I'm working my way through both Avdi Grimm's Exceptional Ruby and 'Kestrels, Quirky Birds and Hopeless Egocentricity' by Reginald Braithwaite (aka raganwald).

The former is about handling exceptions in Ruby with grace, even preventing them in some case. The latter is about a crazy thing called a combinator, which is a . . .

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The task: write a test step that verifies an image is in the correct aspect ratio. On our first pass, we can:

1. verify exact pixel dimensions
2. check the request url for an aspect in the request
3. assert the proportions of the actual image

Exact pixel dimensions

Then /^the image dimensions are (\d+) by (\ . . .

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I have a test suite that currently takes 4:30 to run, and I guessed that it's the browser slowing it down. My tests use cucumber, so these hooks take care of stateful tests while cutting down time to run for every other test:

Before('@stateful') do |scenario|
 kill_browser
end

After('@stateful') do | . . .

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Guava is a time saver. I was reviewing some code, and came across the following method:

protected List<Map<String, Object>[]> buildPages(List<Map<String, Object>> articles, Integer perPage) {
 int index = 0;
 Map<String,Object>[] page = null;
 for (Map<String, Object> a : articles) {
 if . . .

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rube_goldberg.java

Two years ago, I ended up creating a functional test codebase that took at its peak four hours to run. Considering we had over 1500 tests, this seems reasonable, but the tests were fragile in several ways.

• Since we were relying on data, tests could become fragile or have race conditions.
• Database . . .

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The more I research languages for my personal enrichment, the more I like Go.

For one thing, their documentation is excellent. They explain not only how Go works, but also why. The FAQ is great to get your feet wet, but clearly the best document is Effective Go, which explains go's idioms in detail.

godoc is likewise . . .

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I recently found a 1993 Now Hear This! SW2Pi 10" sub and the accompanying amplifier, the 200w SA-2 from Craig's List. It had a problem, according to its previous owner. It basically had an 'unmusical' sound when connected via its RCA inputs. This makes it a great deal if I can fix it and integrate it into my system, so I . . .

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