Comments for nick evans - devblog

Comment on ruby defined? # => “expression” by Ian

Ian — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:28:43 +0000

The issue is the `&&` and `and` have different levels of precedence. I use `defined?(ARG)` with parentheses on a regular basis to avoid this issue.

Comment on please don’t use before(:all) by nick

nick — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 11:49:07 +0000

If indeed you shared blame for this, you certainly weren’t the first nor the last.

Comment on please don’t use before(:all) by Patrick

Patrick — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 06:57:55 +0000

Uh-oh.. I can’t help but feel like I shoulder some of the blame for this post

Comment on a better progress bar for rspec by Matt Scilipoti

Matt Scilipoti — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:58:37 +0000

Thanks! Very nice.
I’ve just started to use `rake -g` for this sort of customization. Instead of `rake spec:recent`, I now use `rake -g spec:recent`. Your spec.opts file can live in ~/.rake too (I had to specify the full path). Now, ALL my projects have a nice formatter (no svn/git/bzr fu required).

Comment on a better progress bar for rspec by nick

nick — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:51:11 +0000

@Nick Zadrozny: Sweet. Thanks!

I’m gonna have to redo this BDD-style and see if I can’t get it pushed into the next version of Rspec. I can’t work without it anymore.

Comment on a better progress bar for rspec by Nick Zadrozny

Nick Zadrozny — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 08:05:49 +0000

Nice take on rspec output formatting! You sparked my imagination.

The only feature that I really missed was some kind of dedicated spec profiler. So I added one here that always prints the top 3 (or 5, or whatever) slowest specs when they’re all finished running.

http://gist.github.com/71340

Comment on Ubuntu is “too easy”?! by Jeff Dallien

Jeff Dallien — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 07:08:01 +0000

Good point about learning by investigating these things on one’s own. A lot of people out there learned what they know about Linux because they *had* to mess with those config files, kernel modules, etc. in the days before Linux that “just works”. It might not occur to them that there are ways to learn even in the absence of a problem to solve.

Personally I’m happy that I can now get my work done and without messing with network card drivers or video modes. The fact that I can dig into whatever piece I might need to keeps me in control of my system even when things are going smoothly. I never have that feeling with a hood-welded-shut OS. Eventually the solution just becomes reinstalling.

Comment on Ubuntu is “too easy”?! by nick

nick — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:28:38 +0000

The amount of customization allowed, not the amount of customization required is what is important.

Thanks for summarizing my long-winded post into a single sentence.

Basically, I see this post as advice to the college-aged me. The me who spent countless hours wrestling with XFree86, etc. The me who had countless hours to spend doing so.

I can totally understand how, for such a person, gentoo or linux from scratch might be especially appealing. When you get thrown into the thick of it, you’re forced to perform or fail, and that can be quite motivating. But I don’t think it’s the best investment of time, even if you do have the time of a college student. And it’s really embarrassing to be the computer geek who always has something new going wrong with his computer.

Comment on Ubuntu is “too easy”?! by bryanl

bryanl — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:06:57 +0000

I would prefer my desktop experience to be easier at first. The amount of customization allowed, not the amount of customization required is what is important.

People are silly. Ubuntu is great because of the great hardware support out of the box. You can still use all the parts of debian you wish.

Comment on ruby defined? # => “expression” by nick

nick — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 19:22:14 +0000

@brandon: Why is what the case? Why is the entire expression passed to defined?, rather than just the first arg? because defined? isn't a method call but a keyword, and it has very low precedence. defined? CONST and CONST == "foo" would have given the expected result, even without parentheses, because of the lower precedence of and. Why is the expression evaluated? I dunno; Principle of Least Surprise, I guess. I'd need to ask Matz (or ruby-talk) to be certain. The weird thing is that pg 113 of "The Ruby Programming Language" states that "the expression that is the operand to defined? is not actually evaluated; it is simply checked to see whether it could be evaluated without error." But that seems to contradict by my irb session, pasted in the post. The methods were clearly evaluated (allowing the printing and raising exception side effects). Initially, I was surprised that the exception gets eaten. But I supposed that's to be expected as well: Calling defined? will never throw an exception, but will always return a truthy (string) or falsy (nil) value. Does that help?

Comment on ruby defined? # => “expression” by Brandon

Brandon — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 18:00:18 +0000

can you explain why this is the case?

Comment on a better progress bar for rspec by nofxx

nofxx — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:17:04 +0000

First try to gemify this;

http://github.com/nofxx/rspec_spinner

Comment on ruby defined? # => “expression” by Avdi

Avdi — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 19:16:57 +0000

This is some great exposition on a corner of Ruby I knew little about. Thanks!

Comment on a better progress bar for rspec by nofxx

nofxx — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 08:44:18 +0000

Well, its ugly but it`s alive:

http://github.com/nofxx/rtui/tree/master

I gave this “universal” name cuz I pretend to add some more helpers I got around..
For now, its progress bar, but a lil easy to customize, and the spinner formatter.
And |=====| equals! hehe…

It changes the call to Progress.new, than on :components => you choose :bar, :spinner, both….. defaults to bar.

Updated the gist with a spinned one:
http://gist.github.com/34500

Comment on a better progress bar for rspec by nofxx

nofxx — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 23:53:11 +0000

Hehe.yea, sorry:

ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [i686-darwin9] (macports)
rspec 1.1.11.1 (build from git)

Oh, one more thing… I had the source open here so I`ve dropped your code there, so I`m running from spec.opts

Last thing… I`ll fork progressbar just to get |===| instead of |oooo| heheh, gonna try to implement a spinner for it too. =D

Comment on a better progress bar for rspec by nick

nick — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:53:13 +0000

@nofxx: Re “missing something”: yeah, it’s missing specs or testing of any sort.

I don’t remember why I used “__full_description” rather than “full_description“. It hasn’t crashed for me (in its current form) yet, so perhaps this has something to do with which version of rspec it is running against?

Comment on a better progress bar for rspec by nofxx

nofxx — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 21:45:21 +0000

Btw, I had to change line 58 to this: “immediately_dump_pending(example.full_description, “.

It crashes on pendings otherwise.. missing something? I`ve gisted it :

http://gist.github.com/34500

Comment on a better progress bar for rspec by nofxx

nofxx — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 21:32:09 +0000

Wow! Sweet, great! Perfect.

And jez, what a coincidence, this morning I asked David on IRC some stuff cuz I had rspec source opened, in order to finally make the formatter of my dreams…

And you did it! And you did it better!! I was thinking about a spinner like sequence of this => \|/- on the side, but the progress bar is way better. And just show pendings and failures… AND SLOW ONES!

Great.. ty, gonna play with this here a lot! =D

Comment on a better progress bar for rspec by Zach Dennis

Zach Dennis — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 15:54:51 +0000

Thanks for uploading the pic and screencast. Looks awesome… I can’t wait for it to be in Cucumber and RSpec.

Comment on a better progress bar for rspec by nick

nick — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 15:23:07 +0000

@aslak: “steal” it for whatever nefarious purposes you want. I forgot to stick a license onto the file… fixed that now (MIT license).