Noel Rappin Writes Here

The end of the repair story

At the end, a very positive experience with Apple support. The repair was free, done when they said it would be done, and all told, I spent less than fifteen minutes in the store between both halves of the visit. Plus, they replaced the top part of my pre-unibody MacBook, which was worn down and discolored from my gunky hands, almost as though they didn’t want an ugly Mac in the field.

Book Status

With the laptop back, I’m back to work, last night going back over the Style chapter. I think now the plan is to do a slightly smaller next beta that would get out next week, just the Coverage and Style chapters, with the next batch, probably the Legacy and redo of the startup example coming shortly on its heels.

Also, the book has somewhat quietly shown up on Amazon and, I presume, other online outlets.

Of course, the beta is still available at PragProg.

Links

Many, many links, as I catch up on an entire week’s worth.

Thoughtbot announces that factory_girl is now split into a separate Rails 3 gem, in much the same way that Cucumber and RSpec are.

Also in Thoughtbot-land, the should_change command has been deprecated from Shoulda.

Jeremy McAnnaly announces the 2010 Ruby Hoedown, after some rescheduling due to the Nashville flooding. Again, it’s the low, low, price of free. I’m hoping to break my 0-for-2010 streak on conference proposals with my submission.

Everyday Rails has a good post about getting Rails 3 and RVM working together.

I haven’t watched this video yet, but a little Don Norman is a good thing, right? (via Joel Spolsky)

Test Inline is a Ruby library from Eric Anderson to put tests in the Ruby source file. Eric freely admits that this is an experiment, which is good because my experience with this kind of tool (Python doctests) is that it gets messy pretty quickly.

Ever think that Lemmings would make a great iPhone game? Me too. Also, the people who have the rights to the code. Coming soon.

I love Steve Martin. He’s posted the rider for his tours. A sample: “BUFFET … Six-packs of any canned beverage for Steve to compare his abs to.”

I’ve been waiting for this: Lifehacker posts some Handbrake presets for iPad and iPhone 4. Seem decent, but a bigger file size than what I had been doing.

Please don’t do this. It’s a bad idea and will make your code harder for other Ruby developers to maintain.

Two from David Chelimsky: Having a topic branch when contributing to git projects, and a change in how views are handled in controller tests in RSpec 2.

I really need to watch this presentation from RailsConf on Beautiful Markup by John Athayde.

Speaking of RailsConf, here’s a retrospective from John Trupiano of the BohConf “unconference” that happened alongside.

Dan Ingalls was one of the people behind Smalltalk 80, here’s an interview with him.

Over at Teach Me To Code, a screencast about setting up a Rails project and writing the first Cucumber feature.

Still in Cucumber, Michael Orr shows how you can use an instance variable to track objects in a Cucumber test. I do this a lot, myself, although I’m not completely convinced that you get a cleaner test suite at the end.

Rands has a great post about his writing process. I love that everybody does this a little differently, although calling what I do a “process” is probably a little much.

Paolo Perrota, author of Metaprogramming Ruby, has a nice note about how great the Ruby community is.

UxMyths seems like a useful site to browse.

Speaking about great writing, I loved, loved the opening of this article by Adam Keys about why he always comes back to TextMate. Also some good comments. I hadn’t thought of the issue exactly this way, but it makes perfect sense.

The Time of Day gem lets you treat ActiveRecord time columns without their date information for certain kinds of comparisons.

Finally

I think I mentioned that I did a talk at Refresh Chicago last week. It was fun, but we think turnout was down due to the tornado warning over Chicago that night – it’s possible the sirens acted as a deterrent. Well, video of that is not up, but here’s a video of the storm that night, featuring lightning striking three Chicago skyscrapers at the same time.