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RailsConf Europe presentation slides now published

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:45:00 GMT

The presentation files from the talk I gave at RailsConf Europe are now available for download.

Direct link: Stories on a Cloud - Distributed Browser Testing with Selenium Presentation (PDF format).

I really enjoyed giving the talk and their seemed to be enough interest for follow up material. All good! I’ll be publishing supporting links and research details very soon, so watch this space.

Speaking at RailsConf Europe

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 08:52:00 GMT

A quick shout about our talk tomorrow at RailsConf Europe:

Drive your browser (or somebody else’s!) through an RSpec story. In this talk I’ll be covering Rspec stories, Selenium, message queues, packaging your apps for cross platform distribution, and more!

Read more info over at the O’Reilly Conference page

Is this thing on? Converted to Radiant from Mephisto

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:16:00 GMT

More news to follow shortly..

sneak peak: http://github.com/martinbtt/radiant-import-mephisto

New RSS feed URL

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Just a quick note to say the RSS feed for this blog has changed. Please update your feed reader to use:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/BeyondTheType

New Year, New start. Hello CitySafe

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:05:00 GMT

As of January this year I’m pleased to announce I will be working with the team at CitySafe.

CitySafe build tools to help emergency responders collaborate and communicate. These include mission critical apps in use daily by the Police, Government, and high profile financial and retail institutions. It’s predominately Ruby (on Rails) based so I’m looking forward to getting stuck in.

For those of you wondering about Working With Rails…. This remains under ownership of DSC and I have passed all the day to day running over to colleagues there. Prior to my departure I ensured that the Hackfests would continue up until March. Much thanks goes to Josette @ O’Reilly for the RailsConf ticket prizes.

All in all WWR has been an amazing project. I’m so pleased to have created it and see it grow from strength to strength benefiting the community so greatly. Many thanks to everyone who uses the site and contributed in some way over the past year. It has been fantastic to have your input and feedback.

I’ve heard many success stories from developers starting user groups as a result of finding each other on WWR, to getting a job through recommendations, collaborating on projects or helping to get Rails adopted in their workplace. Not forgetting to mention the numerous prizes given away through the regular Hackfests.

I hope it has benefited you in some way and continues to do so. Thanks everyone!

Stay tuned…

Continue to keep up with my news via this blog (rss) and via Twitter

VirtueDesktops alternative for OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 10:51:00 GMT

Just upgraded to Leopard and sad at the loss of VirtueDestkops? Spaces not doing it for you? Read on…

Background

When Leopard was announced Spaces was touted as the replacement for VirtueDesktops. This lead to Tony Arnold the main developer of VirtueDesktops downing tools and declaring VirtueDesktops dead.

So everybody waited in anticipation for OS X 10.5… only to find Spaces not living up to their expectations.

So why the big fuss?

With the advent of 10.5 Apple has tightened up the code such that no other Desktop managers properly work on top of Leopard. This leaves many followers of VirtueDesktops little or no choice than maybe to change their working practices to Spaces or find alternatives….

1. HyperSpaces

From the creator of VirtueDesktops comes HyperSpaces. Unfortunately this isn’t set for launch until 2008 and it also isn’t clear if it will have the same rich feature set that VirtueDesktops has.

2. YouControlDesktops

YouControlDesktops has probably the closest functionality you are going to get to VirtueDesktops. The interface for configuring things isn’t as intuitive or slick as Virtue but it’s not such a big deal since you’ll not need to use it that often.

Currently there is a beta version for 10.5 that works pretty well but there is some kinks. Namely issues with the Dock not always getting context when it should.

So in summary the solution is not perfect but it’s the best I’ve found so far. Download the beta and provide the developers with feedback, hopefully we can help push this forward.

Mephisto gets a core team

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 08:00:00 GMT

Good news for Mephisto users. The core team has been decided and the ideas for the 1.0 release are being finalised.

