JJinuxLand

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to install the ActionScript plugin for Vim. First, download it from here. Put it in ~/.vim/syntax. Now, update your ~/.vimrc file to look something like this:set autoindent
syntax on
filetype plugin on

" Use .as for ActionScript files, not Atlas files.
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.as set filetype=actionscript

" Put these in an autocmd group, so that we can delete them easily.
augroup vimrc
au!
autocmd FileType actionscript setlocal sw=4 sts=4 et
autocmd FileType python setlocal sw=4 sts=4 et tw=72
autocmd FileType ruby setlocal sw=2 sts=2 et
augroup END

I work at a company. We use GitHub. There's a project called CoolProject. CoolProject uses Subversion. I want to fork CoolProject for internal use. There's no use submitting our patches back--they wouldn't want them. I want to maintain our own fork, but I also want to keep updated with changes that they make. Since Subversion isn't a distributed revision control system, forking like this and getting updates is hard. If you know of a better solution than the one I've proposed below, please tell me!

Git has support for Subversion. A great video on how to use it is here. The official documentation for git-svn is here. Here's the gotcha: For the sake of simplicity and interoperating with a less-capable system (SVN), it is recommended that all git svn users clone, fetch and dcommit directly from the SVN server, and avoid all git clone/pull/merge/push operations between git repositories and branches. The recommended method of exchanging code between git b…

On October 20, 2009 at 6:30, I'm going to be giving a talk for the East Bay Ruby Meetup Group called "An Introduction to Behavioral Driven Development with RSpec and Cucumber". This is an introduction to behavioral driven development in Rails using Cucumber, RSpec, Webrat, and factory_girl.

For the second time in my life, I finished preparing several days before the actual talk. If you're interested, here are the slides.

Happy testing! :-D

If you haven't read Exploding Software-Engineering Myths from Microsoft Research, I highly recommend it.

If you are trying to escape some URL parameters completely separate of Rails' routing infrastructure, URI.escape (AKA URI.encode) is not what you're looking for. In fact, I can't even figure out what problem URI.escape is trying to solve. Consider:irb(main):003:0> require "uri"
=> true
irb(main):004:0> url = "http://foo.com?a=" + URI.escape("a&b+c")
=> "http://foo.com?a=a&b+c"What you're looking for is CGI::escape:irb(main):005:0> require "cgi"
=> true
irb(main):006:0> url = "http://foo.com?a=" + CGI::escape("a&b+c")
=> "http://foo.com?a=a%26b%2Bc"The same thing goes for URI.decode vs. CGI::unescape.

However, if you're trying parse the query string from a complete URL, try this:irb(main):008:0> require "uri"
=> false
irb(main):009:0> require "cgi"
=> false
irb(main):010:0> url = "http://foo.com?a=b+c&d=a&d=b"…

I wrote a rake task for my Rails project, and I figured I should write some tests for it. The rake task just creates a certain file, hence it's easy to test. I looked for some entries on testing rake tasks using RSpec.

This blog post shows how to launch rake from within your test--in process. I couldn't get it to work because "Rake" wasn't loaded. This blog post shows how to refactor your rake code into a library that can be more easily tested. I decided to shell out to rake instead.

After reading about the differences between kernel.exec, kernel.system, %x{}, and backticks, I decided to just use backticks. The code ended up being fairly simple since it doesn't require much setup:require File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../spec_helper')

describe "rake some:task" do
context "subtask" do
it "should create some file containing some stuff" do
begin
`rake some:task:subtask SOME=args`
$?.exi…

This Thursday, I'm going to be giving a talk for PyGameSF called "How to Blow Up Helicopters Using Pygame". It's a summary of some of the libraries and tricks I used for my two PyWeek entries. I'll be covering topics such as PGU, generator-based animations, and state machine based levels.

For once in my life, I finished preparing several days before the actual talk. If you're interested, here are the slides.

By the way, I used the online service 280 Slides to build my presentation. It was pleasantly simple to use. It felt just a little sluggish compared to desktop software, but for a piece of web-based software, the UI was pretty amazing.