General Purpose Randomizer

I've decided to introduce some noise into the fingerprints collected on me by various unnecessarily curious services and people, so I've written a simple randomizer for selecting a string from a list of strings. The idea was to remove patterns from server selection process when using vpn. Not sure it'll work for obfuscation, but it is a functioning piece of code. Life will prove the rest.

Known to be working with Ubuntu+bash+ExpressVPN

#!/bin/bash
vpnservers=$(expressvpn list all | cut -d" " -f 1 | tr "\n" " ")
list=${vpnservers}

# using just a big value for length
# syntax ${parameter:offset:length}
vpnservers=${list:12:1500}
printf "Available vpn servers:\n${vpnservers}\n"

read -a arrayofservers <<< ${vpnservers}

length=${#arrayofservers[@]}
printf "Actual array length:\n$length \n\n"

randomvalue=$((1 + $RANDOM % ${length-1}))
printf "Your random value:\n$randomvalue \n\n"

printf "Your server id:\n${arrayofservers[randomvalue]} \n"

Troubleshooting Citrix Client for Linux and Fixing Mike Support

Sometimes you find yourself in one of those situations when nobody seems to have an easy solution, so you have to find one for yourself. For instance, you may need to connect to your VDI, and start your Skype meeting only to find that your microphone is disabled (in Skype, in Control Panel > Device manager).

And the answer is
to add AllowAudioInput=True
to the section [WFClient]
of wfclient.ini file
of your Citrix client configuration

So, here is how to fix it in slightly more detail:

Build your own Goldberd machine: Selenium via SoapUI

NOTE: The code examples I refer to in this blog are no longer available, but you can still read the text

Hello, friends. Here is how you can have Selenium run from SoapUi Groovy script step. This solution was created and tested with:

• SoapUI 5.X
• Selenium 3.X

In brief, you need to

• upgrade the libs under $SOAPUI_HOME/lib (! not bin/ext)
• use a custom java library (goes under $SOAPUI_HOME/bin/ext)

Auxiliary materials.

Code examples can be found here. An example of a project with a Groovy script is inside the project under auxmaterials folder.

Total automation with sellotape and glue

Luckily for all of us every profession evolves, and test automation is no exception. What I can see is test automation is now more affordable, and is done in a more professional way than before.

Same goes for approaches and tools (and for those who still trust Internet more than their own judgement, some gurus have already posted a very good knock out article leaving losers like myself with a tingling feeling of guilt for being too slow to update the blog).

But there's still another subject I would like to speak about. It concerns the approach to automation in general. Actually, it intends to slightly shift the way we understand automation and targets some of the popular stereotypes in attempt to get rid of them.