Categories
Agile Rails Ruby

DRYing out model specs

[Updated 14/3/07: corrected specify_attributes as per Paul’s comment]
[Updated 18/12/07: modified to avoid crazy RSpec errors]

A week or so ago I wrote about writing specs for simple pieces of functionality (particularly those that are arguably just configuration, like Rails validations). I argued that it’s important to test-drive even the simple things – however, the amount of test code can get out of hand.

Categories
Agile Ruby Software

Testing trivialities … and double-entry bookkeeping

From time to time I end up in a discussion (as often as not with myself) about the point at which something is so trivial that it doesn’t justify creating a unit test (or behaviour spec, in more BDD-like language).

Categories
Agile General nonsense

InfoQ interview Mary and Tom Poppendieck about Lean

See the video here.

I’ll get round to watching the whole thing eventually, but first, use the link underneath the video to skip to “What are some of the other principles of Lean?”

I never realised that Tom Poppendieck was such an accomplished ventriloquist!

Categories
General nonsense Software

Out of step

More proof, as if it were needed, that I’m not up-to-date with the latest fashions.

Just as I’m teetering on the brink of switching from Safari to Firefox at home (mainly for all that plugin goodness), I read that Firefox’s market share is down, and Safari’s is up.

[tags]firefox, safari, browser wars[/tags]

Categories
BT Java Web21C

BT’s Java SDK part two: making phone calls

Yesterday we saw how easy it is to send text messages using the SDK, so now let’s try making a phone call.

Categories
BT Java Web21C

BT’s Java SDK

As I mentioned recently, I now work in the Web21C SDK team. The SDK provides a simple API for programmatically accessing various web services that BT provides, including SMS, conference calls and location services.

The SDK is in public beta, and is currently free (with daily usage limits). Up to now it’s only been available for those crazy .NET folks, but the next release (on Monday, all being well) will extend that to Java, PHP and Python. Rumour has it that Ruby’s in the works too.

I’ve been having a play with the Java version – here’s a sneak preview…

Categories
Agile Enterprise

Cultural blocks to adoption of agile development

A recent article in the New York Times describes the issues of introducing ‘The Toyota Way’ to non-Japanese factories.

Categories
Apple

Apple and DRM-free music

I’ve never quite understood the attitude of people who won’t buy an iPod for the sole reason that the iTunes music store uses DRM – after all, no-one forces iPod owners to buy music from iTunes, rather than ripping it from CDs they own or obtaining unprotected MP3s elsewhere. As DRM schemes go, FairPlay isn’t too bad (allowing you to burn the music to a CD, for example).

Categories
Web 2.0

The blog as online identity

In You Are Not a Username, Jason Kolb suggests that the blogosphere is really just a large, losely-coupled social network, and that your identity on that network is your blog’s URL, not a username.

I think this is an area that needs to be explored further because I really don’t like the concept of having a separate account at every site I belong to. It really should revolve around my personal Web site, wherever that may be, and that should be the end of it. It’s a simple matter of relabeling the blogosphere as a social network and layering some existing technology on top of it to add some more value.

This sounds very much like the type of thing you can do with OpenID. For instance, using the OpenID Comments for WordPress plugin, your blog becomes an OpenID server, and you can identify yourself on other OpenID-enabled sites simply by specifying your blog’s URI as the OpenID provider.

[tags]identity, openid, blogosphere, community[/tags]

Categories
BT

A gentle nudge

…to Alkesh “the one without a blog” Vaghmaria to get a real post up :-)