November 2007

Turns out the Republic of the Congo is not the same country as the Democratic Republic of the Congo… And some disturbing reports from the DRC :/.

An interesting day in mapping 2.0 today, with the beta release of the NZ National Broadband Map project, and Google Maps’ upgrade to show terrain shading.

Cool video, turns out wolves can fish for salmon, not unlike bears.

Today I went along to the first AGM for the IEEE New Zealand Central section. Our AGM was kindly hosted by Mike Brown of the Telecom Network Integration Lab here in Wellington, and he gave us a tour of the network testbed facilities (read: racks of toys) there.

Youtube brings us this brill video of ‘just in time business processes’ in a Bangkok market with a train track running through the middle of it.

For most apps, this is where you get the biggest pay rate of bugs squashed to time spent. What to test, what not to test, and some inflammatory comments about stubbing out too much.

Breaking avocado news: if you put them in the fridge, they go all weird. Like, hard weird.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks – spring has hit and the BBQs are out – one at S&J’s, one at Meg’s Dads’ place on Guy Fawkes (with excellent fireworks views), and finally a great Kiwiana-themed BBQ & party at Vicki & Si’s.

In MVC testing we test that each of parts of our application behave. Testing them separately makes our tests faster to write, faster to run, and reduces rework when we make changes to the app. Covers when to write the tests, and Test::Unit vs. RSpec.

Catching up on life blogging… Late last month we had Sarah & Tim’s 30th birthday party.

Before we can get stuck into how to test each bit of our application, we need to be clear about what we need to cover.

Intro to a mini-series of articles with advice and pointers on practical, pragmatic testing for Ruby on Rails applications, based on my recent WellRailed presentation on the subject.