Jonathan Lange

Mere Code: Flow, Interruptions and Gold-Titanium Alloys

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 03:21:00 +0000

As I mentioned earlier, I've just had a very productive and fun weekend of hacking on testresources. But why was it so good?

Fast Commits

Because I was working offline using Bazaar, I could make commits to testresources and they'd be done before I could Alt-Tab back to Emacs.

Fast Tests

It takes about 0.15 seconds to run the test suite. This meant I was running it all the time, which in turn meant that I was totally certain about whether the code worked all the time.

Clarity of Purpose

I knew where I was and where I wanted to go.

No Rabbit Holes

The testresources code base is small enough that it is nearly impossible to get distracted by other systemic defects. If there is such a defect, it's probably the one that you're working on right now. This might be another way of saying...

No Blockers

I wasn't waiting on anyone to do anything. There weren't any other bugs that needed to get fixed before I could continue.

No Integration

The system is about as self-contained as it gets. No signals, subprocesses or sockets: just Python. The only dependency is pyunit3k, which is small, robust, well-tested and also pretty darn self-contained.

No Interruptions

I wasn't answering questions on IRC, taking Skype calls, handling incoming email, doing the washing, checking Facebook, catching up on my blogs, watching a film or wrestling a bear. "Fast Commits" and "Fast Tests" probably fall into this category too.

In other words:

There is nothing except this. There's no art opening, no charity, nothing to sign. There's the next mission, and nothing else.

Mere Code: testresources: fresh blood

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:11:00 +0000

Last weekend I spent a bunch of timing hacking on testresources with Rob over at Chris's place. testresources is an extension to unittest that allows tests to specify the resources they use declaratively, so that these resources can be cleanly shared between tests. On Saturday, we talked a bit about direction and decided on some goals. On Sunday, I got busy.

The idea isn't particularly new: zope.testing has had "layers" for a long time. The key differences between testresources and Zope layers are:

You can use more than one TestResource. You can only use one layer. Allowing tests to specify many resources makes it easier to use only the resources that you need, which in turn makes for a faster test suite.
A test that uses testresources can be used independently of other testresources machinery. With layers, you pretty much need the whole shebang. This means that you can use testresources with trial, bzr, nose, tribunal or unittest.TextTestRunner.
Layers have magical inheritance stuff. testresources has no magic.
Layers do some work in subprocesses to accommodate some setUps that can have no tearDown. testresources doesn't know what a process is.

That said, I'm mainly familiar with layers from Zope 3.2—they may have changed since then.

testresources itself is somewhat old. Rob hacked up the first version about three years ago and little has happened to it since. I've always agreed with the approach, but have also had a few qualms about implementation details that made me reluctant to use it or to recommend it. Now, it's well on its way to being something that I can trust and perhaps, love.

If you are interested, check out my branch or at least flick through the TODO file.

Echo and Bounce: Internet, again.

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 04:02:00 +0000

I applied to iiNet for my Naked DSL line on July the 7th. I still don't have Internet access at home. I won't have it, they say, until next week or the week after.

I'll be in Hobart for two weeks from Wednesday afternoon, so I will have waited two months for an Internet connection at my house. That's assuming nothing goes wrong.

Echo and Bounce: Internet and Coffee?

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 04:41:00 +0000

Dear Lazyweb,

Does anyone know of cafés on the North Shore of Sydney that provide free / cheap Internet and don't mind it if someone sits by themselves quietly spending money all day? The closer to Lindfield the better.

jml

Echo and Bounce: Palmerston North

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 07:02:00 +0000

Palmerston North is a strange town. There are three things that single it out from other towns, which I shall enumerate as follows:

1. No one between the age of 25 and 60 has a New Zealand accent.
2. The public library is the coolest place in town.
3. It is ruled entirely by ducks.

More later.

Echo and Bounce: Tolerance

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:47:00 +0000

Tolerance is all about acknowledging that some people, somewhere are allowed to say "different than" when they actually mean "different to".

Mere Code: Cool Launchpad/Bazaar hack

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 05:38:00 +0000

If you push a lot of Bazaar branches to Launchpad, you might want to add something like this to your .bazaar/locations.conf:

[/home/jml/Code]
public_branch = lp:~jml
public_branch:policy = appendpath
push_location = lp:~jml
push_location:policy = appendpath

Once it's there, 'bzr push' will Just Work... as long as you want it to do something like:

jml@rhino:~$ cd ~/Code/pyunit3k/trunk
jml@rhino:~/Code/pyunit3k/trunk$ bzr push
Using saved location: lp:~jml/pyunit3k/trunk
No new revisions to push.

