http://www.echographia.com/blog making things better, making better things Wed, 07 Sep 2011 02:32:50 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Tonight's MacRuby/Xcode lesson: An object (say, an instance of a subclass of NSArrayController) created in Interface Builder won't necessarily have its initialize method called when the program runs. This, I guess, is because the object was instantiated when you created it in Interface Builder, and cryogenically frozen, and when your ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2011/09/06/awake-from-nib/ I just put another hobby project on GitHub. It's a web service that's meant to help me (or, in theory, someone else) insert a dynamic list of most-used tags on my Tumblr blog. It doesn't really help with the inserting, yet, but it will get me the list. And it ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2011/06/29/tumblr-tags/ I wrote something with MacRuby, finally. It's a tool to help me post music every day over on my non-technical blog. The MacRuby part is that it uses iTunes to convert uncompressed audio to MP3, add metadata, and post it to my web site. And add it to my library ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2011/06/10/126/ Posted here, because why write something down if you're not going to put it on the web somewhere? 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: ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2011/05/06/my-plans-for-minnebar/ When I picked up Ruby on Rails in 2006, it was a great relief after several years in Java and C to be using a language that let me express things concisely, without a lot of boilerplate, and without fighting the type system all the time. But this week I ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2011/03/14/back-to-java/ I was getting the above error, intermittently, from Selenium/WebDriver via Cucumber/Capybara. My code looked something like this: When /^I wait for the popup to close$/ do wait_until { !page.find('#nyroModalContent').try(:visible?) } end What's happening, I think, is this: Capybara asks Selenium for a handle to the #nyroModalContent element. Selenium, after returning it, gets the response ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2011/01/13/element-not-found-in-the-cache/ I'm building an app in Sinatra and testing it (in part) with Cucumber. When exceptions were raised in my application, I'd get a stack trace wrapped in pages and pages of HTML - very nice when you're testing in a browser, but almost impossible to work with in a command-line ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2010/04/19/sane-sinatra-stack-traces-in-cucumber/ Just kidding, mostly. I got email today informing me that Watchr "has been released successfully in Brothersoft". Congratulations! 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 ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2010/03/08/release-announcement-flickr-watchr/ Ruby-based testing will only get you so far in the web development world - sooner or later you need to make sure your code works in a real browser. So for the last few years I've been occasionally trying to get a browser-based test automation tool running - often something ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2009/12/23/setting-up-browser-automation-with-firewatir/ John Resig, of jQuery and other fame, spoke tonight at the BayJax meetup in the Yahoo! cafeteria. His slides are probably online somewhere, but they are lucid, informative, illustrated with pictures and code samples, and written by someone who knows what he's talking about, not to mention who was paying ... http://www.echographia.com/blog/2009/12/11/john-resig-on-javascript-testing-performance-analysis-and-jquery-14/