I learned about Desktop Tower Defense from Tom Distler’s blog. It’s so much fun, but heed Tom’s warning.

I made the mistake of watching one of those youtube videos, embedded in google search results, that I would have rather not seen before having a chance to solidify a winning strategy of my own.

Ruby is not some bachelor’s party with a foxy lady in a sherlock holmes hat. Enjoy the clarinet _why. link

Leopard’s here and….. it’s beautiful

They hit some of my most desired usability features on the head: virtual desktops, tabbed terminal, and I’ll take a cleaner desktop as a bonus. :)

The idea of being able to write an app in ruby with a delicious OS X Cocoa interface and have out-of-the-box distribution ability is very exciting to my googly ruby red eyes as well.

I could go on, but will spare you for now. Instead a concise ruby-leopard summary from infoQ: Ruby on Mac OS X Leopard with DTrace, XCode and Interface Builder support

What’s up with not being able to right click on icons in the cool little pop-out from tray folder view or in the new finder view (itunes album view)?

and my hand slaps my face proving that the hand can still successfully slap the face. If only there were not so many commits kicking off the slap suite.

Dstamat at ELC provides a whirl wind of the many options that have come to existence in Ruby automated test land.

As I started to see my test suite slow down, Mocha to the rescue (FlexMock would have done the job too). My controller tests became focused, and my models were simply mocked and stubbed away from them completely. What if I wanted to test my views ?
Enter Selenium and Watir. Now I could even test to make sure my blind_downs were working when a user clicked on my links from browser X, Y, Z. Half way into setting up Selenium, RSpec hit the scene.

Test::Unit, Mocha, Rspec, RCov, Heckle. Throw ci_reporter in the mix for testing in continous integration (CI) setups such as pulse. Rock and roll for what rails has pulled off in the testing arena and more rock and roll considering the benefits gained by all ruby development.

There are so many amazing tools are available that incubate quality and live in complete automation. The learning curve is there, time to implement is there, but the pay off is huge and shouldn’t be ignored.

The vague and partially relevant point of this post is to illustrate the agile software development (r)evolution that passionate Rubyists have manifested in such a short amount of time. The creation, porting, adaption and adoption of these testing tools / frameworks alone should clearly exemplify this.

It’s an exciting time to be writing software

dstamat, I must agree. I’m completely enthralled.

Spread Overview

Spread is a toolkit that provides a high performance messaging service that is resilient to faults across external or internal networks. Spread functions as a unified message bus for distributed applications, and provides highly tuned application-level multicast and group communication support. Spread services range from reliable message passing to fully ordered messages with delivery guarantees, even in case of computer failures and network partitions.

Spread is designed to encapsulate the challenging aspects of asynchronous networks and enable the construction of scalable distributed applications, allowing application builders to focus on the differentiating components of their application.

Powerful, but simple API. Only six basic calls are required to utilize Spread.

After reading the documentation this sounds really impressive. I’m going to need to play around with it to feel it out and find out if it has potential for any future projects.

Check out the platform and language support:

BSDI 4
Linux
Solaris
Irix 6.5.3 (MIPS)
AIX (powerpc)
FreeBSD (x86)
NetBSD (x86, ppc)
OpenBSD (x86)
Mac OS X (ppc)
Windows 95, 98
Windows NT, 2000, XP

C/C++ libraries with and without thread support.
Java Class to be used by applets or applications.
Perl interface.
Python interface.
Ruby interface.

I've been having a very strange problem on the mac the last couple of days. Subversion went from happy camper to sad clown after a MacPorts package update.

• Subversion says it needs libexpat.so.0 at run time (to commit).
• libexpat.so* exists no where on the file system
• Expat only wants to generate static libraries. The port install only generates the static libs (la) and the last release downloaded and configured with --enable-shared still refuses to generate shared libraries. The CVS release blew up so many times I quit wasting my time and moved on.
• Subversion does not have an option to make without expat
• An expat mac install package exists, but doesn't contain the desired so file

What I'm confused about is how subversion is able to build without having expat's dynamic library to link to. If it links using the static lib then there should not be the need to load the dynamic library at run time unless it is specifically made to work this way for some reason.

