So the excitement of the days when I wrote stuff like Do You Understand XP? is gone. Rapid Development is a good book that reviews every practice it preaches with a critical eye, but I’m not overly excited. Yes, I learned, again, that many so-called Agile practices are known for a long time. But hey, I knew that after reading the Mythical Man Month. Excitement is hard to find in books these days. If I only could find one of those thought-provoking books, that rips your universe apart.

I started the test very enthusiastically: To test cmake I create a directory, cd into that directory, create a CMakeLists.txt and let cmake create a CMakeCache.txt. In the end I know that cmake ran when CMakeCache.txt exists.

void QCMakeControlTest::shouldExecuteCMakeInTheCurrentDirectory()
{
  QDir currentDirectory;
  QDir testDirectory(currentDirectory.path() + "/ExecuteInCurrentDirectory");
  QVERIFY(currentDirectory.mkdir(testDirectory.dirName()));
  QVERIFY(QDir::setCurrent(testDirectory.path()));
}

I hit F5 and everything runs just fine. Once. The second time the directory ExecuteInCurrentDirectory already exists. Of course to have a nice and clean starting point the test must remove the test directory if it already exists. So I added:

void QCMakeControlTest::shouldExecuteCMakeInTheCurrentDirectory()
{
  QDir currentDirectory;
  QDir testDirectory(currentDirectory.path() + "/ExecuteInCurrentDirectory");
  if(currentDirectory.exists(testDirectory.dirName()))
  {
    QVERIFY(currentDirectory.rmdir(testDirectory.dirName()));
  }
  QVERIFY(currentDirectory.mkdir(testDirectory.dirName()));
  QVERIFY(QDir::setCurrent(testDirectory.path()));
}

Green. Perfect. Now let’s create a CMakeLists.txt.

void QCMakeControlTest::shouldExecuteCMakeInTheCurrentDirectory()
{
  QDir currentDirectory;
  QDir testDirectory(currentDirectory.path() + "/ExecuteInCurrentDirectory");
  if(currentDirectory.exists(testDirectory.dirName()))
  {
    QVERIFY(currentDirectory.rmdir(testDirectory.dirName()));
  }
  QVERIFY(QDir::setCurrent(testDirectory.path()));

  QFile cmakeLists("CMakeLists.txt");
  QVERIFY(cmakeLists.open(QIODevice::ReadWrite));
}

Green again. Once. The test fails the second time it’s executed:

********* Start testing of QCMakeControlTest *********
Config: Using QTest library 4.3.2, Qt 4.3.2
PASS   : QCMakeControlTest::initTestCase()
FAIL!  : QCMakeControlTest::shouldExecuteCMakeInTheCurrentDirectory()
  'currentDirectory.rmdir(testDirectory.dirName())' returned FALSE. ()
..\..\..\..\..\Source\CMake\Source\QTDialog\qcmaketest\QCMakeControlTest.cpp(30) :
  failure location
PASS   : QCMakeControlTest::cleanupTestCase()
Totals: 2 passed, 1 failed, 0 skipped

Yep, no problem, all I need to do is to rmdir recursively. Just a quick glance into the Qt docs. But I found nothing. Well, it’s not too hard to implement a recursive rm -rf, but still… I was so sure that this function would be hidden somewhere that I spent more time googling and doc-reading than implementing it when I finally realized that I was on my own. So in the end the test looked a little bloated:

#include "qcmaketest/QCMakeControlTest.h"

#include "qcmakeui/QCMakeControl.h"

bool removeRecursiveForced(QDir& directory, const QFileInfo& entry)
{
  if(!entry.isDir())
  {
    return directory.remove(entry.fileName());
  }
  QDir directoryEntry(entry.filePath());
  QList entries(directoryEntry.entryInfoList
    (QDir::Dirs | QDir::Files | QDir::NoDotAndDotDot));
  for(int entryIndex = 0; entryIndex < entries.count(); ++entryIndex)
  {
    if(!removeRecursiveForced(directoryEntry, entries.at(entryIndex)))
    {
      return false;
    }
  }
  return directory.rmdir(entry.fileName());
}

void QCMakeControlTest::shouldExecuteCMakeInTheCurrentDirectory()
{
  QDir currentDirectory;
  QDir testDirectory(currentDirectory.path() + "/ExecuteInCurrentDirectory");
  if(currentDirectory.exists(testDirectory.dirName()))
  {
    QVERIFY(removeRecursiveForced(currentDirectory,
      QFileInfo(currentDirectory, testDirectory.dirName())));
  }
  QVERIFY(currentDirectory.mkdir(testDirectory.dirName()));
  QVERIFY(QDir::setCurrent(testDirectory.path()));

