I’ve been using IMAPCleanse to clean out my list inboxes and have discovered that I get about 500 emails a day from mailing lists. I read no more than ten to twenty mails out of all those, and respond to maybe two of the mails I’ve read. I want a bayesian filter for my mail that tells me what to read. Priming the filter with...

* The activity must present just the right amount of challenge: If the activity is too hard, we become frustrated; if too easy, boredom ensues.* There must be clear and unambiguous goals in mind.* There needs to be clear-cut and immediate feedback about the activity's success.* Finally, our focus during the activity must center on the present -...

The RDoc for your favorite testing toolset is now online at zentest.rubyforge.org/. Strangely, my uploading tasks updates the RDoc every time I run it. Maybe I have the wrong task on the right hand side. desc 'Upload RDoc to RubyForge' task :upload => :rdoc do user = "#{ENV['USER']}@rubyforge.org" project = '/var/www/gforge-projects/zentest'...

The RDoc for your favorite testing toolset is now online at zentest.rubyforge.org/. Strangely, my uploading tasks updates the RDoc every time I run it. Maybe I have the wrong task on the right hand side. desc 'Upload RDoc to RubyForge' task :upload => :rdoc do user = "#{ENV['USER']}@rubyforge.org" project = '/var/www/gforge-projects/zentest'...

You really might think this is a strange thing to say, despite how awesome some people say it is, it still sucks. It doesn’t suck because it doesn’t work well, it sucks because its insides still bear the scars of its birth. My first version of autotest was written at OOPSLA 2005 after seeing Don Roberts and John Brandt show off a...

You really might think this is a strange thing to say, despite how awesome some people say it is, it still sucks. It doesn’t suck because it doesn’t work well, it sucks because its insides still bear the scars of its birth. My first version of autotest was written at OOPSLA 2005 after seeing Don Roberts and John Brandt show off a...

At both Canada on Rails and the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference I watched talks on Behavior Driven Development with RSpec, the former given by Dave Astels and the latter by Steven Baker. At SVRC one person asked why we need a new testing framework and Steven replied that BDD changes the way you think about TDD. As I gained experience with TDD my...

At both Canada on Rails and the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference I watched talks on Behavior Driven Development with RSpec, the former given by Dave Astels and the latter by Steven Baker. At SVRC one person asked why we need a new testing framework and Steven replied that BDD changes the way you think about TDD. As I gained experience with TDD my...

I just completed my presentation on Distributed Ruby an Introduction and Overview at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference. Free of charge you can download a PDF of the slides (720k) or the Keynote original (544k, Apple Keynote only). Now that I have two outlines of more DRb functionality I should seriously consider writing a book on it.

I just completed my presentation on Distributed Ruby an Introduction and Overview at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference. Free of charge you can download a PDF of the slides (720k) or the Keynote original (544k, Apple Keynote only). Now that I have two outlines of more DRb functionality I should seriously consider writing a book on it.

Geoff brings us a movie of autotest in action and has this to say: My development process has recently been supercharged by autotest, a part of the ZenTest package. [...] The revolutionary part of this is that it speeds development by helping you develop without needing to open your web browser! I find myself thinking more about the functional...

Geoff brings us a movie of autotest in action and has this to say: My development process has recently been supercharged by autotest, a part of the ZenTest package. [...] The revolutionary part of this is that it speeds development by helping you develop without needing to open your web browser! I find myself thinking more about the functional...

A week or so ago I managed to chase down the “undefined method for Fixnum” bug to the compiler flags -g -O1 -pipe -fno-common -DRUBY_EXPORT -fschedule-insns2. For now you can get rid of the bug by compiling -O1 instead of switching to gcc3. I haven’t had time to track it down further, mostly because I ran out of time and the...

Today ZenTest crossed one thousand downloads! The latest release of ZenTest contains zentest, Test::Rails and the incredibly cool (and my personal favorites) unit_diff and autotest. ZenTest is my secret weapon for speedy, bug free development. autotest keeps me focused by intelligently rerunning my tests as I modify my code while unit_diff lets...

I use dircproxy to maintain my IRC connection to #ruby-lang so I can flip through the scrollback when I rejoin. Unfortunately tons of people come and go from #ruby-lang during the course of a day. All these quits and joins get logged and all of them get sent when I reconnect by default, which can take ten to twenty seconds. Flipping through the...