Author: Jamie Flournoy

A Cucumber step to test for a YM4R Google Map

I had some problems with a view in a Rails app that was conditionally hiding a Google Map that was generated using the YM4R plugin. I don’t usually test views in unit tests, and this logic depended on a particular situation with the data behind the view, so I decided that this would be a good candidate for a Cucumber feature.

Here’s the Cucumber step implementation I wrote.
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Fancier Stubbing of GeoKit for Rails unit tests

I’m working on a Rails app that uses the ym4r_gm plugin, getting Google to do the geocoding for Thentic. I liked the idea of stubbing the web service call, because all those calls to an external service add up to over 20 seconds of test suite run time(!). That’s almost half of the 50 second run time of my unit tests (and 50 seconds is much too long for a unit test suite).

I found a good starting point at geokit stubbing for faster tests. I also wanted a way to stub a geocoding failure, and a way to prevent any unit tests from using the real geocoding web service.

Here’s how I did it.
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Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 (Intrepid Ibex and Jaunty Jackalope) upgrade notes

I’m at WordCamp San Francisco today and decided that running a year old version of WordPress (on a year old version of Ubuntu Linux) was undesirable. So, with the confidence that comes from many relatively easy Ubuntu OS upgrades, I charged ahead. For (I think) the second time ever, things went badly. Here’s what I did and how I fixed it.
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CentOS 5.3 Minimal VPS Install Guide

I just did this yesterday; you can pretty much just follow my CentOS 5.1 Minimal VPS Install Guide.

The differences are:

  • When you get to the “More Minimizing” section, yum -C grouplist will show a package called “Yum Utilities” which you probably want to leave installed.
  • The Deployment_Guide-en-US file is not there so you don’t need to remove it.

That’s it.

I should also note that downloading a 3.9GB DVD ISO image in order to build a ~700MB installed OS may not be very efficient. I didn’t bother looking for a network installer but that might be the way to get this done faster.

Extreme Programming Experiences: Conclusion

Now that I’ve worked in a team that really was doing XP (except for our Lack Of Onsite Customer shortcoming) I can say that it works pretty well, but only to the extent that you do all of the practices together. Of course, that’s what the XP folks said from the beginning: you can’t just apply 1% of it and make a judgement about it.
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