Pervasive Code – Page 5 – Jamie Flournoy's Software Development Blog

The Princess and the Pea, as a Cucumber Feature

User story: “As a princess I want to confirm my royalty so I get bruised after sleeping on 40 mattresses over a pea”. Just tell real stories”

That sounded so much like a Cucumber feature that I decided to write it as one:

Feature: Physical Sensitivity
  In order to confirm my royalty
  As a princess
  I want to be very delicate

  Scenario: 40 mattresses on a pea
  Given there is a pea on the bed
  And there is a stack of 20 mattresses on the pea
  And there is a stack of 20 featherbeds on the mattresses
  When I try to sleep on top of the stack of featherbeds
  Then I should not be able to sleep

Feature: Physical Sensitivity

In order to confirm my royalty

As a princess

I want to be very delicate

Scenario: 40 mattresses on a pea

Given there is a pea on the bed

And there is a stack of 20 mattresses on the pea

And there is a stack of 20 featherbeds on the mattresses

When I try to sleep on top of the stack of featherbeds

Then I should not be able to sleep

Unix tip: kill -STOP and kill -CONT

Pretty much every Unix user knows about the kill command, and most know about ‘kill -KILL’ aka ‘kill -9’.

But do you know about kill -STOP and kill -CONT?
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How to make Machinist and Autotest coexist

If you’ve tried to use Machinist and autotest (part of ZenTest) you have probably seen this exception that prevented you from using it:

`method_missing': No sham defined for name

1	`method_missing': No sham defined for name

It’s discussed in the machinist Google Group as well.

It’s because of a wacky hack that’s part of Machinist that overrides Module.name so you can do Sham.name, but ZenTest expects Module.name to do what it does normally.

I have a fix for this.
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Rails Migration Antipatterns and How To Fix Them

Migrations are one of the best features of Rails. Although some folks prefer pure SQL rather than Rails migration DSL, I don’t know of anyone who dislikes the idea of a versioned schema that can evolve in a controlled and repeatable fashion.

But because the concept of database migrations is such a powerful one, it’s tempting to jam any old change that affects the database into a new migration and run rake db:migrate to make it happen. I’ve been guilty of a bit of this in the past, and I’ve joined some projects that did other ugly things in migrations. In the process I’ve learned the hard way that there are some things you must never do in a migration or they will come back to haunt you later. Here they are.
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Making Bundler 0.8.5 install Nokogiri on Leopard with a newish libxml

Nokogiri on a standard installation of Leopard is complain-y about a couple of old libraries:

“HI. You’re using libxml2 version 2.6.16 which is over 4 years old and has plenty of bugs. We suggest that for maximum HTML/XML parsing pleasure, you upgrade your version of libxml2 and re-install nokogiri. If you like using libxml2 version 2.6.16, but don’t like this warning, please define the constant I_KNOW_I_AM_USING_AN_OLD_AND_BUGGY_VERSION_OF_LIBXML2 before requring nokogiri.”

Aaron Kalin figured out how to fix this if you’re installing nokogiri as a system gem, but I want to use Bundler and keep my system gems down to the bare minimum. I figured out how to do this under Bundler 0.8.5.
Continue reading “Making Bundler 0.8.5 install Nokogiri on Leopard with a newish libxml”