A lot of people don’t know one of the nicest features about Firefox: quick search. In Firefox you can turn any bookmark into a search action. For that just create a new bookmark and add the following properties: Name: Whatever you like Location: URL of the search but with %s where the query is supposed to be Keyword: The shortcut you want for this search So for example in the screenshot the keyword is tel. Now you can enter “tel kay in basel” to find all Kay’s in Basel. A few shortcuts I have configures are. ...

This morning in the train I finally came around to fix a few issues with list.blogug.ch that had prevented a release for a while. The big change: search is now fast! the search uses a Ferret index with the acts_as_ferret module. Ferret is basically the Ruby version of Lucene. And the URLs are normalized when a new entry is added. This should leave us with far fewer duplicates than we now have. I find most of the duplicates when checking the new submissions but it still was an annoyance.

Selenium is a open-source framework for functional testing of web applications. Today we found out the most likely reason for it’s naming. Intervention to minimise the toxic effects of mercury and other free radical inducers is feasible for both the dental team and patients. Probably the most effective protective agent against the hazards of mercury poisoning is the element selenium. Mercury apparently produces some test software that’s not well-liked with developers. Or so I gather as I have never worked with it myself. ...

TextMate offers an SQL bundle. That bundle can also be used to query MySQL and PostgreSQL databases directly from TextMate. The configuration for the database access is done though environment variables. Specifically the following ones in the case of PostgreSQL: PGHOST: Database host PGPORT: Postgres port (usually the default of 5432 just works) PGUSER: User name PGDATABASE: Database to run queries on TM_DB_SERVER: Tells TextMate to use PostgreSQL. You can either set up these environment variables in the TextMate settings or - much more helpful - per project. In the project drawer deselect all files (by clicking on an empty spot) and then open the properties. There you can add project-specific environment variables. ...

In the Rails world I’m used to Capistrano for deploying. With “rake deploy” I can always deploy my projects to the production server. For my liking it’s a bit too much coupled to Ruby projects for being used in other projects. So what do you use for other projects? Is there anything you like? And if not, is there an interest for a tool?

As you may already have seen on our blog, we at local.ch are looking for new co-workers. If you want to be part of a team of geeks working on one of the most exciting Web projects in Switzerland, join us. We’re looking for exceptionally talented geeks. The currently open positions require Java programming, so you should already feel comfortable with that. You top it off if you already know Spring and Lucene - but that’s not required as we’re looking for people who learn quickly. ...

I spent Friday and Saturday at the T.Camp of the Swiss Web consultancy namics. That’s a yearly conference for the namics techies. As a member of the namics sister company local.ch I was also allowed to participate. And like every year for the past five years I held a presentation again. This time I talked about testing. Specifically Selenium. It’s much the same as I’ll talk about on September 12 at the Webtuesday event. You can download the presentation.

One reason for not posting for a while was that I’ve wanted to move my blog for a while. Thanks to the cooperation of KAYWA I got a database dump of my existing blog. That I now ported to Typo. I’ve still got some issues. Most old URLs will redirect to the new ones. I didn’t port some of the uglier URLs, though. Sorry for any inconvenience. The feeds will all work again and redirect to the right one. ...

Today we'll have a Webtuesday meeting again. Harry Fuecks will have a talk with the title Scripters UTF-8 Survival Guide. We'll meet at 19:30 at the local.ch offices (sixth floor - call me at 079 755 53 67 if the doors are locked and you don't see anybody). Afterwards we'll head to Cheyenne for food and drinks. PS: Sorry for not posting for a while. Will try to get some more posts out again.

Ajaxian reports that Safari gets a Javascript debugger. "Webkit - the development version of Safari, has gotten a real javascript debugger. Its called Drosera, and the Surfin Safari blog has the announcement. Or you can just download the latest nightly of Webkit and go." I downloaded it and gave it a try. But I must confess I got stuck very early. I didn't even find out how to debug an external script file. Did anybody have any success with Drosera?