trying something out for fun using processing.js

This is just a brilliant idea. I love it. They need to package it up into an Android app.

http://youarelisteningtolosangeles.com/

I’m not going to saturate the beauty of this with words. Just enjoy.

Ok, lets start off on the right foot. I’m not an English major nor do I have any interest in being one. Thus my blog is filled with fun grammatical tragedies that I do not wish to be informed of. These posts are simply a way for me to share some of the trials and tribulations I’ve endured in my quest to sharpen my skills as a professional SQA. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the acronyms, SQA is software quality assurance. If you need further explanation you need to find Google.

Today we are covering one of my favorite things to do. Scrape data for the purpose of comparing live data with stored data. The concept is simple. A page is rendered on a website and several placeholders or referenced includes are executed causing javascript, php, aspx placeholders or whatever to display their goods. The trick to this is we’re going to bypass the use of browser based libraries that many are familiar with such as Watir or Mechanize. We’re going to call the webpage direct, parse the data in memory and use Nokogiri’s incredible library to scrape our data.

• almost… http://twitpic.com/348dt4 #

http://tinyurl.com/259yvm6

I spent a few hours working diligently on an interactive and somewhat intelligent test for a very specific task I was assigned at work. I’m not going to go into details about what this task was but I will break out a scenario and give some insight on what I did to construct this test. Hopefully what I learned in this little adventure will help others as well.