(The init method on an instance of a subclass of NSObject was called. I don’t know why init and not initialize. I’ve got a lot to learn.)

In retrospect I think iTunes is not the right tool for this job. It’s a hammer, not a scalpel. It doesn’t give you a lot of fine control, and it takes more energy than the task really warrants. For example, sometimes I need to find a specific track in the library. The API iTunes offers through Scripting Bridge doesn’t let me look up a track by multiple criteria (track 28 from the album “Music Every Day” in MP3 format) - it just gives me the same keyword search you find in the UI. So I can search for the album “Music Every Day” and then loop through the returned tracks looking for the one I need. It gets the job done, but it’s not ideal.

So if I were starting over I might use LAME and RubyMp3info, or something. But it was interesting to get some practice with MacRuby, and if I ever decided to put a GUI on this it’ll be good to have had the experience. The code is on GitHub, if you’re curious.

9:40: Geeks Connecting Neighbors. Because talking with a bunch of fellow geeks about how to use technology to help people connect with their neighbors seems easier than actually talking to my neighbors. Backup: Mirah.

10:40: Making Music Like a Nerd II. I make software and I make music, but not at the same time, and for decades now I’ve been alternately intrigued and irritated by the tools to do it. Time to look again. Backup: Maps? Fonts? Android?

11:40: Building the Tech Community You Want to See. Because I like diversity. Backup: ?

1:40: I don’t know, maybe social networks.

2:40: OpenStreetMap 101. I like maps! And openness! I used OSM on Touring Machine and was impressed. Backup I should be going to instead: Negotiating Consulting Contracts That Work.

3:40: Color Theory & Consumption. Not sure why. Backup: Get More From Your Data, or Why Don’t You Blog More?

4:40: Personal Rapid Transit. I’ve been skeptical about this concept since I read Bruno Latour’s Aramis back in the ’90s, but I don’t really remember why. Time for a refresher course!

Minnebar is “an (un)conference aimed at getting those in Minnesota’s tech and design communities together to discuss topics that interest them.” It happens tomorrow, and it’s sold out.

And it turns out I’ve missed some things about Eclipse - specifically, the way Java and Eclipse, working together, can let you know you’ve made a dumb mistake long before your tests or your web browser do. And although I’m comfortable using ruby-debug at the command line, I’ve missed having a GUI around my debugger. Maybe I’ll give RadRails or NetBeans or RubyMine another shot.

When /^I wait for the popup to close$/ do
  wait_until { !page.find('#nyroModalContent').try(:visible?) }
end

What’s happening, I think, is this:

1. Capybara asks Selenium for a handle to the #nyroModalContent element.
2. Selenium, after returning it, gets the response from my server that tells it to close the popup.
3. Capybara asks Selenium, hey, that element you just gave me a handle to? Is it still visible?
4. Selenium is all, “What element?”

For my present purposes, it turns out I don’t need the “visible” check, so I could just do this:

  wait_until { page.has_no_css?('#nyroModalContent') }

If I had needed to get the element and then act on it, though, I think the way to do it would be to write JavaScript that performs both actions, and call it with page.evaluate_script.

[Ran across John Nunemaker's exhortation to "clog it before you forget it."]

# Don't generate fancy HTML for stack traces.
disable :show_exceptions
# Allow errors to get out of the app so Cucumber can display them.
enable :raise_errors

Both are required. If you just disable :show_exceptions, you’re spared the fancy HTML, but you’re also spared any useful information about what’s going wrong. (You just get “Internal Server Error”.) But if you just enable :raise_errors, well, the errors don’t get raised - they’re trapped by the exception-showing code.

Watchr is a tiny program I wrote five years ago. Ken and I were talking about how we’d like something that pops up images when they’re posted to Flickr. For reasons I don’t now recall, we then wrote two separate applications, his in Python and mine in Java. (By the way, that page is the only use so far of erikostrom.com, except as a mirror of drowning.org, the equally dated site about my singer-songwriter career.)

I’m a little surprised to find that it still basically works. Write once, run everywhere, I guess! Although it still has the same Mac bug noted in 2005, which bothers me more now that I’m a Mac user.

Today I got FireWatir working! It wasn’t that hard, but I had to consult a few different web pages, so here it is all in one place.

1. Via FireWatir Installation, install the gem:

   sudo gem install firewatir

   and the JSSh Firefox extension (Mac FF 3.5 version) to make Firefox steerable.

