was surprised to see that there are no pauses between most of the talks. From my experience, there should be at least 5 minutes between talks.

President of Croatia, Ivo Josipovic. (DORS/CLUC 2013 photo gallery hosted at Wikimedia Commons.)

This is 20th DORS/CLUC, so even the president of Croatia arrived. I do not usually go to conferences with such high profile guests. I have noticed unusual amount of the police outside of the conference venue. I even got my backpack checked when entering the conference room.

Introductions

The conference started with a few short talks from conference organisers. More interesting than I have expected. It was funny to hear everybody thanking the president for coming. I am really not used to such things.

The president had a really short and interesting talk, noticing a lot of people wearing jeans in the audience. He gave Open informatics award to Linux Za Sve (Linux for everybody) site. He left shortly after so the conference will probably continue in the usual casual way.

Karel De Vriendt: Interoperability, Enterprise Architecture and Public Procurement

Nothing much to say about it. It was not boring, but it was not really interesting to me too. Too long for my taste.

Darko Paric, Kristijan Zimmer: About work group for open source and open standards implementation

About the situation in the government. Looks like things are moving. They are implementing something similar to GOV.UK. Pilot projects for the future are increased usage of Open Document Format, moving to open solutions in general, translations of free software and similar.

Really interesting question from the audience came about the domain gov.hr. “gov” is the first three letters of Croatian word “govno”, shit. The answer was that it would be even funnier if the domain was gov.no. There were other really good questions, but unfortunately there was little time for the answers.

As I suspected, not having any buffer between talks lead to delays, about 30 minutes. There goes coffee break. I do not drink coffee, but I do need a break. I am not used to sitting still for such long time. There was time for a short break, after all.

Karsten Gerloff (Free Software Foundation Europe): All watched over by machines of loving grace?

He started with reading a poem. A thought he mentioned a few times during his talk is: general purpose computer is one that can do things it was not designed to do. He talked a lot about freedom and ended it saying: “Take the power back!”

Matija Šuklje (Free Software Foundation Europe): FSFE Legal and the Legal Network: what we do and how we can help you

He had a really short introduction on what they do and then started taking questions.

One of the questions was: “I wrote some code and put it on Github, what do I need to do to make it open source?” If you do not have any license, by default it is copyrighted. Just adding a license file could be enough, but it would be better to have a short comment at the top of every file pointing to the license.

Comment from the audience: “There are a lot of open source licenses, about 200.” There are even a few funny ones, like WTFPL or Chicken Dance License. A lot of licenses are there for historic reasons, or because every project or company wanted to have a license, just because they could.

“What to do if somebody violates your open source lincese?” If you have used BSD or MIT license, there is nothing to do. If you have used a stronger license, you can go to court with copyright violation. Good thing would be to stick with a license that is already tested in court, like GPL. FSFE can help you find a lawyer. Really interesting discussion.

Marko Rakar (Association Windmill): Two times more in a half of a less in public IT

Marko Rakar (DORS/CLUC 2013 photo gallery hosted at Wikimedia Commons.)

I was really looking forward to the talk. He talked about the state of hardware and software in our government and how he managed to decrease the number of servers in a ministry server room from 50 to 4. It could be further reduced to 2 with OS upgrade. Another story was about configuring multi purpose machine to scan papers and send them via e-mail. Yet another story was about JOPPD form. It would simplify calculating taxes, making life simpler. The problem is that different government agencies never really collaborated, and it is hard for them to start doing it now. He mentioned software written in seventies that is still in use today and nobody dares to touch it, of course. The theme of the talk was how to do more with less, something that everybody is looking for.

Because the digital certificate law was written by translating it from German, a mistake was made during the translation and as a consequence no digital certificates are valid in Croatia. It should be fixed soon, or it is already fixed, I am not sure.

There was a question would there be an API for JOPPD form? The answer was no. Marko continued talking about APIs and problems with implementing them in the government.

Lightning talks – free and open source communities in Croatia

After lunch the conference continued with lightning talks presenting smaller local open source communities: Linux Za Sve (leading local Linux portal), Slobodan softver Hrvatska (free software Croatia), SOK (sustavi otvorenog koda, open source systems), OpenStreetMap Croatia, Ubuntu-hr, Blender.hr. Nobody came from Sinbad and Drupal groups (and I could not find their sites).

