Thoughts / Misc: April 2006 Archives

kevinclark: sometime I need to take some time and let you smack me around with postgre propoganda so I understand why I should make the leap
zenspider : k. I can do it, or drbrain can... or we can tagteam you. :)
harrisj : I picture you and drbrain being like Master Blaster in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
harrisj : except neither of you really fits either part
zenspider : I'm totally the big dumb guy

Finished my talk a few hours ago. Very well received. I gave an intentionally short talk (30 minutes or so in a 60 minute block) in order to field more questions because I know most people just don't "get" TDD. I did a full 30 minutes of Q&A and it was awesome. They were excited by what we're doing and want to understand and do more! YAY!

(yes, as you can guess by the subject I'm highly irritated right now... calibrate accordingly)

Project repositories should build and install out of the box without much intervention on the developer's part. Period. That is simply pragmatic. All scripts, recipes, data should be in the repository to make the checkout self-sufficient. 100% reproducible software should be a mandatory goal of all software projects. It should be as close to a 2-step process (check out and type make) as possible. How hard is that?

Go back and read that again. I'm asking for software to simply build (and preferably build simply). The shock! The horror! But really, how hard is that?

Yet, I keep running across developers who's thinking is simply broken. There really isn't any other rational explanation that I can come up with, no matter how I try to put myself in their shoes. Open source projects should build. Period. How hard is that???

The latest project I'm having problems with is RMagick. Not only does it not build out of the box (it even requires scripts that he doesn't have in any source revision system), but the developer actually rejected my bug on the issue. How the hell are you going to get other developers actively working on your project if you don't even want them building it? By acting that way you've violated the "open" part of "open source".

RMagick has major process, build, and stability issues, esp on OSX. Every couple of weeks the damn thing breaks on one of the projects I'm working on. That is incredibly painful because builds of RMagick take 45 minutes or so. A simple tweak I submitted brings that down to less than 5 minutes. That tweak (and others I suggested via email) was later resubmitted by the developer without attribution, nice huh?

Building software... This is so far from rocket science that it isn't funny.

In short, the project is borked, the author is aloof, and I'm wasting a ton of time on the software. I'm now looking at switching to GD2 or forking and making this open source project actually open. ZenMagic anyone? (eric hates the "k" and won't work on it if it is "ZenMagick")

So, about 2 years ago or so I stumbled upon a paper that was a semi/pseudo-academic epidemiology study of zombie infections. First off... HOW COOL IS THAT?!?!? Needless to say, I was fascinated and, later, obsessed.

I was also pissed off that SDL didn't play well with ruby, especially on OSX at the time. Very pissed. Like, "talking to rubycentral about getting a fund going to buy up used ibooks to send to developers" pissed. Once we got SDL patched up I could play with my zombies and send the iBooks off to other devs to improve other things that didn't play nicely with ruby on osx (or just with ruby in general) (*).

That said, wait long enough and a project will either improve, or die. In this case SDL improved support for OSX and someone scratched up a fairly good document for getting it up and running. So I did. Now I have ZOMBIES! I wrote this in about a day up at Whistler right after Canada on Rails:

No biggie for a lot of you, but I've NEVER done graphics programming, simulations, or "games" (applied loosely here). That... and ZOMBIES!

*) Of course I dropped the ball, but I'm still interested in this idea. An iBook lending library type thing would be really awesome. We could send one over to Japan and get our PPC memory collision bug fixed once and for all.

(sorry this took so long to get out, but Whistler doesn't have good (free) intarweb)

Canada On Rails, day 2.

Same as before, after the cut...

Canada On Rails, day 1. These notes were created with the great SubEthaEdit and many people joining in sharing minds. I love this tool. I think it is amazing and really good during conferences. I've copied the notes in with full editing marks so you can see how people interacted. Below are the participants and the notes are behind the cut:

Come in, say hi:

*** Sorted by Last Name ***

[name deleted by request] - [deleted] - boy - with cool hat (in icon at least)

Paul Coyle - deprecated

Ryan Davis - aka zenspider - current projects: rubyholic, ruby2c, metaruby, ParseTree, RubyInline, ZenTest, RubyObfuscator - independent consultant

Bruce Fletcher - broke through my firewall! 1337! Intranet PHP stuff for a small Vancouver company.

Miles K. Forrest - Big tall guy in black jacket. Enjoying the conference (yay!), so did my boss (ooo!) who just gave me my walkin' papers (boo!). Guess I'll be flipping burgers soon. needs to learn to sort

Tim Glen - php app developer from calgary. I work for a little company called nonfiction studios. We use some rails concepts in our framework like AJAX and other view helpers. Wanting to use more rails. Oh yah. Hi everyone!

Kalin Harvey - self-employed IT consulting, doing more dev work recently, Vancouver

Eric Hodel - drbrain - drbrain@segment7.net - all that stuff ^^ - MogileFS, rails_analyzer_tools - 43 Things - Face in snow icon

Brian Muckian - unemployed, out cast from popular development er...platforms, ruby fanatic, rails fanboy....I'm sure I've been called worse

Ken Pratt - http://kenpratt.net/ - doing RoR apps at EA, finishing up a CS degree at UBC, and leaving for 10 weeks of backpacking around europe in 16 days!

Brasten Sager - rjsassertions -- random stuff. Recently became full-time Ruby developer. (yay!) (Will be wearing a black Apple-logo baseball cap all conference long. Come say hi.) - eric wants to talk to you about rjsassertions

Graeme Worthy - pleasant fello. likes linux and .. sushi.. and .. pizza. looks hot with a moustache. looks like a used car dealer when wearing a 70s suit.

Nathan Youngman - http://nathany.com - Mac-geek, ColdFusion programmer (6 years), ruby nuby

...You bring your coffee-maker and beans to the conference.

I'm here at Canada on Rails, after the world's longest train ride from Seattle. BTW, really good noodles across the street from the hotel at the Japanese noodle shop!