Trevor Berg: The Blog

I’ve started working on a new project I’m calling swagr. swagr will be an open source Cocoa usenet newsreader. The project is in the very early stages, but I have created a git repository for the code:

https://github.com/dlfnation/swagr/tree

I’ve also purchased Aaron Hillegass’ Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (Third Edition) to help guide me through the process.

I always forget I have a blog where I’m supposed to announce everything that I do.

I spent a few hours the last couple of days working on a fun little small project called BinaryURL. It does pretty much the opposite of tinyurl, converts a url to a binary string.

check it out

Geeknews.net has posted a great list of Computer Science resources in case there’s something you need to brush up on.

I was looking up a computer science term on Wikipedia the other week and as is wont to happen, one thing led to another and I was about 5 or 6 articles deep on a trail of discovery and research to build up my knowledge.

As I realized I was randomizing myself and getting way off the original track, I decided to start assembling the links in one location for my own reference if not some other geek without the funds for their own degree.

Yes, there’s much more that I don’t have below, I wound up throttling back quite a bit after a while to leave it as is…for now.

» View the list

I saw this on a job application, and I thought it was clever. You CS people shouldn’t have too hard of a time answering it. 

Answer the following:

147 50 61 65 51 75 77 73 147 50 156 51 75 147 50 156 55 61 51 136 62 55 61 56 71 73 147 50 60 51 75 60

Over the past few days I’ve been looking at some of the plugins/frameworks that can be used with rails to improve testing. I came across this video of Tammer Saleh giving a presentation titled “BDD with Shoulda” at MountainWest RubyConf 2008.  He did a good job giving a brief intro to Shoulda, fixtures, and good testing practices.  For anyone who doesn’t know about Shoulda:

The Shoulda Rails plugin makes it easy to write elegant, understandable, and maintainable tests. Shoulda consists of test macros, assertions, and helpers added on to the Test::Unit framework. It’s fully compatible with your existing tests, and requires no retooling to use.   

Helpers – context and should give you rSpec like test blocks. In addition, you get nested contexts and a much more readable syntax.

Macros – Generate hundreds of lines of Controller and ActiveRecord tests with these powerful macros. They get you started quickly, and can help you ensure that your application is conforming to best practices.

Assertions – Many common rails testing idioms have been distilled into a set of useful assertions.

The presentation is a little over an hour long, but I think it’s definitely worth a watch.

BDD with Shoulda - Tammer Saleh at MountainWest RubyConf 2008

I came across an interesting blog entry by Michael Feather’s on how TDD and Clean Rooms relate to code quality. If you have a few minutes it’s definitely worth a read.

The Flawed Theory Behind Unit Testing by Michael Feathers

So you’re one of the many like me who were unable to attend RailsConf this year in Portland and want to see some of the presentations.  I’ve gathered as many of the presentations, videos, slides as I could find for you.  

Scott Chacon’s Introduction to Git 

Scott gave a great introduction for those of us who have heard about Git, but haven’t yet given it a try.  Scott was nice enough to release his slides from his presentation, as well as add the audio from his presentation to the slides.  

Greg Pollack interviews everyone he can find

Greg wandered around RailsConf with a camera and asked pretty much all the presenters he could find to summarize their presentations.  

 
Railsconf in 36 minutes from Gregg Pollack on Vimeo.

 
RailsConf 2008 David Heinemeier Hansson’s Keynote Video

RailsConf 2008 David Heinemeier Hansson Keynote from daniel wanja on Vimeo.

You can view the slides from all the presentations at the RailsConf 2008 speakers site.
 
I’m continuing to look for additional presentations and I’ll add new ones to this post as I find them.  If you know any that I’m missing drop me a message and I’ll add them.

So for the third time in the past year, I’ve decided to reopen my blog.  I’ll mainly be focusing on ruby on rails related stuff, so watch for some more content in the future.