So, I've agreed to help plan the WNY Ruby meet-ups. This will be in addition to the monthly estrip night outs that I've been setting up, and the monthly photo meet-ups that I run.

I just need to find a way to either: combine them all into one event, or start a social event planning business :)

Anyone out there who's interested in Ruby let me know if you want to join up with the user group.

Hey, if you're coming at 8pm (instead of being fashionably late) to the (e:strip) party and want to carve pumpkins with Matthew and I, bring one if you can, but if not let me know and I'll snag a few extra that night otherwise.

I'll pick up some lights to use in them, so don't worry about candles or the like.

Do I get balloons?

(You can totally skip reading this journal, I am writing this for me and my happiness.)

This is the best thing ever. I am so glad that I took the time to look at this a few weeks ago after sort of putting it off for the last six months. I won't bore you all with the details (that's what (e:james) is around for), but I found a super awesome new tool for testing programs, I can't believe I didn't check it out six months ago when I first heard about it. (rspec)

Basically, instead of unit tests you write a live spec, that is continuously run as you code that notifies you of the status of all your tests open each save of a file. So now I don't even have to run my tests anymore, the freakin computer does it for me, and pops up a discrete message in the corner of the screen letting me know what's going on.

Happy tests:


Sad tests:


And writing tests with the new tool is also so much cleaner and nicer.

Old way (just random made up examples):

def test_something
  File.open("/tmp/file", 'W') do |f|
    f << test_data
  end 
  assert_equal "/tmp/file", Retrieve.file, "Should have found it!"
end

New way:

it "should find file path" do
  Retrieve.file.should equal("/tmp/file")
end

But, that is a bad example because it doesn't show all the mocking, like:

Retrieve.file("config") # => can not find
Retrieve.stub!(:file).expects("config").and_returns("/tmp/file")
Retrieve.file("config") # => "/tmp/file"

So that you can completely decouple all your tested classes from each other and external output, thus only testing very specific pieces of logic, and making testing ten times easier because you never have to set up infrastructure for it to work.

You can also just have empty tests, which act like a todo list - they show up when the tests run as pending, so it also acts like a roadmap.

I love Halloween, mostly for the pumpkins, the pumkin carving, and the pumpkin-seed eating. (e:James) and I went and bought pumpkins today, yay!!!

Also I think I will be dressing up for the Halloween party as either a leopard (in honor of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard) or else Speed Racer. I'll have to see which I can scramble to put together this week.

Finding a blue helmet might be harder then finding spots.