So if I've got a branch in ~/Code/<project-name>/<branch-name>, it'll be published at https://launchpad.net/~jml/<project-name>/<branch-name>. This is only a default, of course: you can override it for a given branch by doing:

bzr push --remember <new_location>

Or you can override it for a bunch of branches by hacking locations.conf.

Neat huh?

Echo and Bounce: Over the Ocean

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:08:00 +0000

No Internet yet. It turns out that my actual, postal address is different from my glass-and-copper Telstra address. What larks!

I'll be in Dunedin next week, making merry with the Canonical crew. It's a little known fact that Robbie Burns, author of Auld Lang Syne, was sent to New Zealand as its one and only convict.

After that, I'll be off to Palmerston North, "suicide capital". John Cleese, famous for his roles as Q in Die Another Day, has declared the town to be so "thoroughly miserable" that it can tip the scales for those iffy about offing themselves.

Rest assured, gentle reader, that my straits are not so dire. I'll be deep-sea hacking with another kiwi colleague.

When I return, I still won't have an Internet connection.

Echo and Bounce: Internet

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:02:00 +0000

I've been without Internet in my home for six and one half days. To do my job, I have been commuting to Andrew and Mary's where I am graciously lavished with the Internet's bounty. Today, however was supposed to be different.

Telstra was scheduled to connect my line at some time between 8am and 1pm. The exact time being known only to the technician and to God.

The technician called me at around 9am saying that he had connected the line at the exchange and was just confirming that. At around twenty to twelve, he called me, confirming my building was indeed number 250 that's two-five-zero. Then he hung up.

He called me again. You see, we both need to be sure that the building I live in is indeed two hundred and fifty that's two-five-zero, the one next to the service station. We assured each other of our certainty, then he hung up. I started worrying. I had expected a certain level of confusion—Telstra have a reputation to maintain—but this seemed excessive.

My phone rang again. Apparently the technician and I are both victims of a cruel deception. "They" told him that he was supposed to connect me on the building on the other side of the road. "They" gave him the wrong details, although apparently the correct address. He sees now that the place where I should be connected to is right next to my building.

He's sending the job back to them. They will sort it out. They will probably call me tomorrow or the next day and send him out again, he says. They will explain what's going on. No, my line hasn't been connected today.

Goodbye.

Echo and Bounce: Moved

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:40:00 +0000

I've moved to Lindfield. My muscles are sore and almost everything is unpacked.

There's no Internet at the place yet so I'll be a little bit out of touch.

Echo and Bounce: Lethologica

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:08:00 +0000

What's that word, the one for when people unite to achieve a single goal and spend effort, time, energy, creativity, nous, emotion, money, business cunning and sweat on some grand endeavour?

The closest I've got is "industry". It's a shame the word doesn't carry a sense of wonder and verve with it.

Mere Code: I Love Data

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 07:00:00 +0000

At work, we recently started to graph the time it takes to access a branch in Launchpad via SSH, both on our staging and production servers.

I love this so much. Having this data is liberating. It's like turning on a light in a dark room: suddenly I can go from uncertain, careful, hesitant steps to bold, confident strides.

In fact, the metaphor stretches further. This new light has revealed objects of interest (that is, spikes in the time taken) that I wasn't aware of before. I need to know how long these spikes last, how they correlate with load on the system and so forth. Soon there'll be more graphs, and I'll be able to correlate them and analyze them and suck on their delicious, numerical marrow (the light metaphor long abandoned).

Regardless of whether it's liberating illumination or nourishing, savoury meat, this new graph makes me wonder why I don't chart other things I care about. Having such graphs would help me see the impact of my actions. I could chart things like my bank balance, my waistline or the number of Latin words I learned this week. Then I could answer questions like "do I spend more on Tuesdays?" or "can I afford this iPod/cake/gerund?". This is important, because when I am tempted with a sleek/delicious/perplexing iPod/cake/gerund, I fall back on my own judgment. I think it's time to confess, dear reader, that my own judgment isn't very good. And yet I continue to trust it.