Interestingly enough there may also be a push to switch over to using Git which is gaining a bit of traction in the Rails community. I’m an avid user of SVK and gave Git a try a while back but stopped short after hearing tales of woe with git-svn… I may revisit at some point.

"script/generate undo" plugin released

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:23:00 GMT

Grab it while it’s hot:

 script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/beyondthetype/undo_generator_plugin/trunk

Key Features

Undo any generator command
Keeps a log of all generator history in log/generator.log
Prompts before undo’ing any commands
Even works when you bail out of a generator command part way through

script/generate undo

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:15:00 GMT

Here is small idea I’ve had for sometime that I quickly knocked up yesterday.

Generators are great but we have all had those “Oops!” moments where you realised that what you created was not quite what you wanted to do. Enter script/generate undo….

script/generate model WrongName
      exists  app/models/
      exists  test/unit/
      exists  test/fixtures/
      create  app/models/wrong_name.rb
      create  test/unit/wrong_name_test.rb
      create  test/fixtures/wrong_names.yml
      exists  db/migrate
      create  db/migrate/001_create_wrong_names.rb

.. ….

oops.. didn’t want to do that.

script/generate undo
Undo'ing: model WrongName
    notempty  db/migrate
    notempty  db
          rm  db/migrate/001_create_wrong_names.rb
          rm  test/fixtures/wrong_names.yml
          rm  test/unit/wrong_name_test.rb
          rm  app/models/wrong_name.rb
    notempty  test/fixtures
    notempty  test
    notempty  test/unit
    notempty  test
    notempty  app/models
    notempty  app

Under the hood all it is doing is keeping a log of your generator history (see /log/generator.log). When undo is called it looks at the last log entry and passes it onto script/destroy. Pretty simple stuff but it saves you having to remember what it was that you typed previously.

The patch as it stands is pretty rough and ready. I’m posting this here to get some feedback to gauge whether it’s worth pursuing further.

UPDATE Plugin on the way. I’ve created a new project on Rubyforge for any plugins I make - it should be setup soon. (just waiting for approval)

UPDATE 2: Plugin now released. See this post

N95 update - 3 months on

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 13:07:00 GMT

Sometime ago back in May I bought a Nokia N95. I summed up the good and the bad about it. Nearly three months on I thought it fitting to revisit the issue. (also it seems it’s been far too long since I posted here)

My impressions now? I like it, just not quite as much as when I first got it .. like all things I guess the little niggles get frustrating after a while.

The bad

Sluggish interface…. I’m not sure why this happened but when I got the phone all was sweet. However at some point things started to slow down.. There is a notable delay between selecting apps and an even worse one with the camera. This seems to happen to all the N95 users I have met and nobody has found a solution yet.
Sluggish camera… Ok, this is the same thing but waiting up to 10-20 seconds to get the camera ready just to take a shot only to miss the moment totally sucks.
Fiddly keys - the keypad is pretty cramped and it’s easy to press a button when you didn’t want to
Finding people - Sony Ericsson have a really nice feature where names of the people you most text / call are easily available when sending a text. On the N95 you have to hunt them down each time.

The good

Using it as a 3G modem to connect to the Internet absolutely rocks. I’ve tried the Vodafone datacard before and this is just so much nicer and more reliable.
Using it as a stand alone web browser - works well on it’s own too. View sites, even with flash content.
Sync’ing with your iTunes collection - Nokia recently released Media transfer software
Watch TV on the go.. a while back T-Mobile where offering their tv streaming service for ITN, Channel 4, Big Brother etc It worked pretty well for catching up with things. It kind of worked OK but you def need a high quality 3G reception. It was free but I think you need to pay a monthly fee now.

So all in all you can see I got more bad points this time round. I’m aware there is a new firmware update that I can download which apparently addresses some of the camera issues. Also I got a 4GB memory card from Mobo memory - great for storing movies, pics, and music without having to worry about it getting filled up quickly.