Of course all of this pain and confusion vanquished upon taking a closer look at the error message:

Woops, finally noticed the svnserve. ssh into Gentoo box, create a libexpat.so.0 symbolic link to the existing dynamic library. All is happy camping once again... Think about how there was some emerge -uDv world remote action at the same time as the port upgrade outdated. Slap forhead....

The three lessons learned:

1. look at error messages carefully
2. when something is server/client or distributed account for the remote side as a possible cause of the error
3. don't start writing a blog post mid way though solving a problem =]

Software security is and will become much more important in the security industry especially as security systems begin spanning public networks. Cisco seems to be taking a proactive approach to identifying and notifying customers about software security vulnerabilities. From Security Dreamer:

Cisco uses the error reporting policy to improve its products and boost its reputation. Cisco looks for problems in its products, encourages users to report new problems through a public forum, promptly notifies customers, then fixes the problem. Now that's a company with the welfare of its customers and its brand in mind

This provides insight into a different area of customer service than the traditional.

I learned an important lesson this weekend while equipping the mobile transportation unit with a hook up for the iPod. Don't cut a USB cable and plan to reconnect the wires. They are very small and a good portion of life could be spent on this task. Amazingly enough everything worked after the procedure. A wire stripper that works with small wires would have been nice though. Thanks Angad and Maks for the useful car / stereo links.

I found this on Security Dreamer with many comments on Schneier on Security

Beware of the lube!

I made it up to the mountains with some friends last weekend. We stayed at my grandfather's cabin in Central Camp (a couple thousand feet above Bass Lake) and got some rock climbing in at Fresno Dome.

View of Bass Lake from side of the road

Driving from Central Camp to Fresno Dome

My friend let me cruse around on his beautiful quad. I naturally found the largest puddle I could and blasted through it.

The hike to the rock

Base of our route

Top of the first of four pitches

We didn't make it to the top. Short on daylight and out of practice. We had to descend to the bottom and hike back out the way we came. Making it to the top has the added bonus of getting an easier hike back.

Jeremy descends to set up a lower rappelling station

Overall very relaxing and a wonderful break.

Holy Cow! 27 Videos from the Google test automation conference 2007 with so much important information that my head is spinning (and I only watched a small portion =). Automation, testing strategies, mocking, continuous integration, UI automation, complex distributed system, and many different levels and types of testing explained. These really drive the importance of quality automated testing in many different forms that really push software and systems from many different angles.

The keynote gives a good overview of overall stratagies and the importance of processes like quick build / test turnarounds and developer testing.

I found this nice little app, RCDefaultApp that makes it convent to control which applications start for events and file extensions.

allows a user to set the default application used for various URL schemes, file extensions, file types, MIME types, and Uniform Type Identifiers

and it is taw in reference to his new Mac

There's no good music player. iTunes is a stinky pile of donkey shit compared to the most awesome Amarok.

Nothing like the afternoon beer bong of coffee. Their only shortcoming, not enough coffee per beerbonging. Plus I'd like to see maybe a coffee rockstar mixture happen........ yeah

Due to influence from the love moneky I got up and running with Opensolaris on OS X (in parallels) this weekend. I was originally going to install it with VMServer on Gentoo, but realized that it would be much more accessible on my primary unit de computation.

I simply downloaded the 3 Opensolaris files (Nevada release), used cat to concatenate them into a single file, selected Solaris 10 in parallels, selected the image, and it installed without any hang-ups. Ahh yes, and I had to go back and change the memory allocated as it has a 768mb minimum requirement.

My motivation, hack around with zfs (screencasts) and the much talked about DTrace (Video: interview with developers).

Here are some videos with Sun talking about Solaris, zfs, dtrace, and OpenSource: video 1, video 2. I completely agree with the part about the roll of "urban planning" in complex software systems. This seems to hold true for Apple also and is evident in the high quality and user centric software/systems they produce.

DTrace will also be available on OS X Leopard and with a fancy GUI, Xray.