The reason I don't have such graphs is that they are inconvenient to maintain. A graph of branch access times is easy. All you need to do is describe how to get the measurement, and then do a bit of once-off set up. If you want to graph your body weight, you need to get on the scales at a fixed time and then look at the dial and adjust for parallax and then write a number down somewhere and maybe note down whether this is before or after a meal and then take the number and then add it to a spreadsheet. Most online banking sites I've seen are even less convenient than this.

Getting data on life is hard, but for programming it's easy. What things do you care about on your project? Features, user experience, how fast bugs get fixed? Can you quantify these things? Can you make a pretty picture out of it? If so, do it now! Post your answers here, set up something like Cricket and then profit!

P.S. I can't believe I got to the end of this post without saying how awesome the Canonical sysadmins are. Let me correct that now. The Canonical sysadmins are heck of awesome. They could simply walk into Mortor.

Echo and Bounce: Yet It Moves

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 02:16:00 +0000

I had meant to move this weekend just gone. I had arranged the truck, some friends to help and cleared away a space for my possessions in my new home.

Sadly, I didn't actually pack. Like Pope Urban VII, I expected the universe to move around me. I'm going to try to move again next week. Right now, all of my books, CDs, DVDs and odds-and-ends are all packed. Boxes are scattered on my floor like Biblical allusions in a Nick Cave song.

Instead of moving, I revamped my website, moved my professional blog and set up a feed that aggregates both blogs. Thanks to Huw and Mary for their help.

Mere Code: Somebody Do This Please

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:17:00 +0000

<jml> What's the difference between Gobby and a wiki?
<mwh> NAT

Echo and Bounce: Not Happy

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:32:00 +0000

From http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/06/30/1214677946009.html

EXTRAORDINARY new powers will allow police to arrest and fine people for "causing annoyance" to World Youth Day participants and permit partial strip searches at hundreds of Sydney sites, beginning today.

The laws, which operate until the end of July, have the potential to make a crime of wearing a T-shirt with a message on it, undertaking a Chaser-style stunt, handing out condoms at protests, riding a skateboard or even playing music, critics say.

I guess that means my "Mary: Not really all that" t-shirt is staying in the cupboard.

Mere Code: GMail feature request

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:09:00 +0000

First, where should I make these requests?

Second, I'd like to be able to open my GMail without seeing all the new mail in my inbox. Very often, I open up GMail just to look up some fact that I've forgotten, or to put a date to a particular event. Seeing new mail and an unempty inbox distracts me, leading me down a rabbit hole of processing.

I guess a GreaseMonkey hack wouldn't be too hard.

Echo and Bounce: "Give it a burl, yer fisho"

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:44:00 +0000

Bice asked me to translate "striving for boredom" into Latin. I'm slowly teaching myself Latin in my spare time, and am still very much a beginner. I couldn't just translate it off the cuff, so here's what I did.

First, I looked up to strive and boredom in my Latin dictionary. It offers contendere for to strive and lassitudo for boredom. Then I looked up for.

For has a lot of meanings. Does it refer to advantage, duration, price, being in lieu of something, a purpose or what? I figured "purpose" looked about right and of the two suggestions I picked ad, guessing that in wasn't quite right. I confirmed this by looking up the synonym towards.

The dictionary quite helpfully tells me that ad expects to be followed by an accusative. So, I flipped to the back of the dictionary where it explains how to turn a noun from the way it appears in the dictionary (i.e. the nominative case) into the accusative case.

Guess what? Latin turns out to be pretty complicated! The forms of a noun don't changed based on gender, as I had guessed, but on "declension", a made up category of grammar even sillier than gender. I knew lassitudo was feminine, but not which declension it was. The dictionary didn't give examples of feminine words ending with –do so I resorted to the Internet. Googling for "lassitudo declension" quickly shewed it to be in declinatio tertia.

"Let's see nominative, vocative, accusative—ah! lassitudonēs looks right". Except that lassitudonēs means "boredoms". This prompted a short philosophical tangent whereby Bice and I discussed whether one could have multiple boredoms. Results were inconclusive. Lassitudem looks to be right.

So far, we have ______ ad lassitudem. Time to learn verbs!

This is where I got really confused. Is striving is a gerund? I don't think so. It would be if the motto were "Striving is great", but in this case someone is actually striving.

