April 23, 2010: Still Alive
Top Story
If you think the top story is going to be anything other than the continued launch of Rails Test Prescriptions, well, you probably don’t know me very well. I may not be a marketing genius, but I do know the value of repetition. I mean, if there’s one thing I know, it’s the value of repetition.
Thanks to everybody who made yesterday fun: those of you who bought the book, those of you who blogged or tweeted about the announcement, and anybody who read this. And if you haven’t bought the book yet, well, I’ll repeat myself.
Tab Dump
A couple of quick ones here:
A ruby Mandlebrot set generator short enough to fit in a tweet.
Here’s a Ruby library to the TextCaptcha humane and accessible Captcha library. I really hate twisted image Captcha’s – the Wrox book even has a minimal implementation of this kind of problem-solving Captcha idea.
Git bisect is one of those things you’ll use about once every six months, but when you do, it’ll be totally amazing.
Sarah Allen has some comments onShannon JJ Behrens testing talk. JJ and I worked together about – oy – ten years ago now, where he tried (and temporarily failed) to talk me into switching Python from Java. I find the idea that both of us are now talking about Ruby testing to be wildly funny.
Also, nobody seems to know exactly why Israel has banned the iPad, but Time magazine sees corruption.
Finally
Things that make me happy: Noted character actor William Atherton is interviewed in the Onion AV club, and had two great things to say about one of my favorite movies, Real Genius.
Anywhere I go in the world now, that movie is as popular most anywhere as Ghostbusters or the Die Hards. It’s amazing, and it has a constant following in college kids. It isn’t something that seems to age.
And:
They popped the popcorn for three months. There was a machine in the studio that did nothing all day long but pop popcorn…Then they took it way out to canyon country and a subdivision that was just being built, and they threw it into this house that they pulled down. It was real old-fashioned stuff. Now they’d do it digitally, I guess, but in those days, you had to pop the dang popcorn and put it in a truck and schlep it out to the valley.
And now I’m smiling.