Posted by Doug
Thu, 09 Mar 2006 13:49:42 GMT
Yes, our dog is still a chewing machine. Carla recently told of Kozmo’s love for bananas. Well, last night was the worst. Kozmo pulled Joshua’s pinewood derby car off the middle of the counter (reaching past the bananas) and proceeded to destroy it. Not just a little teeth marks here an there that might be sanded out. No, the entire front end of the car is toothpicks. It really was a crushing blow. The race is in just a little more than two weeks and now we have to completely start over. Of course, Carla’s pretty upset. Josh was also upset but took the news well. I think I did a pretty good job of walking the line between “this is really bad news and I’m sorry” versus “hey, we still have plenty of time to start over”. And really, this is good news/bad news. Of course, it does suck that the car was destroyed. On the other hand it means I’ll be spending all day Saturday with Josh catching back up.
Posted in Family, Josh | 8 comments
Posted by Doug
Thu, 09 Mar 2006 13:16:20 GMT
I have an “older” 12” Apple Powerbook with built in Bluetooth. This year I have been trying to reduce the clutter of my desk and my bag by getting bluetooth devices without wires. The three areas I’ve been working on are the keyboard, mouse, and headset. I’ll write about the headset later. I love my Apple Bluetooth keyboard. It’s totally awesome. I’m very sad about bluetooth mice; however.
I have tried three Bluetooth mice:
I returned the first two and as of right now the third is sitting unused. Honestly, I think the problem is in my Powerbook. The newer powerbooks and the Macbook pro all have a newer chipset for Bluetooth that supports v2 of the standard. Mine only supports v1.3 of the standard. I don’t exactly know what all that means, but my understanding is that the newer standard is (among other things) higher bandwidth. Who knows? Maybe the newer chipset is higher power too.
I think my problem is that I just have too many devices operating in the 2.4GHz range. I have a cordless phone on my desk that’s 2.4GHz. I have a GSM cell phone with Bluetooth. I have two (!) bluetooth headsets that are 2.4GHz. I have a Bluetooth keyboard operating at 2.4GHz. I have my Powerbook with built in WiFi also operating at 2.4GHz. Last but not least, the Airport Extreme basestation for my home WiFi network is sitting a few feet away…
Maybe all those things are supposed to be able to work together. For the most part they do. However, mice seem like they’d be more impacted by lost packets. It stands to reason, if a mouse is 800dpi and you move the mouse one inch then for smooth tracking 800 packets will have to be sent “across the wire”.
Rumor has it my Macbook pro is supposed to arrive Real Soon Now. I’m pretty much waiting to do anything until I get that machine with it’s fancy-dancy Bluetooth chipset. I suspect all of the mice I’ve tried would work just fine as long as you have the newer Bluetooth chipset.
Posted in Hardware | 5 comments
Posted by Doug
Wed, 08 Mar 2006 13:43:13 GMT
At last night’s XP Cinci we did an interesting exercise called “The Fishbowl”. Mark Windholtz setup his powerbook with a terminal, Safari, TextMate and a time tracking application he had been working on. We then each took turns pair programming on the big screen. While there were two of us “at the console” all the time, we swapped one of them out every 10 minutes.
The exercise was interesting for several reasons. Mostly it turned out to be a good example of what test driven development looks like in Ruby on Rails. The skill level of xp-cinci is split pretty evenly. About half of us have done significant RoR development and the other half is either just interested or just learning. Regardless of skill level though, no one was going to code in public at an XP meeting without writing tests. The best way to learn TDD is by doing. Until you’ve lived through the development cycle of TDD it’s hard to really grasp what it feels like.
The other benefit from the exercise was a fairly lively discussion on “this is how we do it in Rails” versus “this is what I’m used to in Java.” Most of xp-cinci comes from a strong Java background. Even though about half of us are “ruby nubies,” pretty much everyone has a very strong developer background with one technology or another. Here’s a for-instance. I coded up a method that used MyModel.find_by_id(params[:id]) and was asked why I used find_by_id rather than just find. I said that I liked how find_by_id returned nil so I could use it as a false value when doing error checking. As a long-time Java smart-guy, Ed Summerfield was pretty quick to jump on this as a bad practice. He demonstrated how his Rails controllers looked using begin and rescue. I’m not entirely convinced that assigning nil to an object as a fail condition is bad, but his code looked fairly neat with all his error trapping in rescue blocks.
While the skill levels of various members varied, our application we worked on wasn’t really the typical “hello world” style application of tutorials. We started with a working application. Mark and Scott are actually using the application as part of their consulting work at Rails Studio. This gave us the chance to work in a more “normal” fare. We had an existing database we were migrating; we had existing code we had to live within; and we had a “real” customer looking for “real” improvements to their application.
Last night’s meeting was different from our usual fare. It was back to a hands on style where we actually wrote code. While we didn’t get very far in terms of feature points, I think we made a lot of progress in general understanding of both coding practices and Rails development. I hope we continue doing more and talking less.
Posted in Community, Programming, Ruby on Rails, Test Driven Development | Tags Cincinnati, Rails, Ruby, testing | 5 comments
Yes, our dog is still a chewing machine. Carla recently told of Kozmo’s love for bananas. Well, last night was the worst. Kozmo pulled Joshua’s pinewood derby car off the middle of the counter (reaching past the bananas) and proceeded to destroy it. Not just a little teeth marks here an there that might be sanded out. No, the entire front end of the car is toothpicks. It really was a crushing blow. The race is in just a little more than two weeks and now we have to completely start over. Of course, Carla’s pretty upset. Josh was also upset but took the news well. I think I did a pretty good job of walking the line between “this is really bad news and I’m sorry” versus “hey, we still have plenty of time to start over”. And really, this is good news/bad news. Of course, it does suck that the car was destroyed. On the other hand it means I’ll be spending all day Saturday with Josh catching back up.
