Stagger in disbelief if you’d like, but I’ve found an instance where it is more beneficial to not begin testing a piece of software until a measurable way through its development.
You no doubt remember my fabulous, in-development command-line NewsGator client, bulletin. I’ve extracted the NewsGator-specific code to a gem called WonderCroc. The README provides a small glimpse of what’s possible with the library now:
wondercroc
A gem that provides…
In any event, I haven’t written any tests for it yet. A lot of the initial programming was screwing around with Ruby’s RSS parser and running requests through in IRB. At this point, however, I’d like to start throwing specs at it as I refactor it and extend it to become a modular library.
So what?
Well, here’s the thing. I want to know that the library responds correctly to the XML responses sent by NewsGator’s server. I assume the correct way to test this is to mock the responses accurately. The NewsGator REST API documentation provides several partial samples, but they’re not complete or complex enough to give me a full range of parsing opportunities. So why not use actual responses?
So that’s my plan. Extend my WonderCroc::Client class to log the XML responses to a file, and use those in my mocks — something I can’t think of a good way to do if I hadn’t written the code in the first place.
Thoughts?
~ $ setopt appendhistory
~ $ setopt
autocd
extendedglob
histignorealldups
histsavenodups
interactive
login
monitor
shinstdin
zle
Ayup.
To my faithful readers (all seven of you), I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know that I am finally going to do what I’ve been trying to accomplish for quite some time: open myself up to freelance development.
If you or anyone you know is looking for a web-designer with three years of experience and who is 4/5ths of the way through his computer science major, with emphasis on intermediate ASP.NET and experimental but consistent Ruby on Rails work, drop me a line at sales@iociem.com. My focus is on clean, functional, modern web design, and cutting-edge development practices and ideas. Any interested parties can also request a full resume from the address above.
Is it me or does the link_updated column in the Links table of WordPress not do anything?
mysql> SELECT link_updated FROM wp_links;
+---------------------+
| link_updated |
+---------------------+
| 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |
| 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |
| 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |
| 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |
| 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |
| 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |
| 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |
| 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |
+---------------------+
8 rows in set (0.00 sec)
I mean, sure I’ll be able to hack it to actually be useful, but I was kind of hoping not to have to do that. The eventual goal is to have links added to my blog’s timeline just like posts, in the style of a certain awesome blogger.
I’d keep an eye on Hyperspaces, an app currently in private beta that presumes to tackle some of the pressing deficiencies in Leopard’s own Spaces implementation, namely:
- Conspicuous naming of individual spaces.
- Different background images for each space.
The site also mentions hue tinting of backgrounds depending on the space, but the provided screenshot doesn’t look too great yet. So we’ll see. Also of interest is the article on Cocoia detailing the thought process and creative work behind Hyperspaces’ excellent icon.
Also also of interest is the growing trend of naming websites for Mac applications like the actual file extension - Hyperspaces.app => http://hyperspacesapp.com. There are other examples of this, I just can’t think of any at the moment.