The Good Ship Narcissus

peetypassion: Sign Language: week 75 - Telegraph

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:37:40 +0000

Sign Language: week 75 - Telegraph

Pigeons away!

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:17:16 +0000

Time to see whether they remember who I am. It’s been what, 5 months? I’m also worried I need replies well before January 15, and it’s nearly Christmas.

Chalmers deadline is looming. I wonder how long it takes to post something to Sweden. It’s sounding expensive… though it seems I may be in Norway at the time anyway.

That could complicate things somewhat…

crowth: Posted as a comment in response to Boing Boing’s...

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:30:02 +0000

crowth:

Posted as a comment in response to Boing Boing’s article on Lordy Lordy Lord Mandelson’s plans for file-sharers. (via Graham Linehan)

How to contact Apple support:

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:59:58 +0000

Go through the website, which is no help at all in finding assistance
Fail to find any email contact links
Provide serial number, to be redirected to the pages you have already seen
Attempt to make a genius bar reservation, to be told that the store has no reservations. Ever.
Find telephone support number, which charges per minute, despite being part of the AppleCare package which they sell to you.

This shit is supposed to be good.

Conscious man 'in coma' for 23 years

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:30:00 +0000

Conscious man 'in coma' for 23 years:

guz:

A Belgian man diagnosed as being in a coma for 23 years was actually conscious the whole time.

Poster-child for modern life?

Oops, cliché.

guz: Low Rise by Peter Root | Ubersuper YES, those are...

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:19:11 +0000

guz:

Low Rise by Peter Root | Ubersuper

YES, those are staples.

Awesome.

yknow, scratch that. I am sleepless and my brain isn’t working. I’ll look them up...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:01:33 +0000

yknow, scratch that. I am sleepless and my brain isn’t working. I’ll look them up anyway, who knows. You wouldn’t have suggested them if they were tripe.

p.s. thanks for the suggestions, though this is the only christmas book I might read.

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:53:13 +0000

p.s. thanks for the suggestions, though this is the only christmas book I might read.

Mildly amused / somewhat bemused: two thirds of the girlfriend /...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:50:00 +0000

Mildly amused / somewhat bemused: two thirds of the girlfriend / boyfriend columns are the wrong way round for my last relationship.

Which book should I get for & read over Christmas?

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:50:50 +0000

"Politics is the art of controlling your environment. That is one of the key things I learned in..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:40:00 +0000

“

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

That is one of the key things I learned in these years, and I learned it the hard way. Anybody who thinks that “it doesn’t matter who’s President” has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid War on the other side of the World—or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on public property—or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons—or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.

”

- HST

Projection on buildings - Live performance on Vimeo (via Vimeo)

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:01:10 +0000

Projection on buildings - Live performance on Vimeo (via Vimeo)

Projection on Buildings on Vimeo (via Vimeo)

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 23:59:01 +0000

Projection on Buildings on Vimeo (via Vimeo)

peetypassion: Man/Baby Statue Apparently, the Man Kicking and...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:03:28 +0000

peetypassion:

Man/Baby Statue

Apparently, the Man Kicking and Throwing Babies statue is in a giant sculpture park in Oslo, Norway.

Wait for it… BEST STATUE EVAR

(via The Fuzzy Squid)

You should go, there’s more. It’s pretty in the snow.

http://www.justgiving.com/nofaithschools

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:27:20 +0000

http://www.justgiving.com/nofaithschools

anachronic and vines: the joys of lightly populated namespaces

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:20:00 +0000

I released my first two real open source projects this week, both Ruby. Kind of nice, never thought it would happen, then it just did.

Vines is a (very small currently) bundle of useful general step definitions for Cucumber, it’s not currently rails specific, and I may make rails-specific steps a different include so it can be used for regular ruby projects.

The only step currently available is very simple, but not provided by cucumber. From its own feature tests:

Feature: Should happen steps
  In order to assert errors in my steps
  As a developer
  I want to talk about a step's side effects or consequences

  Scenario: step raises
    Then an error should occur when I eval `raise`

  Scenario: step raises a certain type
    Then an ArgumentError error should occur when I eval `raise ArgumentError`

That’s pretty simple stuff. There was and will be more there, but the code and dependencies had too many rough edges for now.

Anachronic went straight to plugin; in integration testing Paperclip I wanted to know whether deleting site images (my model wrapper for a paperclip image attachment) was cleaning up files correctly. I wanted to do it in Cucumber, and I wanted the steps to be simple.

The idea is very simple really:

When I add a site image
Then the images directory should have changed
When I delete the site image
Then the images directory should be back to how it started off

You could, of course, use git for this, but I didn’t care about file contents, only whether the files still existed. I think it’d make the tests slow. You may also like to use some combination of ls and diff; have fun with those man pages.

Simple solution — snapshot file and directory names recursively, then spot the difference between snapshots.

Wrote some specs, wrote some code, specs passed, put into the rails app as a plugin, wrote steps, green feature. Magic.

So, at last, something other than forks on my github page!

One email: three hours

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:04:51 +0000

Well, maybe it was worth it. Been a while since I head to proof-read something I wrote.

Fingers crossed, a new client.

Faith and the Muse — Shattered in Aspect

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:52:48 +0000

Faith and the Muse — Shattered in Aspect

Blair isn’t president, I got more work, and possibly a new client. Today was good. If only...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:43:22 +0000

Blair isn’t president, I got more work, and possibly a new client. Today was good. If only there were some Sandman left.

Google previews Chrome open source operating system

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:41:45 +0000

Google previews Chrome open source operating system:

All applications are designed to run in a web browser and all the user’s data is stored on Google’s servers.

So basically, thin clients. Yawn. Sun did that a long time ago. And the rest.