2. Set up a Firefox profile, so you can run tests without all your weird extensions in play, and without messing with your personal browser session and history. Mine is called “tester”.
3. Start up Firefox with JSSh and your new profile (you can do this while Firefox is running):

   /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -jssh -P "tester"

4. In an irb session, try some stuff - for example, on a new Spree instance:

   ff = FireWatir::Firefox.new
   ff.goto 'http://localhost:3000/'
   ff.link(:text, 'Clothing').click

Voila! Now I want to try Cucumber and Watir.

javascript testing is different from desktop/server testing
- cross-browser issues

there are a lot of javascript testing frameworks!
- long tail
- it’s easy to write one

basic components for a testing framework
- the usual, plus async tests
- minimum: assertions
(’glorified assertion-and-logging framework’)
- async tests
- pause (stop executing other tests) and resume

why write your own?
- a good way to understand what testing is for
- not too many cross-browser issues

popular frameworks:
- (none)
- JSUnit
- 2001, and looks it
- YUITest
- good code, supports async tests and event simulation
- (looks like nested contexts?)
- QUnit
- async testing, test timeouts
- no dependencies
- easy to use
- FireUnit
- firebug extension

standardization
- CommonJS: standard API across client and server environments
- including testing API, now adopted by QUnit (I think)

server-side testing of client-side code
- usually Java + Rhino
- Crosscheck (Java)
- Env.js (pure JS)
- BlueRidge (Env.js + Screw.unit + Rhino)

browser launching
- WebDriver (Java)
- Watir (Ruby)
- JsTestDriver (Java)
- Selenium RC (Java)

distributed (for scale)
- Selenium Grid - on Amazon servers
- TestSwarm - crowd-sourced

PART II: Accurately Measuring JavaScript

major use cases:
- same code, different platforms
- which browser is fastest?
- different code, same platform
- which framework is fastest?
- how should we implement this?

same code, different platform
- SunSpider (WebKit), V8 (Chrome), Dromaeo (Mozilla)

… statistics…

error rate
- faster tests => less accuracy
- faster *browsers* => less accuracy
- dromaeo/v8 test runs/sec instead of msec/run
- use harmonic mean to average

different code, same platform
- most solutions are bad
- few runs, inaccurate
- garbage collection
- use mode instead of mean
- less accurate than mean, but more consistent
- don’t discard “bad” results - GC is significant
- may reflect memory issues
- getTime() “very very imprecise”
- 15ms intervals on XP (except FF/Chrome)
- IE in Wine gives you precision, but it’s not IE on Windows

- browser tools
- Safari, Firebug, IE 8 profilers
- DynaTrace Ajax for IE 6-8
- Shark - watches internal function calls

PART III: jQuery 1.4
- complexity reduction
- bubbling change, submit, focus, blur
- required script loading

analyzing performance
- stop measuring absolute execution time
- improve code quality and flow

complexity analysis
- count function calls instead of seconds
- may indicate not slowness, but poorly written code
- remove() did a lot more work than it needed to
- and so did everything that used remove()

event bubbling in IE
- focus, blur, change, and submit don’t bubble
- alternative solutions: piggyback on events that DO bubble
- focus/blur: use focusin/focusout
- submit: watch for click… or ‘enter’ keypress…
- change: basically reimplement the whole event
- track previous value
- watch for keyup navigation, checkbox clicks
- beforeactive on radio buttons

jQuery.require()
- don’t try to load a script multiple times
- load synchronously if needed for dependent code
- load asynchronously if you can get away with it!

URL mapping
- require(’ajax’) => ajax.js
- namespaces expand to URLs

PART IV: HTML 5 Elements in IE

problem #1
- unknown elements are unstyled, and “inner contents escape”
- fix: document.createElement(’section’) makes section work
- html5shiv does that for all HTML5

problem #2
- unknown elements can’t hold other unknown elements
- even with html5shiv
- no fix

problem #3
- nodeName of unknown elements is treated as XML
- fix: don’t assume nodeName is uppercase

problem #4
- injecting unknown elements via innerHTML fails
- “fix”: parse HTML and build DOM in JS

Q&A:

… i zoned out…

Q: clojure?
A: framework… okay. compiler… pretty slick!
- but designed to compile your whole application
- can’t compile the framework separately