abort.u.dot.com

Godspeed to a great senator. He may have had his rough spots in his personal life, but his commitment to this country never wavered. May he rest in peace.

The world won’t be the same without Ted Kennedy.

The fact that Oracle now owns MySQL scares me. I have decided to officially not develop any software using it anymore. I have decided to stick with an old school database I used to use, that is arguably better anyhow. Firebird SQL (used to be Interbase) FTW.

I also finally upgraded wordpress. I’ve been laggin on that.

Well I’ve been working behind the scenes on redfloe. I trimmed a bunch of code out in my latest builds as I have switched directions a bit on the guts of the project. I have changed my unit testing in order to not have to use GWTTestCase’s, which are slow as hell, and makes me not want to run the tests to begin with.

UI Design is going well. Big thanks to neko of n6design for doing all my image work. I am a code monkey, not a graphic designer. He also named redfloe long ago Besides, without his fairly constant motivation, I would have abandoned this project long ago, especially after being laid off by the company who made GWT. Although having time to actually code is nice

Signing out…

-J

R.I.P Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Ed McMahon.

You all will be greatly missed.

I took a few days off of working on the floe to read a book about cleaning up code, naming your variables/functions/classes/etc to make comments almost unnecessary. I was skeptical at first. But I tried a few of the refactoring thing theys suggested on redfloe. So far it reduced the complexity of a few tests and definately got rid of some duplicate code. Woot. Not to mention being able to tell by reading the code WTF is going on without a ton of comments. Remember, small functions doing one thing. If you try to do more, it needs to be split up. I recommend this book: Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship.

Work on redfloe is going well. I have added much more code and tests in the last few weeks. I’ve also got php unit testing integrated into my ant build file now so the php side of things can be tested locally. I’ve gotten into the swing of things for unit testing before writing code. It took some getting used to, but I have seen the benefits enough now to understand how it works.

I’ve got the object (GWT<->JSON/XML<->PHP) serializer classes integrated for the most part. Since I didn’t originally write the code for these particular classes (although I have changed them quite a bit), it’s taking me a bit longer to setup the test suite for this section. I now know understand why people discourage code-first-test-later strategies.

I’ve got my first batch of icons from n6design . n6ko and I have fleshed out some more UI specific things that I hope to implement this week. With any luck I’ll have a GUI to play with soon to start the real testing.

Well I’ve moved abortu, as well as all the other domains to a new server and registrar. Everything *should* be working as usual. Expect some upgrades and new pages soon (I hope)…

So after not working on RedFloe for quite a few months due to time constraints, I finally sat down to work on it. I finally have a grasp on how to integrate GWTTestCase with ant, so now all of my tests finally pass. Slowly, but they pass. Now I can start writing proper test cases for new widget classes. Finally, some progress.

1. Fix broken code.
2. …
3. Profit!

Until next time…

So the initial excitement of Obama being sworn in is finally wearing off. I just have one thing to say: Don’t fuck it up, Obama…

In the light of the ever increasing food shortages across the globe, the G8 summit treats world leaders to an 18 course meal.

“Shortly after saying they were “deeply concerned” about soaring global food prices and supply shortages, world leaders attending the G8 summit in Hokkaido sat down to an eighteen-course gastronomic extravaganza, courtesy of the Japanese government.”

I don’t really need to point out the irony about this headline. I highly recommend reading or watching this segment as Frances Moore Lappé does an excellent job of explaining the current food crisis that has been building for decades. In light of our current economic problems, I have started paying very close attention to the growing food crisis and will detail some of my findings in future entries.