Round table: “Internet of things”

Round table. (DORS/CLUC 2013 photo gallery hosted at Wikimedia Commons.)

Moderator (Milan Rajacic, HULK) said the trend is to connect everything to the internet. The number of machines connected to the internet is bigger than number of people at the planet. That was in 2008, by he way. The number is way bigger now. The first panelist (I have forgot the name) talked about the cost, benefits, ease of use and drawbacks (loss of privacy, for example) of everything being connected. The internet of things is already here, he said.

The second panelist, Dobrica Pavlinusic, talked about hardware, Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, Cubieboard and Arduino.

The next panelist, Robert Sedak, talked about Arduino and how to develop code for it. There is a GUI that is simple enough that kids could learn how to write code for traffic light in about an hour. Impressive. He also mentioned Arduino designed in Croatia, Croduino.

Somebody from the audience asked about robot kits and the panelists have mentioned multiplo, Seeed Studio and LEGO.com MINDSTORMS.

The final panelist (lost the name again, sorry) talked about Zipato smart home control, the idea, the implementation and how to use it. They also have GUI language inspired (or based on) Scratch. Dobrica asked about the problems and challenges. The biggest hardware problem is lack of production of hardware in Croatia and in the near. It is faster and cheaper to get the hardware from China.

During the break I have tested connecting my laptop to the projector. I have a talk tomorrow, so I wanted to make sure there are no technical problems.

Ivan Turcin (IBM): 4987 days after – Consolidation regardless on IT infrastructure size

I think this was the only sponsored talk. He talked about System z and Linux on System z. He tried to convince the audience that IBM solutions are actually cheaper. I have no idea how such big projects work, but I could hear people sitting around me saying they are not convinced.

Zoran Babic and Mila Kokotovic: Teachers’ and students’ digital competencies development project, first results

The project is about teaching kids in school how to use open source software. Both kids and their parents loved the pilot projects during Christmas and spring break.

Zlatko Papeš: Open healthcare in Croatia

He talked about using open source software in healthcare.

Andrej Dundovic: Crisium Code – free software in tourism promotion.

As far as I understood it, it is Python web application that generates QR codes.

Samuel Picek: Multipoint WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication)

He started the talk with showing a video stream of audience. He explained problems and solutions trying to implement something like Google Hangout. The question from the audience was is it supported in browsers. It is supported in Chrome (and it has a lot of market share). It should be implemented in all major browsers by the end of the year. Really interesting talk.

Alex Malinovich (GitHub): GitHub – About company and selling to tradional companies.

I am not sure if there is a bug in the schedule, or the talk is really 60 minutes. I think that is the longest talk of the day. He said a few sentences in Serbian and then switched to English. The talk is about GitHub Enterprise. GitHub Enterprise uses the same code base as GitHub.com. They take dogfooding really seriously. Not only they use GitHub every day, but every GitHub developer has to pay for GitHub every month (micro plan, $7/month). It is a way of testing the billing. The talk was about selling GitHub Enterprise. It was more interesting than I would expect from a sales focused talk. Then he talked about how to apply the lessons they have learned selling GitHub Enterprise to selling your own product.

Igor Švarc (FOI): Accessibility revisited – new interfaces and new challenges

The last talk. Igor is blind. I think this is the first time I have listened to a talk given by a blind person. I am not sure why he had the talk in English, since he is Croatian, but his English was good enough so that was not a problem.

He started by talking about accessibility (or a11y) in general. He mentioned screen readers, speech synthesizers, braille displays. Then he talked about Linux a11y: AT-SPI, Orca, Speakup, eSpeak, Festival, SpeechHub, MBROLA and BRLTTY. Accessible Linux desktops are GNOME (GNOME 2 was accessible, but GNOME 3 was not until GNOME 3.4), Unity, Xfce, LXDE and Enlightenment. Linux distributions targeted to blind people are Vinux and Sonar. Mainstream distributions that care about a11y are openSUSE, Fedora and Arch.