  QFile cmakeLists("CMakeLists.txt");
  QVERIFY(cmakeLists.open(QIODevice::ReadWrite));

  QCMakeControl qCMakeControl;
  qCMakeControl.configure();

  QFile cmakeCache("CMakeCache.txt");
  QVERIFY(cmakeCache.exists());
}

#include "QCMakeControlTest.moc"

At least I have an idea where this could lead me - a nice class to generate a clean cmake directory. But let's see whether I'll be right, perhaps YAGNI will finally get back at me. And if you know an easier way to delete a directory recursively with Qt, please leave a comment.

So I put the batteries into the recharger and realized that while the batteries were powering up I had no mouse. Since not using the computer for a full day (my god) was no option, I had to figure out how to use Windows with nothing but a keyboard. The principle was not new to me, as I already controlled my Unix flavored operating systems (like emacs) with keyboard FSAs and never really missed anything. But on a Windows XP box this turned out to be a whole new experience.

First I remembered the “Windows Key”. I just realize that I don’t know what to do if you don’t have a Windows and a context key (first one left of the right control key) on your keyboard. Fortunately my keyboard got them. Anyway, the Windows key helped me to get Thunderbird and Firefox up and running. Thunderbird is really nice to control via keyboard. It’s intuitive, and while it’s not quite as comfortable as using your mouse, the basic task of classifying the spam mails into the spam folder was no problem.

Then I tried to use Firefox. At first this was rather awkward. Since the only keyboard control key I knew was the tab key, I tabbed endlessly through the user interface before I was able to extract the basic key combinations from various sources on the web:

1. F6: Change frame
2. Ctrl-L: Address box
3. Ctrl-K: Search box
4. Ctrl-W: Close current tab
5. Ctrl-PageUp/PageDown Previous/Next frame

Equipped with my new knowledge I entered my Wordpress administration page and tried to start a blog entry. Don’t try this. It simply doesn’t work. I nearly tabbed my brain out of my head. So I needed a Firefox plug-in to save my day.

Searching for “keyboard” on the Firefox plug-in page revealed the NumberFox extension, which I couldn’t get to work, and the Hit-A-Hint extension. Hit-A-Hint worked great for me and I was able to do some serious browsing now. After a few minutes I stumbled across Mouseless Browsing. I couldn’t find this one at first, because you usually search for “keyboard” and not “mouse” if you actually lack a mouse.

All of the solutions above share the same common principle. For every link, button and edit field on a web page a number is shown. If you enter this number in a special finite automaton mode you can directly browse there without tabbing to death.

For full blown keyboard control Mouseless Browsing is better suited. You can use it from within edit fields and it has a consistent interface for switching between tabs. It even supports to select a link instead of following it, which makes Firefox show the link target in it’s status bar. But it feels a log more sluggish than Hit-A-Hint.

Hit-A-Hint is a quick and small solution, but you have to reenable it on every web page and the default configuration features the “h” as start key for your finite automaton, which is quite inconvenient if you want to enter “hello” into a text field.

While searching for firefox extensions that make my mousless life easier, I found the English and German dictionaries to get inline spell checking support in Firefox. I hope my blog entries will gain some quality with regards to spelling…

Hey, I wrote quite a lot today. This shows that with the right combinations of tools it’s easy to blog, search the web and use dictionaries all at once without a mouse. Praise the inventor of finite automaton theory!

The problem with election machines is, that you can always simply ’switch’ an election machine for a different machine that looks exactly the same. This way nobody (not even a highly paid technical expert) can say for sure that the vote is taken into account without messing with the hardware.

Of course such high level attacks can be detected afterwards by inspecting all machines. After all we can just redo the election, that would save us some big money, and would motivate many more people to vote.

And than there’s the ‘insider attack’. An underpaid software developer working for the election machine company who needs the money to pay an expensive medical operation for her terminally ill son. She has all the cryptographic keys and expert knowledge of the operational tests done during and after the election to modify the program ‘just a little’ so that Mr. Money becomes chancellor.

And even if all those attacks could be eliminated – only a cryptographic expert would be able to understand and check those machines. The average German is not a mathematical genious. This will certainly boost voter participation.

Some Germans obviously remembered that democracy is all about participation of the people and filed an e-Petition against election machines.

Ok, this is just a small header and I couldn’t find more information on SCO and IBM. But, you can still search for disclosure agreement…

Is this a new way to track copyright violations?