News You Can Bruise for 2006 September 7

Thu Sep 07 2006 09:43 Totally Gross!: My fear has come true. Jake's gross-out candy idea has been assimilated. At least it took four years.

Totally gross! You know what we're talking about. You've skinned your elbow while crashing your bicycle getting extreme over a gnarly jump in your neighborhood.

I never meant to get extreme! It was all a big misunderstanding!

Thu Sep 07 2006 17:55 Stop the Motion!: The best thing about the crop of online video storage sites (YouTube, Google Video, et al.) is that it's a perfect medium for sharing, on someone else's dime, old short films that otherwise no one would ever see. There's the old proto-Muppet coffee commercials, and yesterday Andy Baio pointed to an Art Clokey pre-Gumby film which has a great Lovecraftian Roadside Picnic feel.

Gumbasia reminded me of old films like the ones I saw at the Exploratorium, so I went digging. I found Norman McLaren's Synchromy, which is still excellent though on my computer it was slightly... out of sync. Oskar Fischinger's Composition in Blue I could not find, but there is another film of his, seemingly a commercial that anthropomorphizes cigarettes. It's fun except it was made in 1934 and you're all the time worried it's going to turn into a cigarette Nuremberg rally. Which is totally unfair because Oskar Fischinger's art was degenerate and unwelcome, and he left Germany for Hollywood in 1936, so why am I thinking that?

There's also Norman McLaren's Neighbors, which some crackpot Wired article claimed was one of the inspirations for Star Wars. Why, because there's a swordfight? (Note: I don't feel like finding the reference because the Wired article might actually have a point, and then where would I be?)

(1) Thu Sep 07 2006 19:46 Unit Testing The Whole World!: One of the quality control measures I introduced for the Ruby Cookbook was automatically testing the code in the recipes. Most of the recipes contain worked examples, and the examples can be treated as a partial unit test suite for the forgoing code. I wrote doctest-like code that treated those examples like unit tests and used the results to find bugs in the recipes. You can still see the reports linked from the unofficial Ruby Cookbook page.

I think this technique is pretty interesting and I'm really happy with the quality improvements and extra confidence I got out of it. I even considered going to RubyConf and giving a talk about it. But going to RubyConf to give a talk costs me money, money I don't have, whereas writing an article on the same topic would earn me a pitifully small amount of money. I decided to write an article. This is the sort of business acumen that has made me the financial giant I am today.

Now the article's been published: "Unit testing your documentation". Original title was the less-prescriptive "Unit testing a book", which got changed to the even-less-prescriptive "Unit testing the Ruby Cookbook" but now it seems I'm prescripting away! Whee!

Thu Sep 07 2006 23:10 Hello, My Ragtime Gal!: Wow, it looks like I forgot about and stopped reading the webcomic adaptation of The Frogs right around the point where Michigan J. became a central character. Comic also seems to have Jabberjaw for some reason.