File URLs in Firefox

In Firefox, it is possible to trust file URLs on a configured set of sites.  Add the lines like this to user.js:

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites", "http://site1 http://site2");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled", "allAccess");

For some reason, it is hard to add these preferences using about:config.  You can create these keys, but they are not shown on the configuration page so you are typing blind.  They do appear in the prefs.js file, however.  More information on configurable security policy can be found at:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/components/ConfigPolicy.html

OpenWiki

To delete a page in OpenWiki, add the line "#DEPRECATED" to the top of the page.  Then, run the administrative page deprecate.asp to actually delete deprecated pages.  You must edit that script first because it is shipped in a non-functional state (for protection).  Also, it includes a parameter for the minimum length of time that a page must remain unedited before it is deleted.

Eclipse RCP

When you use the export function of an Eclipse RCP production configuration, it overwrites the plugin.xml of the main application project to update the 'about' screen.  This behaviour is a bit unexpected, and is not friendly to the version control system.

Subversion and Ant

Here is a cheesy, but effective, way to recover the current Subversion revision number of a directory using only Ant -- the Subversion client is not necessary:

<project name="svn-version" default="get-svn-revision">

  <xmlproperty file="../.svn/entries" prefix="svn"/>

  <target name="get-svn-revision">
    <echo message="${svn.wc-entries.entry(revision)}"/>
  </target>

</project>

I call this method cheesy, because it depends on the internal details of the SVN entries file, the format of which is subject to change.  Also, it relies on the fact that the first entry is the one that contains the revision number for the directory since the Ant xmlproperty task does not handle duplicate elements.  The method has its charms, however, since it does not require the Subversion client to be on the path (or even installed), and does not need any temporary files (such as those the xslt task might demand).

QA

A good quality in a QA person is the ability to raise issues with developers without immediately polarizing the discussion.  The personalities of both QA people and developers make this a challenging proposition sometimes.