Windows Automation with Watir and Ruby 1.9.1

We love automation at Spiffy Stores, so with this in mind, I thought I’d alert anyone who uses Ruby under Windows using the Ruby Installer that there are some small bugs that you should be aware of when using Watir.

First off, if you want to interact with dialog boxes, then you will run into problems using Ruby 1.8.7. There is a bug in DL under the mingw32 code that is used to build this version of ruby and this is what Watir uses. It causes a segmentation fault.

So, finding no solution to this problem, I tried to run Watir under ruby 1.9.1, and this is where the fun starts.

If you try to run a Watir script you may get a popup saying that ‘msvcrt-ruby18.dll’ can’t be found. Strange, I thought we were running 1.9.1.

It turns out the the default gem installation of win32-api comes preconfigured for Ruby 1.8, hence the popup.

The way around this problem is to install the gem manually and specify the platform as ruby and force the gem to be rebuilt when it’s installed. You’ll need the Ruby Installer DevKit installed to do this.

gem install win32-api –platform ruby

Just one of those little quirks that keep us scratching our heads.

Is Australia Post run by Amateurs?

Ok, this is getting silly.

Australia Post provides a copy of their Postcode database, which we use to validate shipping addresses in our software.

This database is automatically refreshed on a weekly basis from the data that Australia Post provide on their web site. A couple of weeks ago, this data got corrupted as someone had inserted random blank lines into the CSV file. Not a good look. Of course the database load failed and the postcodes table was wiped out.

Fortunately, we have checks planted into the system, so we picked up the problem pretty quickly and restored a copy of the database from a backup. No big problem.

Today, we received a complaint that customers in the Northern Territory were having problems entering thier postcodes, which all start with zero.

It didn’t take long to discover that the brains trust at Australia Post central have decided to encode the normal 4 digit postcodes beginning with a zero as 3 digit entries. Thus, the postcode ’0810′ is now stored in the database as ’810′.

Now this strikes me as being a bit like amateur hour. Do these people know nothing about quality control or testing? We’re not talking about a small corner-shop operation here, but a large government organization responsible for providing a national service. Other people’s businesses actually depend upon this stuff.

So I thought, maybe I should see if there’s anywhere that I can complain about this latest problem. So off the the Australia Post web site I go and guess what????

“Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.”

The web site is down. On a Friday evening. Just when everyone has gone home. I wonder if it will be back by Monday?

Mmmmm…..

I rest my case.

First-class morons.

Update:

Optimistically, I sent in a report on the bug using their contact form. Needless to say, I have yet to receive any communication from them. I guess their response is “in the mail”.

Further Update (29th April, 2010):

How good is this? What a class operation. Over a month now, and no sign of a reply. And of course the database is still broken.

Trying out some Social Media

Well, the new Google Buzz is out, so I decided to give it a whirl.

http://www.google.com/profiles/eastsydneyboy

I might try to use it to keep everyone up to date with what’s happening in the Spiffy Stores world.

We hit a bit of a milestone yesterday as I finally finished the last of the pages in the new interface. So now it’s just a matter of tidying up some minor bits and pieces and then we can launch the new version in a couple of weeks.

Been Busy

I’ve not had much time to myself  lately, as we push ahead with the final phases of the Spiffy Stores development.

It’s almost done and we should be launching early in the new year. I’m just finishing up the account management functions so that we can manage our stores, but everything else is now finished.

We do have an early release Beta version available, and this has been up and running for over two years now and it’s fully functional. It’s just missing a bit of the icing that will see daylight when we launch the product.

You can get a taste of it here

http://spiffystores.com.au/

SBS Hall of Shame

This is just a quick post to highlight the recent degradation of SBS’s SD transmissions…

Here’s what it looked like on 30th March, 2009.

Shameless SBS 30-03-09

Now here’s what happened on 20th April, 2009

Shameless SBS 20-04-09 Interlace Problem

The main problem here is that SBS is transmitting the interlaced fields offset by 1, which means the two non-movement fields are on adjacent frames and not on the same frame as they should be.

We can fix that, and this is what we get…

Shameless SBS 20-04-09 Interlace Problem Fixed

Notice how the image is much blockier than the top image?

Update: 29/04/2009

The incorrect interlacing problem was not present in the Shameless episode this week, but the macro blocking is still hideous.

SBS Shameless 27-04-09