A question from the audience was: “Is Linux more or less accessible than other operating systems?” Linux, Windows and Mac OS all rely on their accessibility platforms. Mac OS has accessibility built in. There was a question: “Are web sites accessible?” I have asked if he can work on a computer by himself, or does he need help in everyday tasks. (I was surprisingly nervous when asking the question. I felt my hart pounding like crazy. It will be fun giving the talk tomorrow.) Unfortunately, none of the answers were clear to me. I do not think he answered any of the questions.

Day Two

Branko Radojevic’s talk from backstage. (DORS/CLUC 2013 photo gallery hosted at Wikimedia Commons.)

A slightly smaller room today.

Karsten Gerloff (Free Software Foundation Europe): Breaking chains, building bridges: The Free Software Foundation Europe

What does The Free Software Foundation Europe do? Public awareness projects, like running campaigns: Document Freedom Day, Free Your Android!, PDFreaders.org; talks on software patents, competition (making sure that free software projects can compete in the market), open standards, public procurement… Need legal help? Developers of free software get legal advice for free.

The last part of the talk was brainstorming with the audience on main issues for Free Software in Croatia. Some identified issues were: funding for projects, support, education, trust in Free Software licenses & help with licensing, awareness of Free Software, procurement: procurers believe that proprietary solutions are cheaper than Free Software.

Ivo Lukac (NetGen): Building a successful Enterprise Opensource product: eZ Publish CMS as an example

Not all software that we need today could be written for free (as in beer), since we need a lot of software. Somebody needs to earn money making open source software. There are a few big companies that earn money on open source, for example Red Hat and Automattic. He also talked about eZ Publish CMS and it’s history. It has community and enterprise versions. 90% of the revenue comes from enterprise subscriptions. There is also an active community.

Should you release your core software as open source or not? It is a hard decision to make, especially if you want to earn money selling it. There are severals risks: forks, commoditization, conflict with implementation partners, license risks. If you can not build the community, then there is no point in open sourcing a piece of software. Good documentation is crucial. The project should be developed at consistent pace. Partners need to have good incentive to be a sales channel and/or contribute back.

Nikola Stjelja (Penta Id Sistemi): Opensource in the .NET ecosystem

Nikola was not there (strange, right?) so we had a long break.

Bojan Mrkobrad (Altus-IT): MooseFS – Distributed file system

Altus-IT is leading data center in Croatia. They also provide cloud services. For cloud they use KVM, VMware, MooseFS… He talked how MooseFS is implemented in general and how they use it. Mostly boring.

Igor Vuk, Vedran Živicnjak (Nimium): Red Hat storage

Igor Vuk started the talk. Red Hat storage is scale-out storage (as opposed to scale-up storage). It is used for private, public and hybrid cloud. It is used for unstructured and semi structured data (multimedia, backup, file sharing…). One of the technologies it uses is GlusterFS distributed file system. It’s components are node, brick and volume.

Vedran Živicnjak continued the talk. The underlying operating system is Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®. He showed how to use Red Hat storage from the command line and using RHS Console. Supported hardware is the usual commodity hardware. Companies that use RHS: Pandora (redirects me to pandora.com/restricted ), Brightcove and NASA – Mars Science Laboratory, the Next Mars Rover.

Nenad Merdanovic (Crossvallia): MySQL cluster is web scale

He explained how MySQL cluster works, and mentioned where it works the same as MySQL and where it works differently. The documentation says one billion transactions per second, but his experience is that the performance is not so good. The conclusion was “one does not simply scale writes”. His experience with MySQL cluster were bad, there were a lot of problems.

Similar product is Postgres-XC but it works as bad as MySQL cluster. Another one is Percona XtraDB Cluster (Galera). This one could be useful.

Conclusion: If you are a sysadmin, you should not be doing databases. If you are a database administrator, do not even think about this. If you are a programmer, you do not know shit about database design. Read the documentation, think and use Percona/MariaDB.

Branko Radojevic (CARNet): Sys.backup – centralized open source backup system for CARNet’s members

He started by asking do we need backup at all. He split the users into three groups, end users (that use Facebook, Dropbox, Google Drive…), cloud providers (they should take care of our data, we are not sure if the data is safe there, how private it is) and traditional users (non cloud users, companies, they have to take care of their data). Carnet is between cloud provider and traditional users, and their users are traditional users.

