Anthony Bailey Feed Public Domain Dedication

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This tumblelog is a noisy stream of consciousness from Anthony Bailey. (And not Amazon.)

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For a lower traffic, more obsessively edited Anthony, see the real blog.

July 5

Ruby: Alternative action

Here’s an abstract description of a coding pattern in the Ruby language.

I often find myself uncomfortably coding an alternation like this one.

Now, moving details of the edge-case behavior into its own method is great, because it lets me concentrate on it in a context where it isn’t a distracting detail.

But creating this context has cost me; I don’t like the code for act, because most of it is about things other than the natural implementation, which is hiding off in another method.

Yesterday in Noel Rappin’s “Getting Started With Rails Testing”, I saw a concrete example of another formulation that I prefer.

(My #footnote is that in the unlikely scenario where the natural implementation of edge_case_step_2 can evaluate to false, you’ll need to stuff some extra truth in there somehow.)

I like this because it reads naturally, and is shorter due to the abbreviating power of the Perlish “and” for conditional actions.

[tag: software_development]

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June 19
Alice and Kev is a “real life” Sims 3 story, told with images from and textual descriptions of unfolding events in that game/world. The author Robin Burkinshaw set up a homeless father and daughter, and watches the story that has emerged. He makes wonderfully artful choices in his character setting, occasional intervention and narrative interpretation; but the game itself comes across as an equal creative partner. Fascinating concept. And the tale is really compelling. This is the only soap in my feed reader. (I have little interest in an ontology debate, but, tag: machinima)

Alice and Kev is a “real life” Sims 3 story, told with images from and textual descriptions of unfolding events in that game/world.

The author Robin Burkinshaw set up a homeless father and daughter, and watches the story that has emerged. He makes wonderfully artful choices in his character setting, occasional intervention and narrative interpretation; but the game itself comes across as an equal creative partner.

Fascinating concept. And the tale is really compelling. This is the only soap in my feed reader.

(I have little interest in an ontology debate, but, tag: machinima)

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June 13
Progression of feelings about meta-programming. Scary and Bad: People are wary of meta-programming and don’t use it much Scary and Good: people begin to see the value of meta-programming but are still uncomfortable with using it. Easy and Good: as people get comfortable they begin to use it too much, which can complicate the code-base. Easy and Bad: people are wary of meta-programming and realize that it’s very useful in small doses. (From a longer article by Martin Fowler examining the use of Ruby at Thoughtworks.)

Progression of feelings about meta-programming.

  • Scary and Bad: People are wary of meta-programming and don’t use it much
  • Scary and Good: people begin to see the value of meta-programming but are still uncomfortable with using it.
  • Easy and Good: as people get comfortable they begin to use it too much, which can complicate the code-base.
  • Easy and Bad: people are wary of meta-programming and realize that it’s very useful in small doses.

(From a longer article by Martin Fowler examining the use of Ruby at Thoughtworks.)

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May 25

Tiny activity

I recently did a little rewiring of the technologies behind the on-line representation of me. Almost certainly unwarranted given how little watched and how inactive I am, but it means this post gets an apt title, and the approaches were interesting for their own sake.

Firstly, a little vanity. I’m pretty happy using anthonybailey.net as my home on the Net, but it can be incoveniently long sometimes. So I registered antb.me/ as a tiny URL vanity domain, and wired up my blog framing machinery so that I can shorten e.g. http://anthonybailey.net/tumblelog/2009/03/30/a-happy-accident-memetics-and-pairing to antb.me/t214 if I want to.

Secondly, some aggregation. I display a headlines summary as part of my homepage. This used to be generated from a special-purpose merge of my blog and tumblelog feeds, but I am a little active on sites that I don’t own as well, and activity streams are all the rage. So, now it’s powered by a FriendFeed blend of these blogs together with comments tracked by the excellent Disqus and BackType services. (This is still imperfect. Ideally, FriendFeed wouldn’t abbreviate my blog content and then the feed itself would be a more useful read. Actually, ideally trackback would have caught on enough that I could comment on other blogs by posting on my own, but that wishful distributive thinking just hasn’t worked out.)
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May 21

Space Elevator Pitch

<dl>
  <dt>space elevator pitch</dt>
  <dd>
    When a "great new business idea" takes
    so long to describe you know it can't work.
  </dd>
</dl>
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May 19
Dollhouse is well worth watching. The first season of Joss Whedon&#8217;s latest TV show ended in the US ten days ago, got renewed at the end of last week. I plan to write a proper review at some point, but wanted to give two thumbs up in the meantime since it starts on Sci-Fi here in the UK on Tuesday evening.

Dollhouse is well worth watching.

The first season of Joss Whedon’s latest TV show ended in the US ten days ago, got renewed at the end of last week. I plan to write a proper review at some point, but wanted to give two thumbs up in the meantime since it starts on Sci-Fi here in the UK on Tuesday evening.

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May 9
“ Uncle Bob is trying to create a world where nobody ever got fired for writing a unit test. Giles Bowkett worries about overprofessionalism in software development. I think the warning is way premature, but I like the phrasing.
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April 24

Buzz Out Loud discuss a partial brain simulation.

  • Tom Merritt: [The researchers] can trace back every activity of every molecule in every cell, every connection and see how the memory was formed... in ten to twenty years they may be able to create an entire brain
  • Natali DelConte: Essentially then you upload experiences in the same way you do in the matrix, you can just plug in and... then I'm going to know ju-jitsu and you should all just watch out.
  • Tom Merritt: The thing is, you won't be able to know whether you're in a real brain or not... they could just make infinite copies of you... and how do you know you're you any more?
  • Natali DelConte: Why do I care? *I know ju-jitsu.*
  • (from Buzz Out Load podcast #958.)
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April 23
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Continuous deployment is a provocative phrase. The recent blog post by Timothy Fitz may have produced as much heat as light and the inevitable “yeah, but we can’t because…” but the concept provokes good conversation in this Technometria interview (54min) where he and Phil Windley discuss the underlying driver (basically lean product development involving the end-user earlier) and nearby thoughts such as YAGNI in end-to-end test design, lessening the pain of load-testing in production, managing intermittent test fails, etc.
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April 21
Is the Supremacy of OOP Over? Thoughtful article advocating less ceremony and fewer objects over at (irony!) Object Mentor.
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