Posts Archive

Some time ago, there was a lengthy debate on the Agile Sweden mailing list regarding the term “Architect”, and what it means. My position is that the term has become synonymous with the paper or PowerPoint architect, and I therefore try to stay clear of it. Other people haad other opinions.

Neal Ford has changed his title, and describes why in a brilliant way:

Neal Ford: From Architect to Wrangler: […] “The title of ‘Architect’ for software developers has gotten so diluted that its meaningless anymore. In fact, its almost pejorative because so many ‘paper’ architects give it a bad name. I’ve gotten ‘Oh, dude, I’m so sorry’ looks from people when I tell them I’m an architect, assuming that I’ve had a head injury or something and can’t do real development work anymore.

Reading this a little bit earlier would have saved me a lot of time. In short: callbacks such as :before_add does not work with has_many :through, and the documentation does not tell you that. To get callbacks, add them to the join model.

Paul Duncan is another Mercurial convert, and explains his choice of VCS very well

The current incarnation of autotest seems to assume that you are using integrated views. If not, you can modify the rspec_rails_autotest.rb file to run the view specs as well:

:::ruby

# when %r%^app/views/layouts/(.*)\.rhtml% then
#   ["spec/views/layouts/#{$1}_spec.rb"]
when %r%^app/views/(.*)\.rhtml$% then
  ["spec/views/#{$1}_view_spec.rb"]

Your view spec must be postfixed with “_view_spec.rb” for it to work

Update This works out of the box now.

Autotest 3.5.0 is out, and the result given from Autotest is no longer a String, it’s an array of strings. So if you still want Growl to function properly just modify the .autotest slightly:

#ruby

module Autotest::Growl
  def self.growl title, msg, img, pri=0, stick=""
    system "growlnotify -n autotest --image #{img} -p #{pri} -m #{msg.inspect} #{title} #{stick}"
  end

  Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |at|
    output = at.results.last.slice(/(\d+)\s.*specifications?,\s(\d+)\s.*failures?/)
    if output =~ /[1-9]\sfailures?/
      growl "Test Results", "#{output}", '~/Library/autotest/rails_fail.png', 2 #, "-s"
    else
      growl "Test Results", "#{output}", '~/Library/autotest/rails_ok.png'
    end
  end
end

Tim Bray is my hero of the day. So many other people would defend their brainchild, especially a world conquering one, in any situation but Tim clearly stands above such behavior.

Any Damn Fool: “… we designed XML as a document format. When the world gleefully seized upon it as a data-packaging/RPC tool, that was OK, but I doubt you could get any of XML’s original designers to disagree with the statement that JSON, for example, has all sorts of advantages for wrapping up short-lived strongly-typed data.”

I’ve previously mentioned that I’ve unsuccessfully tried to migrate my personal domain to Google Apps. I also blamed Google for it not working. I was wrong.

It seems that Textdrive has some nifty Apache security going on which denies the Jakarta HttpClient to connect, returning a “412 - Precondition Failed”. Big thanks to Doug for finding this out.

I am getting all parts of my Rails development environment settled. In addition to vanilla Rails, I am currently using RSpec, Selenium and Autotest. I am seriously considering Haml and Sass as well.

When googling arounf to learn more about Autotest, I realized that people are using together with Growl. It works out-of-the-box with Test::Unit, but RSpec needs a little tweaking. I took the basics from here and modified to my liking. The following is what my .autotest looks like.

We’re using Google Apps at Re:mind which is really, really great. So great in fact that I wanted to move my private mail there as well. So after setting the domain up, I created the webpage that was needed for domain activation, put it on my server, clicked the “verify my domain”, and got the usual “this may take 48 hours to complete”

It has now been almost two weeks or something like 300 hours, slightly more than 48. I have sent Google a support email asking what is happening, but I have yet not received an answer. To that mail that is

Spring surprised us early this year, so we are currently blessed with a mild 10ºC. As everyone who has ever experienced it knows, the early days of spring after the long dark winter are just wonderful

The photo is taken with my SE K610i, and stitched together with DoubleTake, which deserves a mentioning. I noticed today that I had lost my license for it, so I sent an email to EchoOne explaining the situation. I got a reply with my license within 4 hours. Great stuff.