Left Napa yesterday, the car completely packed with very little room to spare. We're here in San Jose for Steak Party 2.0, a tradition down with here with friends. Left the car with an audio shop so Colleen could plug in her iPhone, or I my Android.
We leave tomorrow to Salt Lake City! Should have some pictures.
Had an idea to write a script for Amazon.com that would download every free book for the Kindle. Simple concept but need much script writing practice.
That's all for today. The next week's updated might be sparse, considering the road trip. I'll do my best to write and share with everyone (or have Colleen dictate for me).
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Friday, July 1, 2011
Late night update
Just a late night update. I started playing around with Watir today, and all I can say is this so far:
The source information is OLD. I understand this is a test app that is probably old now (no updates to Firefox since 3.6? oh boy...), but none of the documentation from online is either written very well or edited. One of the example programs it even came with had a line of code defining a search bar as 'seach,' and then calling on the search later with it spelt correctly. Whoops
This will likely be a great time for me to start digging through a Ruby gem to figure out what is defined in FireWatir's gem and what is not. It'll end up being a week of just testing every little thing that I see, just to see what it does. Oh boy!
I also was introduced to a website today, Weekend Testing. It's a community of testers who do stuff on the weekends, I guess. This weekend will be bad for it--but if the driving schedule goes as planned, I might be able to spend some time on it next Friday and Saturday, just to see what goes down. It looks exciting, none the less!
Getting Zachary's pizza tomorrow. Excited as usual.
The source information is OLD. I understand this is a test app that is probably old now (no updates to Firefox since 3.6? oh boy...), but none of the documentation from online is either written very well or edited. One of the example programs it even came with had a line of code defining a search bar as 'seach,' and then calling on the search later with it spelt correctly. Whoops
This will likely be a great time for me to start digging through a Ruby gem to figure out what is defined in FireWatir's gem and what is not. It'll end up being a week of just testing every little thing that I see, just to see what it does. Oh boy!
I also was introduced to a website today, Weekend Testing. It's a community of testers who do stuff on the weekends, I guess. This weekend will be bad for it--but if the driving schedule goes as planned, I might be able to spend some time on it next Friday and Saturday, just to see what goes down. It looks exciting, none the less!
Getting Zachary's pizza tomorrow. Excited as usual.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Napa Wrap Up
I'M OUT
...almost.This week ramps up to a close early upon realizing I need to move out of this apartment by tomorrow afternoon, and still have things to box up tonight. Packing light--and it's nice because I got rid of all my books (woo Kindle, thanks Colleen!)-- and I should be able to fit my whole apartment in to the trunk and backseat of my Altima. It's all increasingly busy, considering this is the first hour (and only hour) I have to myself today. It's been meeting after phone call after meeting since yesterday, and will not end until Colleen and I leave on Sunday morning.
I have had fun testing out two new products that came out recently: turntable.fm and google+. I moderate my own turntable room (dropturntables, aptly named), and we have about 4 - 5 regulars show up. I'm also at the eventbrite one on occasion--great bunch of people there. Google+ I just hopped on last night, and right now it looks like Wave+ with Facebook. Wasn't a fan of Wave, but I'm excited to see how G+ turns out.
I'm reading a new book: Everyday Scripting with Ruby by Brian Marick. It's a programming book written specifically for testers, so I'm hoping I can finish it up by the end of the weekend and I'll have "some" kind of STE chops with improved Rubying. I'm also getting on Watir to work on some web app testing skills. I like the presentation of Watir, and I think it'll help me get those basics I need to have if my interest in testing continues the way it is.
Starting Sunday, it'll be driving about 10 hours a day for a week straight. I'm hoping to use the blogspace to share my trip with some pictures. Would love to hear back from readers: ideas for on the road? Colleen and I have Pandora, but we know how long that lasts! The last car trip I did was the 2006 drum corps tour with the Vanguard---but I was on a bus, and the driving was all at night, so I slept. Post a comment!
Back to packing...
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Rubying with Regexp
So far Ruby Koans is a lot of review for me. I learned a few new things (a lot about symbols!), but I finally get Regular expressions. This was almost completely new, but I run into the code quite often when looking through examples--most commonly at rubyquiz. Let's see if I can go over all the params from Koans...
Note: Ruby reads from left to right, so it'll return the first string to match from the left. There are some examples of this where you can check for all matches, so I noted those.
''[/text you want to match/] -- checks a string for matching content.
if what you are searching for isn't there, match comes up nil
''[/text you want to match?/] -- the question mark means the last character is optional. so [/oranged?/] checks for orange and oranged, but oranged is optional.
''[/text you want to match+/] -- the plus checks that last character to see if there are more, and will return all of the extra ones.