Tense was less tricky. It's not past, it's not future, pluperfect or future perfect. It's not passive or subjunctive either, although I don't think these are tenses. Present seems to be the only sensible choice, and the examples in the dictionary helped verify this. Contendere ends with –ere (not –ēre!), so it looks like it's in the third conjugation.

Latin verbs, like German ones, really seem to need a person. Cogito means I think. Bice and I decided that "We're striving" was the meaning we intended, so I went for third person. Contendo, contendis, contendit!

A quick Google for "contendit ad" showed that others have used similar constructs, notably contendit ad perfectionem, so at least it's not an original mistake.

So, that leaves us with contendit ad lassitudem. Not this blogger's motto, honestly!

Mere Code: 2008

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:12:00 +0000

Firefox 3 is awesome!

Echo and Bounce: Hypothesis

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:32:00 +0000

Karma Police and Ballad of a Thin Man are actually the same song in the Platonic world of forms.

Echo and Bounce: Used Tickets

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 04:55:00 +0000

UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY PRESENTS
A SYDNEY IDEAS LECTURE
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT

Thu 19 June 2008

John Micklethwait is the current editor of the Economist — a newspaper to which I subscribe. He tried to get us thinking using "provocative paranoia". Sadly, I didn't take notes, so I'll have to dredge my memory for a possible later post.

Cinema 04
Prince Caspian (M)
Wed 18/06/2008

Like the Micklethwait lecture, this doesn't have any heroes. Unlike the lecture, it lacks decent villains too. At one point, the chief bad guy swirls his cape menacingly as he steals the throne from Caspian. I spent the whole film thinking about Philip Pullman's opinions on Susan and how Edmund seemed along for the ride (except for one awesome moment near the Stone Table).

Just read the book: it's cheaper, more enjoyable and won't take much longer than watching the film.

Echo and Bounce: Yeats, Poor Planning, and Sausage

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 10:56:00 +0000

I missed out on going to church tonight due to an unfortunate accident with my laundry — I did all of it in one go, leaving me with neither socks nor clean outer garb.

Instead I've idled a bit around the house, flicking through some Yeats and the Introduction to the Penguin edition of same. This bit's worth repeating:

Yeats's commitment to the potency of the word was also connected with his belief in the virtues of English as it was spoken in those parts of Ireland which had not yet been corrupted by the 'base idiom' of the newspapers, … 'a speech exhausted from abstraction'. In the Elizabethan period Irish writers 'belonged to the old individual, poetical life, and spoke a language [Irish] in which it was all but impossible to think an abstract thought'.

Later,

[Yeats] remembered that he had found himself 'continually testing both my verse and my prose by translating it into dialect' … helping him 'to get back to the definite and concrete away from modern abstractions'.

Which reminds me of Orwell's translation of Ecclesiastes 9:11 into "modern English" from Politics and the English Language, and of the introduction to Roger Ebert's review of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which has these concrete words:

The Indiana Jones movies were directed by Steven Spielberg and written
by George Lucas and a small army of screenwriters, but they exist in a
universe of their own. Hell, they created it. All you can do is compare one to the other three. And even then, what will it get you? If you eat four pounds of sausage, how do you choose which pound tasted the best?

Such a capable meat.

Neighbours are getting noisy again, time to plot my escape.

Echo and Bounce: Decisions Made

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:40:00 +0000

I've decided to move to Nick's place in Lindfield. I've spoken with my property manager and expect to move there in a couple of weeks time. I'll miss Glebe, but I'm sure I'll find ways to console myself.

I've also decided to take a break from World of Warcraft and focus on Free Software for a bit.

Also, I now own a brand new filing cabinet. It is so beautiful and oblong.

Mere Code: Really Satisfying

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 05:23:00 +0000

I have just returned from the shops with a Snickers bar. The packet says that one out of every six Snickers bars will instantly win me a free Snickers bar.

So, statistically speaking, how many Snickers bars do I have? Show working.

Mere Code: Aren't code reviews great?

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:37:00 +0000

Ben Sussman-Collins writes about programmer insecurity and how a lot of programmers dread having others see their code.

Some of the best programmers I've worked with are in love with code reviews, and all great writers have editors. (The "linked list" is in no way exhaustive.) Personally, I see reviews as being a great opportunity to learn.

