Quicksilver drag and drop

October 22, 2007

Quicksilver keeps amazing me.

I had to mail a document so I wrote that mail and then browsed for the document in order to attach. I forgot where on the file-system that
document actually is since I always open it with Quicksilver. I then thought that I would be real neat if I could find it with Quicksilver and
then drag and drop it in Mail.

That just works ™™

Nothing new for the die hards and old old news: drag and drop.
Still I’m surprised it is in there.

I just love Quicksilver. It feels so simple, but has a wealth of features and keeps amazing me in that it always is one step ahead of me….. But that step is not in my face and is there when I realize I need it and are ready for it.

Leave a Comment » | Mac OS X, QuickSilver | Permalink
Posted by Ronald Pulleman

Endeca dimension specifications

October 19, 2007

The next post is about some trivial XML parsing. Since it is uses Endeca definitions, which is not Google friendly perhaps it is useful.

Endeca spec

When using Endeca for search and guided navigation it of course often happens that Endeca is implemented and the specification is trundling behind.

During discussions with business representatives about Guided Navigation (aka dimensions and precedence rules) a bit of documentation is definitely necessary due to the dynamic behaviour of Endeca. That dynamic behaviour can be a tough cookie to demo. So a functional description becomes necessary.
Especially so when a test team comes along and wants the specification in a human readable form, perhaps to write the test scripts.

So I wrote a little Ruby script which parses the Endeca dimension files as produced by Endeca Developer Studio and dump them as a tab separated dimension hierarchy.
rexml code
This produces

Cat struct
like structures.
A bit of extra text and you are good to go.

I wonder

Will the test show a difference between the specification and the implementation? This can be a nice test of the test script.

Leave a Comment » | Endeca, REXML, Ruby | Permalink
Posted by Ronald Pulleman