The Physicist

Hah! I did it. I totally biked to and from work today without changing to a lower gear (all in 21st gear). Additionally, on the way there I didn't use my hands except for two stoplights. Strong legs. :)

So, we had a physicist come to work today to give a talk on her new book. The talk was pretty good, but unfortunately, since I was really tired, so I fell asleep for part of it. I really need sun glasses. When I ride to work sometimes some small bit of dust will get into my eye, and my eyes will just be tired and messed up all day. Ugh. Frustrating.

We also had some guy come to talk about Chickenfoot. Chickenfoot is perhaps one of my favorite firefox extensions ever. It lets you not only execute arbitrary javascript on the page at hand (any javascript console does this), but it gives you full access to Firefox's DOM as well. You can have it automatically execute when a page finishes loading, then have it execute a series of commands. Not only that, but these commands include things like 'click("search button")' and 'enter("title textbox")' or 'enter("title")' which interact with ui elements just as a user would. You can even write these commands in a more natural-language fasion: "press the search button" "search" "push search" all do the same thing. You never have to look at the page's source at all. All the work is done by algorithms finding things in context. This UI interaction can make unit tests easy to automate on web pages. It can make filling out forms really easy. And it can all be done by non-programmers! Really cool stuff.

Aside: apparently www.myspace.com had gone down earlier this weekend because of their servers getting heat stroke. Stupid global warming. Hehe. Rolling blackouts, here we come!