Sussman-Collins also writes about how distributed version control can exacerbate the "isolated genius" problem by shielding ones code from the public eye. This is definitely a big potential drawback of DVCS, but one that's largely mitigated by a culture of short-lived branches and an easy-to-use public registry of all branches for a project.

Mere Code: Another Bazaar story

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:29:00 +0000

I'm currently hacking away on Launchpad's support for "stacked branches", something that will really make Launchpad's codehosting a joy to use.

At the moment, I'm writing some tests that require a user to login. This was becoming a bit cumbersome, until I remembered something: Tim has recently landed some code to make this easy. But how do I get these changes without messing up all of the work I'm doing now? bzr shelve to the rescue!

'shelve' interactively goes through each change you've made to your current working tree and allows you to decide whether to keep a change or shelve it. It comes with a twin command 'unshelve', which lets you interactively restore your changes.

In this case, I don't even care about the interactivity, so here's what I did:


# Shelve my changes
bzr shelve --all
# Fetch the latest trunk
cd ../trunk
bzr pull
# Merge it into my branch
cd ../stacking
bzr merge ../trunk
bzr ci -m "Merge in changes from trunk to get login testing improvements."
# Restore my changes
bzr unshelve --all

The 'shelve' command comes with the bzrtools plugin, and I am basically in love with it.

As a parting shot, I should mention that things like bzrtools aren't accidents. They are natural and inevitable when you have good APIs in a high-level language and a very nice plugin system.

And now I'm off to keep working on this branch.

Mere Code: Real Life

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 01:17:00 +0000

Inspired by Mikey, I've set up my own real-life blog.

I've done this one using Blogger's "upload to remote server" feature. It looks nice, has the features I need and means less WordPress & PHP. I'm hoping to migrate this sucker to the same technology.

Echo and Bounce: Moving

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 01:01:00 +0000

I've been living in a unit in Glebe for a few months now and am thinking of finding a sharehouse. In particular, a sharehouse where everyone else has day jobs, so I can work from home without undue distraction.

The dilemma I face is this: do I stay in the Inner West, or do I move to the North Shore? I like the Inner West more, but the North Shore is more convenient. O dilemma wretched! In particular, if I move to another place in the Inner West, then I should start to think seriously about switching to a more local church.

That said, I'll be looking at a place in Lindfield on the weekend — let's see how it goes.

Echo and Bounce: Back in Sydney

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:24:00 +0000

I'm back in Sydney, really back, and I'm happy.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Prague at the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Prague's a great looking city, and I hope I get to back there and explore it and enjoy some more Staropramen.

Off to play some Mario Kart with Andrew.

Mere Code: Neat Bazaar feature

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 03:28:00 +0000

Ever find yourself working away on a branch, enjoying yourself and getting just a little carried away? Maybe you're working on a feature and you notice and fix a bug that's not strictly related to that feature.

If you catch yourself in time, there's a nice little feature in Bazaar that can help with this: bzr merge --uncommitted. It will merge in the changes that you've made to your working tree but haven't committed yet.

e.g.


$ cd some-feature-branch

... hack hack hack ... oops!

$ cd ..

$ bzr branch trunk bug-fix-2357

$ cd bug-fix-2357

$ bzr merge --uncommitted ../some-feature-branch

$ bzr ci -m "Fix up bug 2357. Found this while working on some-feature."

$ bzr send

Don't know what bzr send does? Trust me, you want to find out.

Mere Code: What I meant

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 01:39:00 +0000

z3p recently blogged about a comment I made in a code review. In the review, I linked to:

That's a negative and grumpy way of phrasing an idea that I've come to value a lot: good code expresses its intent clearly.

When looking at a patch, the reviewer needs to understand two things: the intent of the code and the intent of each change to the code. To be clear on the former, you need:

intent-revealing names.

good abstractions / interfaces.

good, small tests.

simple implementations where possible.[1]

docstrings where appropriate

comments where appropriate.

That's not exhaustive, but it's in a rough order.

To be clear on the intent of your change to code, you need:

Small patches.

A good bug / spec with a good, short summary.

A review request letter, summarizing your implementation strategy, any compromises you made, gaps in testing, future work etc.

That's not exhaustive either. In #2037, I didn't understand the motivation for lots of the code, nor for some of the changes to the code.

I'm indebted to Andrew Bennetts for teaching me that the first duty of a reviewer is to ensure that the code is clear and to Tom Berger for reminding me that compromises are worth noting.

