Antares Trader Blog

Is Ruby better the Lisp? There are lots of ways and reasons to answer questions like this. Some people rightly find the argument banal sense there are so many different values and reasons at play. I personally enjoy such comparisons. The give me a view of how other people code, and different things that can be done in different ways.

My problem is that so often the examples that are chosen show me nothing. They are so small as that they are almost pointless, and if I haven't ever seen something done before, I have no clue why I'd want to do it. My opinion is that articles like this should have one small, but useful example written in both languages. This example should actually solve a problem someone might care about, and it should not be the key idea of either language.

Cucumber is an acceptance testing framework that lets you and your clients write our requirements as short stories and then test those stories fro compliance. Those familiar with it will know that you can tag a scenario by placing putting labels precede by the @ sign on the line imminently before the scenario starts. There are a number of different uses for these tags. They can sort features by priority or developer, or they can designate in what version the feature is likely to appear.

As a one-man-band, I don't need quite that level of organization. But I do use three tags that help me keep my development clean. I do however label all my scenarios as @pending, @current or @passing. I can then use the -t flag to choose which tags to run.

JZForm is a side project I've been working on. Its aim is to provide a DSL for html forms and input in general. After a week of picking at it I'm setting it aside again because it is sapping my energy without showing much progress. The problem is, I really don't know what I want. I have some general ideas, but the API continues to be overly complex while the output is too amorphous to provide a clear path forward.

Users of Git will know that it refuses to story an empty directory. When one is trying to check in a generated project with a bunch of empty directories this can lead to confusion. It can also bite when you expect a directory to exist, but don't want to put it's contents under version control. ('/log' for example).

The way I have found to fix this is to touch <directory>/.nil This creates an empty hidden file in the directory that you can add to a git repository. It would be nice if there was a way to add empty trees, unless and until that happens this will save you a few minutes when you go to deploy and find you cannot open your log files.

The latest version of rake is not playing nicely with the sake. There is a lighthouse ticket that explains in more detail what is going on, but the summery is rake complaining can't convert true into String. There is a patch that need to be applied to sake. I had to do this by hand because my directory structure did not match the patch. It is a really easy one liner. Below I've listed both the error and the patch:

AntaresTrader is the the game I want to play, but have never actually found. I've been writing it in some form sense I was in elementary school and learned that computers could play games. As I have gotten more sophisticated, I have learned a lot more about why people like to play games and how to design them. This post lays the ground work for a discussion of what makes a good game.

Not every site needs a huge dedicated server farm. In fact I would say that the vast majority of sites on the web do not see more then 100 visitors a day. Local businesses, churches and non-profits that must have a web presence (does any one use a phone book anymore?), but do not actually do business from that site really need little more then a domain name, some pages and a reliable server.

Services like Engin Yard Solo are great for fast moving startups, and SliceHost is fine for the tinkerers who like to role their own. Both are overkill for a site that will be see more of its admin then its clients. (Full disclosure: Engin Yard sponsored a recent hack-a-thon I attended including providing us a Solo instance to deploy to. SliceHost is my web hosting provider.)

Since I have been approached by three different people wanting just such a web site I went looking for what might be good. There are lots of commodity hosts out there, but the one I found most interesting is Heroku Their shared hosting environment looks like just the kind of thing, and their smallest instance is free. For the very low traffic websites I'm looking at this might be exactly the thing. I also like their innovative deployment model. Sites like charities that could see a sudden spike in readership if their cause makes headlines would really benefit from it.

The webmaster at my church has been bugging me to help him redo the site so it is easier to maintain. My thought is to put an instance up on Heroko and play with it some time this fall. If it is as good as it looks on paper, I think they will be seeing a lot more business from me. My one hesitation in just jumping in is in their pricing tiers. It is a huge jump from free to $36 a month. I would like to see a $8-15 a month option with a little more space. But for free, I'll at least take a test drive.

Extravagant, that is what I used to think of people who insisted on having a second monitor. Why would you need two screen you can only look at one thing at a time. At least that's what I thought until I got the bright idea to hook up my laptop to my desktops monitor. Now I think that it is a Luxury worth having.

If you are reading this, then you are looking at a successfully redeployed instance of my blog. Usually this should not be news worthy, but this redeploy required the complete rebuilding and restoration of the database. One thing I will say is that I am defiantly getting better at this whole deployment thing. Having a good plan helps. So does deploying to a staging server first. If you want the blow-by-blow check out my twitter feed.

Now it is time to work on something other then the blog for a bit. There is a minigame that wants love and JZForm is calling again. I also want to hack around a bit on DataMapper to see if I can get many-to-many associations to eager load.

Some of the best lessons are learned from ones first real job. All that schooling melts away under the harsh glare of the real world, what ever that is. Some of the best stories come out of that first job as well. A recent post got me thinking back about my first job doing on-site tech support of a County Government Division. If you are up for a few chuckles and some tips for fixing pebkac errors cause by the id:10-T in cubical 9 read on.

This is Part 1 of a 2 (or 3) part series