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Explaining Social Places

Posted by Doug Thu, 06 Apr 2006 12:50:11 GMT

I had a conversation with a cousin of mine this weekend about her teenage kids using a social networking site. I think it was facebook, but it could have been myspace. She didn’t really know. She demonstrated some of the same “I don’t get it” mentality that Bill O’Reilly does in this video. (thanks for the link)

Danah Boyd is a PhD student at UC Berkeley. O’Reilly introduces her as an “anthropologist studying the Internet.” The story of the day is some 16 year old girl who was arrested for child pornography by publishing photos of herself on myspace. Bill has Danah on to explain what this stuff is all about. She really does do a pretty good job. I’m not an O’Reilly fan and almost never watch the show; however, I hope he has her on more often to explain that intarweb thing more often.

She said something really interesting about teenagers and social web sites. Bill asked her why they spend so much time on the web talking to their friends. Why not meet in person? Her response was that teenagers use many mediums to chat and hang out with their friends: phones, IM, and social networks. She said they would probably prefer to hang out in real space; but many parents don’t allow them to troll the neighborhood (my words) for fear of their safety.

It’s an interesting loop. As a parent I worry a great deal about just letting my kids ride their bikes where ever. When I was a kid, we did. The neighborhood was pretty much mine to roam. So, we keep our kids home to keep them safe. Kids wanting to hang out with kids, they turn to the Internet to socialize. But now we’re afraid (and rightly so) of the same people who may harm our kids physically harming them online.

Posted in Community, Family, Internet | 5 comments

Testing Rails Helpers

Posted by Doug Fri, 31 Mar 2006 18:52:40 GMT

I’ve asked Scott four times now how write functional tests for helper methods. He’s replied the same all four times, and this time I’m going to “remember” it…

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../test_helper'

class HelperTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  include ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper
  include ActionView::Helpers::TagHelper
  include ApplicationHelper
  # include whatever helpers you want to test here, sometimes you'll need
  # to include some of the Rails helpers, as I've done above.

  def test_some_helper
  end
end

By including the ApplicationHelper in your test class, you have all the methods defined on that class available as local functions. If you have helpers in other classes, you’d need to include those as well.

Posted in Ruby on Rails, Test Driven Development | no comments

Gender Programming

Posted by Doug Fri, 31 Mar 2006 15:35:32 GMT

While I’m blogging family stuff, I’ll share a funny story. This is convincing evidence of genetic gender programming.

I came upstairs the other day to find my four year old daughter, Tiffany, and my five year old son, Justin, in what seemed to be a knock-down, drag-out fight. While no actual blows had been thrown, tempers were pretty high. “No! You do it!” “I’m not going to do it! You do it!”

Turns out Justin had lifted the toilet seat and was refusing to put it back down. Tiffy had to go potty, but was also refusing to put the seat down. For the record, I sided with Tiffy and made Justin put the seat back down.

Posted in Family, Humor | no comments