We survived. I was a bit nervous about driving in the UK but it went pretty well. Dóra did very well as a navigator and she had to tell me to drive on left side instead of right side only once. No accidents caused and close calls do not matter.

Moving itself was nothing special, just a matter of elbow grease. It was pretty straightforward this time as we moved between furnished flats in the same country. No overweight fees nor pulling suitcases through the city happened this time.

On the way back we drove along Fife coastal path (road A921) which took us through many small towns like Kinghorn and Burntisland. The downside was that the road was rather narrow and there was usually just a stone wall or thick bushes next to the road shoulder. For some reason the car rental upgraded the van from small VW Caddy to bigger Ford Transit for free. This was nice but it caused me more headache on those tight bends on the narrow road. But that is just matter of practice.

Tomorrow we will load a small van with our belongings and drive to Kirkcaldy. Yep, it is time to move again. I will keep working in Edinburgh but Dóra's studies start in Dundee so this location is a bit more reasonable. We'll see how life in Kirkcaldy looks like...

I ended up on the website of Expat Software and my first thought was how come they managed to hide from me this far. They have some cool applications like twiddla but the main point is that these guys are location independent. They seem to be doing fine having a branch at Chamonix for example. That sounds much better than a cubicle, right?

This is not the first company being location independent but this one is distributed over continents. Previously I have blogged about Artlogic but in their case they seem to be located just all over North America. Both companies have in common that they employ senior level developers only. They also utilize collaboration software to keep people on the map.

But what remains somewhat unclear is how these two companies find their customers. Artlogic has most likely achieved strong reputation among its customers and that will keep them busy. At least they have bunch of big names as their references. On the blog of Expat Software they mention high value of meeting people in real life instead of online resources. My own experience is that having a beer with right people might lead to a job interview so I could imagine that works with customers as well.

Last couple weeks I have been working in a project which utilizes Google Web Toolkit for the user interface. The development has been quite straightforward but testing has caused some headaches.

We are using GWT 1.5 RC 2 and one of the new features compared to 1.4 is the debug id. It allows to set a specific id for most of the elements by calling onEnsureDebugId method. This addition in UIObject helps Selenium testing because elements can be referred with their id instead of xpath.

But the first problem came up with Tree and TreeItem. Expanding tree with Selenium RC test case was tricky. Clicking those plus and minus images was quite impossible because I did not manage to set an id for them. After several attempts I decided to use double clicking to expand a tree item. This was also easy on the test side as Selenium has doubleClick command and the tree item itself can have a debug id.

The second problem was with GWT's RichTextArea. I wanted to type text in the area but Selenium IDE did not recognize or record my typing. The problem here was the iframe used by the editor. Some searching revealed that most WYSIWYG editors have the same testing issue. The solution was to select the right frame with Selenium's selectFrame, type text to //html/body and finally select the top frame again.

Edit: alternative for selectFrame method

Oversold performances, problems with ticket printing, suspended telephone and counter sales. The reason for such was an epic failure with new software called Liquid Box Office from Pivotal Integration. The system failed right away in June and had to be replaced with other system. However, the ticket printing was dependent on Liquid Box Office so sales were blocked because of lack of tickets. Eventually the printing issue was solved somehow and tickets were posted on very last moment.

Naturally such problems damage image of Edinburgh Fringe and people are pretty angry about the situation. There are competing festivals and I can imagine someone missing favorite act because of software problem will think twice next year.

Too bad I don't know anybody working for Pivotal Integration. I am rather curious to know how the project was managed, whether it followed waterfall process and how communications were with the customer.

Hmm... actually the company's name sounds really familiar. Let's do a search...

Oh my, I actually applied for some Java developer position in Pivotal Integration. I sent an application email when I was looking for a job in Scotland. I never heard anything from them afterwards - until this. Lucky me not getting that job.

www.edfringe.com: Box Office FAQs

Scotsman: Good news: Fringe box office to reopen... Bad news: It’s got no tickets
Scotsman: Fringe was warned months ago of box office fiasco

The Register: Edinburgh Fringe ticketing chaos continues
The Register: Edinburgh Fringe ticket site dead as a par
The Register: Edinburgh Fringe box office system goes titsup