Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 27 Sep 2006 16:14:43 GMT
It seems to be kind of in vogue to point people to Steve Yegge’s blog these days–I’ve seen 2 or 3 people that I read link to him already this week. And I try to avoid me-to-isms. But you probably ought to go read his take on Agile programming. I don’t completely agree with everything that he says, but it’s a fascinating read. Even if he does overstate things slightly–he said that if you ask “[Google’s office] movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.” It’s taken Google’s movers almost a week to throw me out of my office and give it to Steve’s new team. Inaccuracy!
Tags mlp, programming | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:50:56 GMT
I just uploaded my photo montage software to my Subversion server. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but it’s usable. I’ll upload it to RubyForge when I have time, but for now I just want to have it out in the public eye before I start at Google.
Tags photography, programming, rmagick, ruby | 2 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 03 Nov 2005 23:02:49 GMT
Dave Thomas just pointed out a great little hack from the Ruby Extensions Project. They added this little snippet to Object:
def to_proc
proc { |obj, *args| obj.send(self, *args) }
end
and now instead of writing this:
result = names.map {|name| name.upcase}
you can write this:
result = names.map(&:upcase)
The “wave this method over all objects in a collection” idiom is very common in Ruby, and Ruby’s native block syntax isn’t too bad for this use, but it’s not as clean as Python’s list comprehension syntax would be:
result = [n.upper() for n in names]
With the to_proc hack in place, Ruby’s code is a bit cleaner, at the cost of using a non-standard extension to the language. Personally, I’d prefer to see map extended to take an optional symbol, then we could ditch the ugly & when we’re using a single method with no parameters.
Tags programming, ruby | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 24 Aug 2005 02:13:00 GMT
Although blogs are inherently HTML-based, HTML isn’t really a great format for writting plain-text documents. If nothing else, manually adding <p> and </p> around paragraphs interrupts the flow of writing. Most people would prefer to write in a more user-friendly manner, either via a GUI editor or a light-weight markup language like Markdown, which is then translated to HTML automatically. Very few people really want to write raw HTML blog postings on a daily basis.
Out of the box, Typo 2.5 supports the Markdown and Textile markup languages and the SmartyPants HTML-post processing filter, which adds typographical quotes and dashes to HTML. Adding additional filters is difficult because the filter setup is hard-coded into Typo. One of the new features that I’ve been working to add to Typo is the ability to easily add new text filters via filter plugins, similar to the sidebar plugins in Typo 2.5. At the same time, I’ve also added several new filtering plugins that extend Typo’s abilities in a number of useful ways.
The goal of all of this is to make it easier to write using Typo. I’ve tried to find things that cause me pain and then fix them. I want to make it easy to do common writing tasks without having to fire up an external tool. Admittedly, my definition of “common writing tasks” is probably different from most people’s, but the easy ability to extend Typo’s filtering system will allow people to adapt Typo to their own needs without having a deep understanding of Typo’s internals.
Read more...
Posted in Typo | Tags filters, programming, ruby, rubyonrails, typo | 6 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 19 Aug 2005 17:43:45 GMT
Typo development slowed down for a while after we released Typo 2.5.0 so we could make sure that we had a stable release for people to use. It’s been a couple weeks now, and Typo 2.5.5 looks good, so we’ve started working on the next release, which will be called Typo 4.0. We’re going to skip Typo 3.0, because it conflicts with Typo3.
The two biggest changes so far are tags and file upload support. Over the next few weeks we’ll add the beginnings of podcast support, unify our RSS and Atom feed code, and (hopefully) add the filter code that I’ve been working on for the last week. Our current wishlist for Typo 4.0 is available in the Typo wiki.
I’m starting to feel good about my filter code. It’s a huge patch–it currently touches 68 files, not including vendor updates. I have three or four things left on my to-do list, and then I’ll spend a bit of time doing audit, cleanup, and testing. Most likely it’ll be ready by early next week.
Posted in Typo | Tags programming, typo | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 09 Aug 2005 20:54:25 GMT
I updated my Typo to-do list this morning and uploaded it to the Typo wiki.
Hopefully we can get most of those features into the next major Typo release.
Posted in Typo | Tags blog, programming, rubyonrails, todo, typo | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 08 Mar 2005 18:47:02 GMT
I’ve been playing with Trac a bit recently for a hobby project, and I’m really impressed. Trac is an open-source project management application that combines bug tracking, a wiki, and a Subversion browser into a nicely integrated little package. You can think of it as a sort of light-weight do-it-yourself SourceForge, minus the mailing lists and hosted downloads.
One of its cooler features is the ability to provide a single integrated RSS feed that lists SVN checkins, bug tracker progress, and wiki changes all in a single feed.
Unlike certain other bug trackers, Trac’s bug database is actually usable by mere mortals. It does a nice job balancing complexity and simplicity while still being reasonably configurable. For instance, it’s really easy to change Trac’s bug priority and severity options–just run trac-admin on the command line and use its priority and severity commands. Like Joe, I agree that 5 priority levels are at least 2 too many.
Posted in Computer Programming | Tags programming, projectmanagement, subversion, svn, trac | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 14 Oct 2003 23:00:47 GMT
Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt’s The Pragmatic Programmer is one of the best programming books that I’ve read in years. Dave’s talk at last year’s Ruby Conference was one of the highlights of the event for me. Now, they’re back with a pair of new books:
It’s been a busy couple of months here as we prepare to launch our
new book-printing imprint, The Pragmatic Bookshelf. We spent the
year writing the first two books, Pragmatic Version Control and
Pragmatic Unit Testing. [PragDave]
Time for two more entries on my to-read list.
Posted in Books, Computer Programming | Tags books, pragmaticprogrammers, programming, ruby | no comments
