If you use Google Analytics, Asynchronous Tracking is now available.  This is a faster way for pages to send data to the mother ship, and was announced at the end of last year.  The GA module for Drupal is working on supporting the new tag, in fact a patch is available if you want to run on the absolute bleeding edge.

We're happy to announce that the asynchronous tracking tag, which came out of beta last week, is now available in your admin interface when you set up a new profile. This makes it easy for everyone to start off tracking new sites with this very fast, state-of-the-art tag.

Google Analytics Blog: It's now easy to set up new sites with Asynchronous Tracking

This is the "science" methodology behind anti-vaccine research.

In January, Britain's medical council ruled that Wakefield and two other doctors acted unethically and showed a "callous disregard" for the children in their study. The medical body said Wakefield took blood samples from children at his son's birthday party, paying them 5 pounds (today worth \$7.20) each and later joked about the incident.

The Associated Press: Britain bans doctor who linked autism to vaccine

Arne Blankerts - part of thePHP.cc, premium PHP consulting and training.

• Selenium is a java based portable testing framework.
  • Seleniumm RC runs any browser supported by the framework, firefox, opera, etc
  • Can operate/execute ANY browser available on the host machine
  • On Linux, have to tweak how process is shutdown.
  • Selenium IDE - extension for Firefox to Create and Edit Tests.  Can record clicks instead of writign code.
• Where to use it?
  • Acceptance/Integration Tests - test behaviors in the browser.
  • Compatibility Tests - test that new functions work across browsers/versions
  • Monitoring - you can record behavior and trigger events.
  • \ Can test that, for example, your registration form actually works not just makes the page available.
  • Test case recording for Bugreports.
  • Provide more detailed, reproduceable bug reports.
  • Development - automate filling out forms during development.
• Selenium does not replace unit testing or other forms of testing.
• Useful RC options
  • -port alternate listening port
  • -log save console output to logfile
  • -debug more trace output
  • -timeout seconds to wait before giving up on a test
  • -html run a single standalone test
• Selenium Tests
  • Written in browser independent JavaScript based DSL
  • Same test can run on any OS with Java runtime and many browsers
  • Firefox 2+, Internet Explorer 6+, Opera 8+, Webkit from Safari 2+
  • Can write tests using PHP as well.
  • Can test for presence of elements - seems to use XPath to select elements, but you can use other notations.
  • Pretty powerful selectors for finding elements.

Talk derailed a bigt by technical difficulties, but provided a good introduction into selenium.