----

[1] Actually, this reminds me of something I heard a preacher say, "before I give a sermon, I go through it, find everything clever, and take it out" (I paraphrase, not having a reference on hand).

In as much as sermons and code should both be ego-free communications of ideas, I think this is sound advice for hackers.

Mere Code: bzr-removable

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 01:04:00 +0000

The plugin I talked about in a previous post is now at https://launchpad.net/bzr-removable. Please file bugs.

Thanks to Michael Hudson and Daniel Watkins for submitting patches.

You can get the plugin by typing 'bzr branch lp:bzr-removable' on the command line.

Mere Code: OK I lied

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 03:36:00 +0000

The next post is actually about a Bazaar plugin that I've now got ready to share. To get it, 'bzr branch lp:~jml/+junk/merged-branches'.

Once you've got it, run 'bzr merged-branches' in the trunk of your project. It will then show you all branches in sibling directories that are safe to delete. That is,

They have no uncommitted changes.

They have no "unknown" files. (Files outside of version control that haven't been explicitly ignored.)

They have no shelved changes. The plugin will only check for this if it can find bzrtools.

The branch is now at the point where it works for me, but it still belongs in '+junk' — here's why:

It assumes that you have a trunk branch in the same directory as all of your other branches.

It assumes that branches and working trees are the same thing.

It's called 'merged-branches' when it really means 'safe-to-delete'.

It doesn't make it easy to see why a branch is not safe to delete.

It doesn't let you customize the conditions of the search. Maybe you want to see all branches with uncommitted changes.

Still, if you are like me and make a lot of branches, it's quite useful. I'll tolerate bugs, accept patches and welcome encouragement.

Mere Code: User Experience — When Reality Attacks

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:24:00 +0000

I've just got back from a hectic week in London, where members of the Bazaar community got together and thrashed out a bunch of important topics.

We talked about "user experience" and how we all want Bazaar to be a joy to use. More than one person said that we have been focusing too much on features and performance instead of user experience. The term was never really pinned down, but it's fair to say that there are things other than convenience and speed that affect how users feel while using Bazaar and that we need to work on those things, once we figure out what they are.

I think I might know the name of one of them: errors. Next post: "Notes on error".

Mere Code: Three-ways on Pidgin?

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 23:04:00 +0000

Dear Lazyweb,

How do I initiate a three-way chat with Pidgin 2.2.1?

jml

Mere Code: What I do all day

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 05:57:00 +0000

Kick-arse summary here: The great source code supermarket.

Mere Code: The Economist Index

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 04:10:00 +0000

The Economist occasionally publishes a "Big Mac Index" — how much the world's favorite "burger" costs in each country, translated into a common currency.

Why they don't publish an index of how much an issue of the Economist costs? All of my issues have the price of the newspaper in lots of Asia-Pacific currencies. A small sample:

Australia, 9.39855 USD

Cambodia, 6.00 USD

China, 10.43655 USD

Hong Kong, 7.6917 USD

India, 5.0522 USD

Japan, 10.70535 USD

New Zealand, 8.6669 USD

Can anyone tell me why the price varies so much?

Mere Code: WoW account temporarily suspended

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 01:43:00 +0000

Howdy Partners,

My World of Warcraft account is temporarily suspended for silly administrative reasons. I'm not in any rush to clear those up, so don't expect to see me on Khaz'goroth or Frostmourne any time soon.

Regards,

jml

Mere Code: Obligatory

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:02:00 +0000

Not using Facebook anymore.

Have fun kids.

Mere Code: Fake Plastic Tests

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 02:40:00 +0000

Ever wondered what's the difference between a FakeReactor, a StubReactor and a MockReactor? Find out in this brief article on test doubles.

Mere Code: The most retentive thing I've done

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 08:15:00 +0000

Mere Code: Cracked Mac

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 08:09:00 +0000

OK, I've started with this whole photography thing, I might as well run with it.

My Mac cracked:

Mere Code: Around like Grover

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 08:06:00 +0000

What's up hep-cats?

I've been travelling around the world, weaving in and out of timezones like Jason Bourne navigates facial expressions. Last week's adventure took me to tropical Dunedin — the southiest outpost of Canonical Ltd. (I'm trying to get a mention on Language Log.)