It all started in 1992 with the first internet connections (gopher, e-mail). The amount of data was small and the data was not really important. In 1994 carnet pushes institutions towards internet usage (web, e-mail). The first servers are ordered. In 1997 the usage of internet services increased. Carnet acquires servers for itself and other institutions. The backup was on tape. There was no automatization, everything was manual. Today all institutions have they own commodity hardware.

They use IBM hardware and Bacula open source software. The data center is in Osijek, since earthquakes are rare there. The data is stored in the central location, it is encrypted and the user has the only key. They do backup for 51 server and they host about 3 TB of data. They use CARNet Debian distribution.

Željko Filipin (Wikimedia Foundation Inc.): How MediaWiki, software that runs Wikipedia, is tested

The audience just before my talk. (DORS/CLUC 2013 photo gallery hosted at Wikimedia Commons.)

I was pretty happy with my talk, I have covered almost everything I wanted to say, but it was ten minutes too long. I have to practice more. Surprisingly, compared to yesterday when I just asked a question, I was less nervous during the talk. I have wrote a blog post documenting the talk.

Hrvoje Matijakovic (Percona): How to solve MySQL problems with 5 Percona Toolkit tools

The talk title says it all. And I needed a few minutes to recover from my talk. (And to upload the first photos today.)

Jakov Šošic (SRCE): Puppet – resource management automation

Automatisation is replacing human labor with automated systems. People do not like to do the same thing over and over, not to mention that we are all somewhat lazy. In the past, the majority of the people were working on the land, then introduced animals and then machines.

Two types of computer automation: pull (Puppet, Chef, Cfengine) and push (MCollective, Capistrano, c3-powertools). Puppet has big user base. It is doing configuration management. He showed and example file and package definition. What Puppet can help you with? To install and configure a service, to install LAMP stack, server reinstallation, server documentation… There are problems in introducing Puppet. The bigest one is that people do not want to learn a new tool, the price for initial implementation is high, it is hard to implement it in heterogeneous environment, security (if master server is compromised, for example).

Puppet script is about 3 times longer to develop than doing the same task manually, but in the long run it saves the time.

Marian Marinov (1H Ltd.): Automate your car and home with open source

During the pause and this talk I was handing out t-shirts, pens, stickers, badges and talking with people about my talk and related things. Marian drove for 8 hours from Bulgaria to give the talk. He got probably the biggest applause. Unfortunately, I have missed almost the entire talk.

Dobrica Pavlinušic (HULK): GNU/Linux on ARM for 50-100 USD

Dobrica always has interesting talks. I was looking forward to it. He usually talks about hardware, not my favorite topic, but he is really good speaker. The goal of the talk is to get unbrickable device that you can install a normal Linux distribution on. He mentioned Raspberry Pi ($35), Cubieboard ($55), MK808 ($42), GK802 ($89) and UDOO ($109/$129).

Vlatko Košturjak (Diverto/HULK): Opening closed code

People push source code to web sites by mistake. It is easy to find such repositories using Google. He mentioned a few tools that could help you, DVCS-Pillage and his tool dvcs-ripper.

Tonimir Kišasondi (Faculty of organization and informatics): Security tips and tricks, part 0×01

The last talk of the day and the last talk of the conference. The talk started with Advanced persistent threat (APT). You should tighten up your attack surface. Trends: automated scanners / script kiddie hack tools keep getting better and more effective, and there is black market for it. He suggested to disable Java and mentioned istherejava0day.com, but java-0day.com looks interesting too.

Time to patch a server is 48 days for internal servers, 19 days for external servers. He mentioned Linux/Cdorked.A.

Tips: do not wait for compromise to happen (prepare for the worst: backup, backup, backup…); Use rootkit detectors rkhunter and chrootkit (monitor the logs); password security is important, ssh keys for remote logins are better than username/password; Fail2ban, Sshguard.

Attacks are getting more and more targeted.

Good baselines are Information Assurance Guidance – NSA/CSS, OWASP, CIS Security Benchmarks, Google is your friend.

He ended the talk saying we should educate yourself and your users, prepare your systems.

Random photo: One Does Not Simply Get a Tour of 21st Amendment Brewery

Recently I have shared code how to set up a custom profile for local Firefox and Chrome. Then I tried to do the same for remote Firefox and Chrome. As usual, I had no problems with Firefox, but Chrome was significantly harder.

