I’ve just seen this stuff by Ana Ventura - simple but brilliant. Who hasn’t looked at patterns on walls and pictured stuff like this at some point? I remember back where I used to live, we used to have slate floors in the bathrooms and I used to catch myself looking at the patterns imagining them to be people’s heads, trees or scenes being acted out.
November 6, 2009
November 5, 2009
Climbing Update
Quite a few things have been happening on the climbing front lately. The competition at The Lactic Factory is going well, for a start. I’ve made a lot of progress since signing up, and this week, I completed my first C (difficult) problem. Admittedly, this week’s problems were the easiest set so far, but I’ll take what I can get.
The long weekend was also a great opportunity for some friends and I to head up to the Grampians and do a bit of bouldering. The guys are quite new to the sport (and one of them new to the Grampians), so we didn’t go too crazy, but it was fantastic taking the mat out and trying out some problems. Spots we went to:
- Loopy’s, which is just past Hollow Mountain cave. There is a really wide variety of problems up there, so it’s great for keeping lots of people of different skill levels entertained. The day after we left, back at the Hollow Mountain cave, James Kassay, the insanely effective climbing machine, finished Sleepy Rave (V15) which is amazing. What’s more amazing is that he makes the first half look like it’s the easiest route on the planet.
- Andersen’s, which is somewhere between the Hollow Mountain and Mount Zero carparks. Most of the problems here were a bit too challenging for us, but it was good to see what’s out there, and have some more problems to work towards.
- Pinnacle. This was a bit of a larf really - taking the bouldering mat up along one of the most popular walking tracks and seeing if we could find anything fun to climb on along the way. Kudos to the 50 people who made wise-cracks about me sleeping on the mat at the top.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to head up there quite a few more times this year to work on some of these problems, though I suspect Sleepy Rave may be slightly out of reach *cough*…
September 23, 2009
The Things You Can Learn
Ahh internet. So many useful pieces of information, phrased in a variety of hilarious ways.
… This does not mean that emotional people are not intelligent; it just means that they might be dumber during the times in which they are emotional.
Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.
September 15, 2009
The Humans. Are. Dead.
I’m not usually one to post links, but this thing is totally rad, and this is the most insanely elaborate flash app ever (pick drum & bass).
Music is fun!
September 9, 2009
Build Automation: You Can Do It
During my final weeks at work, I have spent most of my time trying to convince people that it is worth their while to set up an automated build / test server, and to my great surprise, with a little bit of nudging and a fair amount of prototyping, it has actually happened! The entire application is now built, published and (partially) regression tested on a nighly basis, with a pretty-looking summary report published on the side.
Although this may not be appear to be a revolutionary act to anyone who has been working as a developer for a while, I assure you, it is quite revolutionary in this environment. The idea of knowing more-or-less straight away when a change breaks the code or causes tests to fail is still quite fresh here, as is the prospect of integrating changes so rapidly.
Specific difficulties encountered:
- The UI testing tool we were licensed to use, HP’s Quicktest Professional, did not handle our application’s AJAX functionality particularly well. When recording test steps, QTP would record the actions performed on the dynamically returned HTML elements, however, when playing-back the recorded test, it did not know to wait for any XMLHttpRequests to complete before attempting to perform the actions. We got around this problem by manually inserting Wait statements into the recorded test scripts.
- None of our testers had any experience recording or configuring automated user interface tests. It took longer than expected to train them in the use of the tool, particularly after the aforementioned AJAX issues were encountered.
- Because the project has an off-shore contingent, many remotely hosted “enterprisey” applications (such as Rational ClearCase) were used for tasks like SCM. These enterprisey tools seem to be intended for use via the GUI only, which made running them from the command-line more difficult than anticipated.