So, I’m quietly beavering away at Typo with an eye to slimming down our somewhat monolithic ArticlesController class, tweaking our routing to use the new datestamped_resources plugin that I’ve developed to help dry up our routes, making a couple of new resourceful controllers for comments and trackbacks and generally tidying the place up. Hopefully Typo’s code is going to be much more habitable when I’m done.

You know, I’m sure, how good fresh baked bread smells. But, good as that smell is, the real pleasure for me is the way it sounds.

Joss Whedon writes strong female characters, he’s the mind behind some of my favourite TV ever and he’s a wise man. Here he is reacting to seeing camera phone footage of the murder of Dua Khalil Aswad on CNN almost alongside the trailer for Captivity:

The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.

“I’m sorry.”

What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority - in fact, their malevolence - is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.

You should read the whole thing. Seriously.

Dress for success: wear a white penis

While I’m tilting a windmills, I should just like to tell all those people who bang on about ‘metaprogramming’.

It’s all just programming.

That is all.

Windmill tilting time again I’m afraid. Blame chromatic and David A. Black.

What is it that characterizes domain specific languages? Before you trot out something like “Programs written in them read like domain experts talk”, take a look at some examples of code written in domain specific languages:

Control.TextArea.ToolBar.Textile.js is currently rocking my world and, if you wish to comment on anything in this blog, will shortly be rocking yours I hope.

I might need to fix up some of the feedback on commenting, but it’s nearly 1 in the morning and I’m going to bed.

For years I’ve managed to dodge learning JavaScript. People have told me it’s a fine language with some dodge implementations. Friends have built an entire business model in the language, and I’ve continued to treat as if it were The Sound of Music (I’m 39 now and I have managed to completely avoid watching that film).

Wow:

$ rake spec
...

156 examples, no failures

$ ./script/spec spec
...

156 examples, 2 failures

$ rake
\[unit tests, all pass\]
\[functional tests, all pass\]
\[specs...\]

156 examples, 2 failures


For extra points, the 2 failures from running the plain `rake` are not the same as the failures from running `./script/spec spec`. And if I run `./script/spec spec` after a full `rake` run, I get a host of extra failures.

I wonder what I'm doing to so comprehensively screw up test isolation.

Ho hum.
    

It’s definitely fun to commit a major rework of something that’s been bugging you to SVN. It’s slightly less fun to check it out in your production server and have it fall over until you remember you to retweak the environment.rb file.

Last year, you would have been forgiven for thinking that Typo was pretty much dead in the water as an ongoing project. Typosphere was a placeholder, changes were few and far between, the app was a bloated monster. So, people switched, in droves, to Mephisto the new, (and excellent) kid on the block. Heck, even Tobi, the original author of Typo, has switched.

Let’s say you’re running tests against your rails application and a test fails.

“Hmm…” you think, “I wonder what could be causing that, let’s run that test file by itself.”

When you read Christopher Alexander’s ??A Pattern Language, the patterns within the language are interdependent and ordered from big patterns down to small ones. Each pattern has a number and wherever one pattern refers to another it’s referenced with both the pattern’s name and its number.

From Extreme UI Testing:

Method wrappers. Easily possible in VW and Squeak since you can subclass CompiledMethod and much with the method dictionaries […] Niall uses a strategy pattern to automatically wrap threads that get forked off by looking up the stack to see if the code is under test (and if it is, make sure to install a wrapper)

So, since I couldn’t sleep, I’ve been hacking on the routing drop in replacement.

I’ve reached the point where things are mostly working and I can at least run the benchmark tests.

Those of you who’ve been reading attentively will be aware that I’ve been working on a drop in replacemen for a chunk of Rails’ routing subsystem. You will also be aware that things have gone a bit quiet on that front.