After reading the documentation and source code, contacting Sauce Labs support, asking at watir-general, selenium-users and Stack Overflow, offering maximum bounty for the question (500 reputation) and poking Jari on Twitter, I got the answer. Jari, thanks again.

Firefox:

require "watir-webdriver"

profile = Selenium::WebDriver::Firefox::Profile.new
profile["intl.accept_languages"] = "de"

caps = Selenium::WebDriver::Remote::Capabilities.firefox(firefox_profile: profile)
caps.platform = "Linux"
caps.version = 20

browser = Watir::Browser.new(
  :remote,
  url: "http://USERNAME:ACCESS-KEY@ondemand.saucelabs.com:80/wd/hub",
  desired_capabilities: caps)

browser.goto "http://sandbox.translatewiki.net/"

Chrome:

require "watir-webdriver"

profile = Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Profile.new
profile["intl.accept_languages"] = "de"

caps = Selenium::WebDriver::Remote::Capabilities.chrome("chrome.profile" => profile.as_json['zip'])
caps.platform = "Linux"
caps.version = ""

browser = Watir::Browser.new(
    :remote,
    url: "http://USERNAME:ACCESS-KEY@ondemand.saucelabs.com:80/wd/hub",
    desired_capabilities: caps)

browser.goto "http://sandbox.translatewiki.net/"

Tech

I have atended a lot of meetings, paired with people, attended meetups… For example, I was in the office while they were recording VisualEditor video (photo).

The first meetup I attended was Discussion about English Wikipedia Dispute Resolution with Steven Zhang (photo).

Another one was Wikimedia & wikiHow mobile updates (photos). Chris McMahon and I had one minute talk about browser automation. We start at 46:44.

Chris and I had a bit longer talk about browser automation at a Wikimedia Open Tech Chat (photos). We talk for the first 14 minutes.

I was at Tales From the Selenium Testing Trenches meetup organised by San Francisco Selenium Meetup Group at Lookout Mobile Security office. At the meetup I have met R. Tyler Croy, organiser of Testing and Automation devroom at FOSDEM 2013. He works at Lookout Mobile Security, so he gave me a short tour around the office before the meetup.

After the meetup I had a beer or two with a few people, including Chris and Michael Larsen. Michael wrote “…and Those Automated Browser Tests Totally Saved My Ass!” blog post the next day.

Chris and I had dinner first with Elisabeth Hendrickson and then with Marlena Compton, both of Pivotal Labs. Marlena invited us to breakfast at Pivotal Labs, so we visited their San Francisco office.

Beer

I was sampling beer (21st Amendment Brewery, ThirstyBear Brewing Company, Magnolia Gastropub and Brewery, Toronado Pub, to mention a few). I was able to get a short tour of 21st Amendment Brewery (photos). I also visited San Francisco Brewcraft brewshop (photo).

Sightseeing

I also did some sightseeing. One day I walked to Fishermans Wharf (photo). I tried getting to Alcatraz but it was sold out. This photo shows the closest I was to it. I stumbled at California sea lions at PIER 39 (photo), Musee Mecanique (photo) and Chinese New Year Parade. The Old Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception (photo) was was near my hotel, so I have visited it. Can you tell from the photo that it is in Chinatown? One day I have rented a bike and had a nice ride to the Golden Gate Bridge (photo) and back.

The photo leads to gallery hosted at Wikimedia Commons.

Yesterday I was at Zagreb STC MeetUp #10. This is the first time the meetup was at ZIP.Factory. We had the first international speaker, Gojko Adzic. Gojko had an hour long talk and then we had an hour or two of discussion. The talk mentioned impact mapping and MindMup, among other things.

Before the meetup, Karlo and I picked up Gojko at the airport and gave him a short tour around downtown Zagreb. After the meetup we drove him to Tuhelj. He had a talk at Agile Adria conference earlier today.

I am really happy to say that our small library continues. The books were returned and loaned.

Update: Karlo wrote about Zagreb STC MeetUp #10 in more detail.

Random photo: Spring in Zagreb, Croatia.