Those few Hobartians who keep reading will notice that Dunedin, well, umm... here's a photo:

Pay careful attention to the hills in the background.

Mere Code: Five Years

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 03:35:00 +0000

That's not quite how long it took Glyph to write a post explaining what he meant when he told me that xUnit should use the visitor pattern instead of the composite pattern.

I'm going to write a more detailed response later, God willing. I just wanted to flag the post and say thanks to Glyph for finally posting it — the hassling must have worked.

Mere Code: It's a Gibbon

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:07:00 +0000

Over the weekend I upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 7.10 aka "The Gutsy Gibbon".

Obvious improvements include having Pidgin installed and a much superior version of Deskbar. There's also a swanky new panel to actually control display settings (dual monitor and all that jazz). Unfortunately, I can't quite get it to work just yet. My 22" 1680x1058 LCD will just have to sit there, gathering dust :(

In another weirdness, all of my fonts are suddenly much, much bigger. I had to resize everything down to 8 or 9 to make them sane.

My pretty Emacs has also stopped working, but that's to be expected. It's a third-party package that hasn't yet been built for Gutsy.

Other than that, seems to be a fairly routine upgrade. Is there anything exciting that I've missed?

Mere Code: Merging New trunk Features to a Development Branch (redux)

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 23:37:00 +0000

Oubiwann has recently posted about the joys of using Combinator to do branch-based development using Subversion. I thought it'd be fun to do the same post, except this time with Bazaar.

Background

You're working on a project called "Project", you have a copy of the mainline branch (i.e. 'trunk') in your src directory.


~$ cd ~/src/Project
~/src/Project$ ls
trunk

You want to implement a new feature, so you branch trunk to work on it:


~/src/Project$ bzr branch trunk viking-feature-836

Bazaar is a version control system, not a PYTHONPATH-managing system, so it doesn't maintain a global list of projects and the branches that are currently active for each project.

Perhaps your company focuses on historical invasions of Britain. You decide to start work on another feature:
lass objects.


~/src/Project$ bzr branch trunk norman-feature-1066

You multi-task for a bit, until you finish 'viking-feature'. You decide to merge 'viking-feature-836' into trunk.


~/src/Project$ cd trunk
~/src/Project/trunk$ bzr merge ../viking-feature-836
~/src/Project/trunk$ bzr ci

At this point, you begin to suspect that Bazaar treats branches as first-class objects. However, at this point, a developer on the obverse side of your continent calls you,

"Where's your viking feature? I need it to invade Britain!"

"I've just put it into trunk. Have you got the latest copy?"

"Yeah, I do, I just pulled from trunk."

"It's in trunk, you fool! ... Oh, wait, gimme a sec."


~/src/Project/trunk$ bzr push
Pushing to bzr+ssh://bzr.example.com/Project/trunk...
~/src/Project/trunk$

"Try now."

Merging

OK, enough background, let's merge.

Say you need some of the changes in trunk in order to finish work on your norman feature. No problems.


~/src/Project$ bzr merge trunk norman-feature-1066
~/src/Project$ bzr ci -m "Merge from trunk."

It's hard not to feel smug at this point.

Wait a second, you also want to look at the experimental branch that a friend is working on:


~/src/Project/norman-feature-1066$ bzr merge bzr+ssh://yourfriend.example.com/branches/sealion-1946
~/src/Project/norman-feature-1066$ bzr diff | less # better double check this one
~/src/Project/norman-feature-1066$ bzr revert # nope, doesn't seem like a good idea

Summary

Bazaar treats branches as first-class objects and treats trunk just like any other branch. Although Combinator is great for branch-based development in Subversion, it is more complex and less flexible than doing branch-based development in Bazaar.

With Combinator, you lose history when you merge in changes from trunk, with Bazaar you don't.

With Combinator, you can only merge in changes from trunk, with Bazaar you can merge from any branch.

With Combinator, merging from trunk leaves a bunch of changed files in the trunk checkout on your system (this has tripped me up more than once). With Bazaar, this doesn't happen.

Mere Code: Tired Hippo

noreply@blogger.com (jml) — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 05:45:00 +0000

Chronomancy... is generally a fictional and sensational school of magic. Although the school is based on quantum physics and certain scientific theories, there is no concrete evidence of the perfected use of time manipulation.

Thank you Wikipedia.