I am spending my holidays in snow covered Finland. It has been very relaxing and peaceful, things-just-work, 12h sleeps...

In case I get seriously bored I will check out Google App Engine, I created an account week ago already.

My free advice for a fellow expatriate - do NOT use online forms to inform them about address changes. You might try it out but be prepared to follow up the situation yourself. In case of Edinburgh council they provide online form for address change but it is not taken into account. Therefore I ended up sorting out the situation by emails and phone calls. In case of Scottish Hydro I used their online form with a similar result. In this case email enquiries were not replied to, so several phone calls were required.

The preferred way is to send an email or a letter informing the organization about the change, wait a week or two and then call them to check that it is actually received and processed correctly.

Never assume that things would work on the first attempt in this country...

After fighting with our test suite of roughly 40 Selenium tests I finally managed to get them all passing on the build machine. The test cases were created with Selenium IDE and saved in HTML format. The build machine has Hudson and it executes the test suite.

To have tests as stable as possible there are some points to watch out:

In case of AJAX application timing issues are a major problem. One option is to set test speed to slow enough. The obvious downside is that the test suite takes forever to pass. The other option is to use pause or waitFor commands in the test case. This requires more effort from the test case writer or recorder.

Not all Selenium components are equal. Selenium RC, IDE and Core all have a bunch of minor variations. For example clickAt command works nicely on IDE but on Core you might want to try mouseDown. And don't get me started about right clicks.

Last but not least is the external input. Another developer playing with mouse cursor while test runs on the browser might cause focus loss and test case failure. The only clue of this is randomly failing test cases.

There are some alternatives for Selenium but I have no clue how well they compare against Selenium. I am not 100% happy with Selenium so alternatives are welcome.

Edit: Hudson is an open source continuous integration tool. It supports on demand builds and scheduled builds, so you can set it up to run a full Selenium test suite during the night.

Today was somewhat interesting day in Finland. The minister of migration and European affairs, Astrid Thors, is facing increasing opposition. Previously her statements have raised some eyebrows but now she managed to offend maybe way too many. She is pushing forward a new law of Aliens Act which is mostly about immigration and asylum seekers. The main problem of that proposal is that it would make Finland in immigration matters the most liberal country in Europe.

The trend in the rest of the Europe is pretty much opposite as countries tighten their borders after seeing effects of uncontrolled immigration. The problem is not with the people who come to work. The problem is the increasing number of asylum seekers without real reason to have asylum - except interest for a state supported life.

I did take a look at the official proposal and it does have some points that even I can agree with being problematic. For example, if an asylum seeker destroys his passport and other necessary documents, he cannot be deported. Technical reasons like this can be used to grant a residence permit until further notice (51 a §). This also grants the same permit for his family members.

Even though people in Finland are bit slow to react to things like this, the opposition started to scale. People are demanding Astrid Thors resignation. There is facebook group, online petition etc. But I don't believe there would be a protest in front of the parliament... that would be way too radical for Finns.

After spending time writing emails, sending letters and phoning to solve such trivial things like gas supply and council tax details I was quite fed up. But the day was not over as the next set back came. Pound has been weakening since I arrived to the UK and today one of the news headline was the record low rate of GBP.

This is not the first time I am facing currency fluctuations. In April I wrote about the UK situation and even earlier from Hungary.

This doesn't affect me dramitacally because I still have some money in my euro account. But I just have to hope two things. First thing is that UK does not join euro zone with this or lower exchange rate. The other thing is that the whole UK economy wont collapse before we relocate again.

Just to make things more concrete: Comparing my annual salary in euros in January 2008 and in December 2008 it shows around 12,5 % difference. Luckily, this "loss" wont realize until I actually do the exchange.

Yesterday we took a train with our bikes to North Queensferry. From there we crossed the Forth bridge with bikes and continued through Kirkliston to Edinburgh airport. We were very lucky with the weather as there was not a single cloud on the sky.



Before this biking trip I did some research and I got tips for good photographing locations around Edinburgh airport. I chose a location on the north side of the airport because it was easy to reach and offered good view over the perimeter fence.


Other plane photos

The plane spotting and photographing was quite interesting but we were not prepared to stay very long there. After several shots we headed back home but we took the train from Dalmeny instead of crossing the bridge again.


View Larger Map

I eventually bought an old Canon EF 70-210mm f4 macro lens from eBay. It did not cost too much, around 1/10th of the price of the new Canon 70-200 L USM f4. It was built in 1988 and it is in ok condition. I did some tests with it and its sharpness is good from 70mm to 150mm but at 210mm it is quite soft with full aperture. But it is still better than cropping photos of 18-55mm kit lens.

Today we went to Edinburgh and we packed our camera gear with us. Because of St. Andrews day Edinburgh zoo had free entry. After spending time in the frosty zoo we walked around in Edinburgh winter fair.