''[/text you want to match*/] -- asterisk is similar. it's like a combo meal of ? and +, so it returns all of them if that character exists in the string.
array.select { |a| a[/[characters you are checking as options]rest of string/] }
phew that was a long one. this replaces the first character with whatever is in the array. for example, [a/[bcfj]ar/] checks for bar, car, far, and jar.
''[/\d+/] returns all the digits as strings. similarly I could use [/[0-9]+/] as a range.
''[/\s+/] is for whitespace. It claims it's a shortcut, but I don't get that part yet. This is one I need to play around with a bit more.
''[/\w+/] is for words, which is anything A-z and 0-9.
''[/.+/] is for return carriages.
''[/^[characters negated]/] the ^ checks for everything but what's in the match string. Likewise, you can use capitals D, S, and W to negate any of the above checkers.
And for quickies...
[/\Atext/] /A anchors to the beginning, while \z anchors to the end (put \z at the end too!). Likewise, carat (^) and dollar sign ($) anchor to start and end of lines. \b anchors to a word boundary... another one I'd like to test a bit more.
.scan can be used to find all of the matches, and returns them in an array. Useful for finding all the words or numbers in a string.
.sub is used to replace the first, while .gsub is used to replace any time the string is matched.
Okay. That was a lot to take in. I'd like to start looking at more examples of Regexp and how it can be used in context, but in the meantime, back to Koans.
Note: Ruby reads from left to right, so it'll return the first string to match from the left. There are some examples of this where you can check for all matches, so I noted those.
'
if what you are searching for isn't there, match comes up nil
'
'
'
array.select { |a| a[/[characters you are checking as options]rest of string/] }
phew that was a long one. this replaces the first character with whatever is in the array. for example, [a/[bcfj]ar/] checks for bar, car, far, and jar.
'
'
'
'
'
And for quickies...
[/\Atext/] /A anchors to the beginning, while \z anchors to the end (put \z at the end too!). Likewise, carat (^) and dollar sign ($) anchor to start and end of lines. \b anchors to a word boundary... another one I'd like to test a bit more.
.scan can be used to find all of the matches, and returns them in an array. Useful for finding all the words or numbers in a string.
.sub is used to replace the first, while .gsub is used to replace any time the string is matched.
Okay. That was a lot to take in. I'd like to start looking at more examples of Regexp and how it can be used in context, but in the meantime, back to Koans.
More koans, and bedtime. Maybe.
With my domain registered, might as well put it good use. Here's to an exciting year at heypodo.com (which, for the record, doesn't have an index page yet).
About 1/3 through Koans now. Pine never covered symbols, so this last section was mostly new to me. I never understood the purpose of symbols before because they felt a lot like strings to me, but they clearly are not strings. Aye.
About 1/3 through Koans now. Pine never covered symbols, so this last section was mostly new to me. I never understood the purpose of symbols before because they felt a lot like strings to me, but they clearly are not strings. Aye.
Testing, writing, moving update
I'm approaching my last week here in Napa, and the apartment is progressively getting more empty each day as things get sold and so on. Having less distractions is kind of nice, actually. My last few days have been the most productive since the last work day I had, so going back to living with absolutely nothing but a computer and a bed will be a welcoming change.
Today was filled with a lot of reading. That wasn't its original intention, because I don't like staring at the computer screen unless it's work related, but it was in all good purpose. I did learn a lot about context-driven testing, which appears to be the most common testing concept for software. I think the most informative part of it all was that I do a lot of this stuff already. I remember particularly when I had to make a last minute design call on the drill for Vintage's drumline show 'Rhapsody,' and even though I don't like making last minute changes, it was definitely for the better.
One drill move that Lisa designed clearly wasn't working, and the kids were getting frustrated. Why wasn't it working? Partly because some of the kids were moving too far, too early, and one wasn't moving consistently. I ended up breaking down the move into two subsets, because mathematically, it made sense. We were flipping three diagonals from one side of the gym to make one long one on the other, so I had them split the diagonal to make three short straight lines, and the end result was awesome.
Of course, software testing is a bit different, but I love the idea of critical thinking and just figuring things out. I started Koans about 30 minutes ago, and I'm about 5% into it. Going slower than expected, but it's been a long day. Unfortunately, no work on Rails or HTML today as planned, but I do hope to get out the design notebook and work on some website ideas for Connecticut's Best Disc Jockeys. All in due time.
There was an interesting comment on Hacker News about how Blogger hasn't changed over the last four years, compared to other blogging forms such as wordpress. I strangely have to agree, since I used it for my teaching one about that much time ago, but it's friendly territory. It will be nice to complete my own blogging app, since it'll truly be something I can call 'my own.'
