Monday, November 2, 2009

Koalas are Cool

or so I say...
Upgraded two laptops to Ubuntu 9.10-AMD64 Karmic Koala last nite while watching the original V-miniseries on SyFy. So far, so good. Interface looks cool. Got some sort of bug with 'npviewer' that everyone seems to be getting if they use firefox. hmmmm... Seems like I remember that being a problem at first in 9.04 too. Main thing I did with this one though is that instead of doing a "fresh" install, I did an upgrade from the package manager. Oh, I downloaded and baked the iso using BitTorrent, but still, I wanted to try something different. Everything seems to have transfered hot gravy like so it's all good.

We'll see!

need to study some more php.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Ten Days!

Just look at that beautiful countdown going in my sidebar! 10 days!
Saw an email in my inbox that said "Windows 7 is Almost Here!" My first thought was "BATTLESTATIONS!"

then I lol'd.

My Dad likes it so far though, he says it's what Vista should have been. idk.

Been reading up on PHP and Apache. Having fun, but still believe rails is a better way to make dynamic content. Will reserve final judgment till after I get some things built in PHP.

that is all

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Ruby Foo and the Art of Application Development

Hmmmm,
I'm thinking about what it takes to write really good programs. I'm thinking about this a lot lately, because I want to earn a living writing really good, useful, soul searching programs. So let's talk about cucumber. I discovered cucumber about 10 months ago, right when it was starting to become usable. The team I was working with used cucumber for writing stories in their development cycle. The whole BDD/TDD development process was new (and still is new) to me at the time, but I was having fun, and it seemed to me that this cucumber thing was great fun. I had no idea what it really did.

I suppose you should be making fun of me, it's not after all, very reasonable to use a tool you understand nothing about, but I am a jump then look kinda guy when it comes to some things, and learning is one of them (sometimes). I did what any reasonable person does after discovering something shiny and nifty, I bought a book about it.

Actually, what I bought was a promise for a book, at a special discount. The simply named The Rspec Book is a great lil' book. It's not released yet, but it's in 'beta' mode. That means I get regular updates when Dave, or Aslak, or whoever updates the book. I got it round about version 4, it's on version 10 and set to release in it's final version in December of this year. I'll get a hard copy of the book once it's officially released too. Personally, I think that this is a great way to do publishing. Since this book was first announced/released, there have been several changes to the methodology of running cucumber and rspec. There have been minor syntax changes, new habits for namespacing, etc. The book remains current. I mean, it is seriously Agile (must be Italian)! It's easy to read if you are a n00b or if you are a wannabe (like me), and the support the guys give with the Rspec and Cucumber groups online is outstanding.

The book takes you on a journey through the methodology of Acceptance test driven planning, Domain Driven Design, and Test Driven Development. This triad forms the basis for Behavior Driven Development (BDD), a system by which good software 'emerges' from the process by writing the code that answers the questions users ask.

I'll leave you with that for now.
I :heart: you guys.

G. Brandon Hoyt

Thursday, April 16, 2009

So it's April, and you Know what that Means!

Counting down the release of Jaunty Jackalope, Ubuntu 9.04!
hehehe!

so, i'm writing a few apps right now, right, mostly focused on one webapp (top secret at this time), but also dabbling in something i've always wanted to do, write a cli to take some of the mystery out of sshing into a client computer. so far, so good. I might even push it to github, just for giggles. I don't think it's really useful, but it has been fun to say the least.

so far I've written the menu and a validation block for the menu. hey it's a start. now I've got to store data in a file that the compy can read. Me being a rails guy, you'd think I'd use a database, but this is a highschool type of project, and I'll solve it using a highschool type solution, text values using csv's!
awexome!
It's Pascal all over again!
l8tz

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

ReTread Random Reconstituted Rhubarbs!



yes,
it's a video of what happens when we who do BASIC have a lil free time between when we meet our helpers and we get done preppin' our stizzzuff for the helpers to make.


i vote Happy Medium!