February 24, 2009
Just finished reading Desert Solitaire
. Amazed. Did not want this book to end. Here’s my quick review:
A philosophy of the concrete.
Edward Abbey’s love letter to the Utah desert is a pleasantly intoxicating sensory overload. Abbey magnifies for us every spec of grit, gives us a sense of the desert’s abundance through inventories of flora, fauna, rock, and sky, and leaves us with a taste of nature’s infinity.
What’s so unusual about Abbey is that, though he is naturally a philosopher, he avoids any tendencies towards the usual mediations on bottomless-pit concepts like being, existence, and essence. On the contrary, Abbey is enamoured of the physical world and the lush vocabulary that describes it: “…I can see the princess plume with its tall golden racemes; the green ephedra or Mormon tea…pepperweed, bladderweed, snakeweed, matchweed, skeleton weed – the last named so delicately formed as to be almost invisible.”
While the epic catalogs thrilled my city-dulled senses, Desert Solitaire also inspired thought. Death, tourism, solitude, companionship, greed, government, humor, and home; Abbey’s range is astounding. As is his honesty. For though many readers may find him querulous, even bitter, Abbey is frank enough to let his personal contradictions shine through. The result is a human portrait as vivid and real as the natural desert world he evokes.
February 08, 2009
Customizable and Quick
I wanted to redesign my blog and host it on my VPS, but two obstacles stood in my way. First, I had been using Wordpress, but had no desire to dig into the tarpit of Wordpress theme design. Second, I wanted to use Ruby, but didn’t care for the overhead of running Typo, Mephisto, or even an improvised Sinatra- or Camping-based blog engine.
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December 21, 2008
What’s the best way to annotate an electronic document with revision notes and comments? Mainstream word-processing products include revision tools, but they’re complex and only work in the context of this or that piece of software.
It turns out that the simplest thing that could possibly work also works in all text-editing situations: bracket notation. I first read about bracket notation in an article on the Humanized blog and thought it quite clever. So, when a friend recently called on me to make some revisions to a letter he’d sent me via email, bracket notation came to mind and fit the bill perfectly.
Not entirely satisfied with the Humanized system, I invented my own derived form. The general formula is as follows:
([old text] [new text] [notes/reviser])
The third bracket, containing any notes or the reviser’s name, is optional.
To demonstrate bracket notation in action, I’ve provided a sample below. The text comes from a slightly modified (for demonstration) passage from Strunk and White.
Draft
The most powerful writing is concise. A sentence should not contain any unnecessary words; a paragraph no unnnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine should have no unnecessary parts.
With Bracket Notation
([The most powerful] [Vigorous]) writing is concise. A sentence should ([not contain any] [contain no]) unnecessary words([;] [,]) a paragraph no ([unnecessary] [unnecessary]) sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine ([should have no] []) unnecessary parts ([Well said!]).
Revised
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
October 05, 2008
Explanations of Behavior-Driven Development often contain much nuance and noise. This FAQ is an attempt to provide a straightforward account of BDD, especially for beginning practitioners and those who have never quite understood it. To do so, this article tries to work around the three biggest obstacles to understanding Behavior-Driven Development: the main emphasis, the word “test,” and the word “behavior” itself.
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September 12, 2008
Updated 10/1/08: Modified for the release of Shoulda 2.0.
Updated 9/26/08: Fixed some typos and omissions. Added should_route
and should_render_with_layout (Thanks to Dan Croak and Michal Szajbe).
I’ve created a basic Shoulda cheat sheet. Along with Topfunky’s "Ruby on
Rails Testing Cheat
Sheet":http://nubyonrails.com/articles/ruby-rails-test-rails-cheat-sheet, it
should be a good reference, especially for those migrating from RSpec.
August 17, 2008
Engineers and designers must collaborate. Whether building a bridge, a commercial jet, or a web application, the most elegant solution will result from an open dialog between design and engineering. Apple understands this. So does Boeing, with its notion of the design/build team. This sort of cooperation will always be important. Big Contrarian recently wrote about the fallacy of thinking otherwise:
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August 13, 2008
Shoulda
What’s the best Rails testing framework? The one that makes your testing life most enjoyable, of course. For me, this has been RSpec, but I’m beginning to prefer Shoulda.
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