This will open sandbox.translatewiki.net in English using Firefox. The top link at the left hand side will be Main page.

require "watir-webdriver"
browser = Watir::Browser.new :firefox
browser.goto "http://sandbox.translatewiki.net/"

This will open the same page in the same browser, but in German. The link will be Hauptseite.

require "watir-webdriver"
profile = Selenium::WebDriver::Firefox::Profile.new
profile["intl.accept_languages"] = "de"
browser = Watir::Browser.new :firefox, :profile => profile
browser.goto "http://sandbox.translatewiki.net/"

I want to open the site in German using Chrome. I was able to find the solution using Watir documentation on Chrome and Chromium source code. Now that I look at it, the solution is trivial and really similar to Firefox.

require "watir-webdriver"
profile = Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Profile.new
profile["intl.accept_languages"] = "de"
browser = Watir::Browser.new :chrome, :profile => profile
browser.goto "http://sandbox.translatewiki.net/"

A few days ago I was at a merged meetup of a couple of local groups: JS Zgb drinkup #2 + Ruby on Beers. As the name suggests, the venue was local Pivnica Medvedgrad brewpub. It was nice to see familiar faces again and talk about JavaScript, Ruby, Selenium, testing, Ruby, working from home and life in general.

The next local meetup is Zagreb STC #10 with Gojko Adzic! See you there.

In early February I was at FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium. Since I am writing about it now, you can imagine how much I remember. I have some notes and I took photos so I will be able to write at least a few words.

The trip started at Zagreb airport where I have met Vlatko Košturjak so I was not travelling alone. Since we arrived on Friday, we have decided to go to Friday beer event, but it was way to crowded. Luckily, there were plenty of places in the near with beer.

I have started the Saturday with How we made the Jenkins community keynote by Kohsuke Kawaguchi (photo). I have spent the vast majority of the first day in Testing and Automation devroom. The first talk I saw there was Automating OpenStack Testing on Ubuntu by James Page. The room was surprisingly full for this talk (photo). It was followed by BDD for Mobile using Calabash by Karl Krukow (photo).

Then I gave How MediaWiki, software that runs Wikipedia, is tested talk (photo). I have noticed the talk mentioned in Fosdem 2013, coté code blog post (in French).

The next talk that I saw was Scale your Jenkins build pipeline automatically to minimize test time by Anders Nickelsen (photo). My notes say I was also at Building, testing and deploying mobile apps with Jenkins & friends by Christopher Orr, but I could not find any photos. The last event in the room was Jenkins Developer Meetup and Birthday Toast by Kohsuke Kawaguchi (photos).

All talks from the devroom were recorded, but unfortunately the laptop that had the recordings was stolen.

I have ended the Saturday with ByteNight (photo).

I have started the Sunday with Measuring the Wikipedia Community talk by my colleague Ryan Faulkner (photo). I also saw How to hack on Wikipedia talk by another colleague, Quim Gil and Has the GNOME community gone crazy? by Vincent Untz (photo).

The majority of the Sunday I was browsing the stands. The most interesting ones were Aldebaran Robotics (photo) and Pandora (photo).

We also had Wikimedia meetup (photos), where I have met a lot of my colleagues for the first time. (I work from home.)

I have finished the day with The Keeper of Secrets keynote by Leslie Hawthorn and Closing FOSDEM 2013 talk by FOSDEM Staff (photo). Since the event is completely free (as in free beer) they do not know the number of people that was there, but if I remember correctly the estimate was about 7000.

And for the end, looks like I am not the only one that finds little boy peeing (into the bottle?) on a Coke machine funny. I hope somebody got promoted for that.

Zagreb STC MeetUp #8

I am really sad that I failed to write anything about Zagreb STC MeetUp #8 and #9. Karlo wrote reports for both events, so if you want to read a few words about the events, read his blog posts. I did take a few photos and I wanted to share them.

Zagreb STC MeetUp #9

I have heard about Zero Day and Trojan Horse novels by Mark Russinovich at Security Now podcast. Steve has recommended the book several times. Mark appeared as a guest at episode 370 of the podcast.

I have “gently” mentioned to my wife that I would like to read the books, so I got them as a present. I have read both books and I have really liked them. I will not go into a lot of detail, but both books talk about what could happen if somebody really wanted to take advantage of problems in contemporary software. I would recommend both books. On the podcast, Mark mentioned he is writing the third book. I am looking forward to reading it.