Selenium is a software library that’s used to automate web browsers. It’s often used to run automated testing but can be used for anything involving a web browser. Since so much software is now running in the cloud and accessible via web interfaces Selenium is ideal for automating lots of manual tasks. There’s libraries available …
Category archives: Automation
Multi-threading API Requests in Python
When making hundred or thousands of API calls things can quickly get really slow in a single threaded application. No matter how well your own code runs you’ll be limited by network latency and response time of the remote server. Making 10 calls with a 1 second response is maybe OK but now try 1000. …
Using Python with One Time Passwords (2FA)
Ever wanted to automate a process involving a vendor website and come across this. Me too 😔 One time passwords (aka MFA, 2FA, or two factor authentication as I’ll say from here on) are something everyone should use and are great for security, not so great for automation. Until recently I thought this was hard …
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Do What I Mean!
DWIM (do what I mean) computer systems attempt to anticipate what users intend to do, correcting trivial errors automatically rather than blindly executing users’ explicit but potentially incorrect inputs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM When I hear about the AI singularity and how no one will have jobs in 10 years I usually just laugh. Computers and software are really, …
Why are Logistics Carriers so Bad with Data?
Just to be clear when I say Logistic Carriers I mean UPS, DHL, DSV, GLS and many other three letter companies that deliver your Christmas presents, but in a business context they are also responsible for B2B deliveries of goods to shops and warehouses. I’ve previously worked in Logistics for many years and so have …
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Loading Private Python Libraries to Alteryx at Runtime
The python tool in Alteryx is a great resource that I often use but it can easily get very cluttered with lots of reusable code that could easily be moved out and imported as a library. Unfortunately by default you can’t just use the standard import statement since the location of your workflow at runtime …
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Converting xls to xlsx files in Alteryx
There are numerous threads on the Alteryx Community where people are asking how to covert xls files to xlsx. The solutions generally suggest one of two approaches, either Read the file in with an Input Data tool then output again in the new format Use the Run Command tool to use an an Excel component …
IoT Sensors – Saving Collected Data
Now that my sensors are successfully collecting data and the data is being processed by a Node-RED flow on my Raspberry Pi the final step is to add some persistence to the data. As it stands the data is constantly streaming and being displayed on a dashboard but after that it’s discarded so there’s no …
IoT Sensors – Data Collection
In the first part I talked mostly about the sensors and the gateway so in this article I’ll show you how to collect, filter and store that data from the sensors. My setup is running locally on my LAN and uses a Raspberry Pi 3B+ to process the data. I’ll be using Node-RED to process …
How to use Amazon S3 from KNIME
This post follows on from my S3 post usng Node-RED so you can read that for a brief into to S3. Using S3 with KNIME is extremely easy as there is already an S3 node available to install. Amazon S3 Connection The only node that needs installing is the Amazon S3 Connection. All the other …