Night everyone.
Today was filled with a lot of reading. That wasn't its original intention, because I don't like staring at the computer screen unless it's work related, but it was in all good purpose. I did learn a lot about context-driven testing, which appears to be the most common testing concept for software. I think the most informative part of it all was that I do a lot of this stuff already. I remember particularly when I had to make a last minute design call on the drill for Vintage's drumline show 'Rhapsody,' and even though I don't like making last minute changes, it was definitely for the better.
One drill move that Lisa designed clearly wasn't working, and the kids were getting frustrated. Why wasn't it working? Partly because some of the kids were moving too far, too early, and one wasn't moving consistently. I ended up breaking down the move into two subsets, because mathematically, it made sense. We were flipping three diagonals from one side of the gym to make one long one on the other, so I had them split the diagonal to make three short straight lines, and the end result was awesome.
Of course, software testing is a bit different, but I love the idea of critical thinking and just figuring things out. I started Koans about 30 minutes ago, and I'm about 5% into it. Going slower than expected, but it's been a long day. Unfortunately, no work on Rails or HTML today as planned, but I do hope to get out the design notebook and work on some website ideas for Connecticut's Best Disc Jockeys. All in due time.
There was an interesting comment on Hacker News about how Blogger hasn't changed over the last four years, compared to other blogging forms such as wordpress. I strangely have to agree, since I used it for my teaching one about that much time ago, but it's friendly territory. It will be nice to complete my own blogging app, since it'll truly be something I can call 'my own.'
Night everyone.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Finished a rails app
It took me all day--including several breaks to do some job hunting, updating websites, and buying two domain names--but I finished the whole Ruby on Rails introduction guide, and I understand for the most part what's going on. It seems like Rails is best for multi-user support, which is the main reason why I think startups are so "on it" now, especially the ones that revolve around social networking.
The mvc infrastructure is actually quite a piece of art. Rails is so well integrated within itself that it really isn't that difficult to create and move things around, particularly when you get to writing the different views and methods. Of course, writing views takes some html/js/css knowledge... so I'll get to that. Posted the outcome on github (or should be up shortly after this update).
Gameplan now? Get back to rubying. I fixed up secret santa a bit more so there are 4 less variables and all the data is stored within one array instead of the 4 or 5 I had before. Next step is to implement STDIN to save a group of information into the array, and then it should be at its final stage of development.
Then, it's onto the next ruby quiz I want to check out.
So... new week, new goals. HTML and CSS reviewfest, and if all goes according to plan, get that website cranked out!
The mvc infrastructure is actually quite a piece of art. Rails is so well integrated within itself that it really isn't that difficult to create and move things around, particularly when you get to writing the different views and methods. Of course, writing views takes some html/js/css knowledge... so I'll get to that. Posted the outcome on github (or should be up shortly after this update).
Gameplan now? Get back to rubying. I fixed up secret santa a bit more so there are 4 less variables and all the data is stored within one array instead of the 4 or 5 I had before. Next step is to implement STDIN to save a group of information into the array, and then it should be at its final stage of development.
Then, it's onto the next ruby quiz I want to check out.
So... new week, new goals. HTML and CSS reviewfest, and if all goes according to plan, get that website cranked out!
Rails for Zombies
It took me about 4 hoursish to get through all of Gregg Pollack's Rails for Zombies training, which is really just a short introduction to its infrastructure, the mvc framework, and some quick guides on making models (which looks like are just Ruby classes) views, and controllers. Honestly, I think it was a bit much for me to do over two days. Pollack suggests learning Ruby code first, which after a couple weeks of Rubying, I honestly feel "okay" with it, but aside from some design details, I don't see much of Ruby in Ruby on Rails. Maybe I'm not looking at it correctly, but it felt like a completely new language to me.
I'm going to review all of this tomorrow and post something a bit more insightful to show what was learned and then design a blog app using my own material instead of Google's. Unless this becomes a complete blunder, expect a transition by the end of this week to a own domain, which will include this blog in Rails, a personalized about me to toss the about.me website, and whatever other nonsense I can come up with for it. Should have a better idea of what that will look like tomorrow. In the mean time, time to continue fooling around with Rails.
I'm going to review all of this tomorrow and post something a bit more insightful to show what was learned and then design a blog app using my own material instead of Google's. Unless this becomes a complete blunder, expect a transition by the end of this week to a own domain, which will include this blog in Rails, a personalized about me to toss the about.me website, and whatever other nonsense I can come up with for it. Should have a better idea of what that will look like tomorrow. In the mean time, time to continue fooling around with Rails.
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